In their relentless race to capture the Internet user, social media sites expand their resources, hoping to attract users with updated offers. Facebook and Twitter provide two examples of this practice that we will discuss.Facebook is adding “Trending Topics” to its news feed to provide notifications about recurring themes in your network. Twitter is offering two very interesting innovations this week. The first is addition of a photo upload button in the message window; the second is incorporation of the user’s activity summary tabs with the accounts the user is following. A final novelty we will describe here is an Argentinian platform that brings together political participation on social networks.
Trending Topics on Facebook
In competing for audience share, companies keep one eye on the competition. This has led Facebook to imitate a successful Twitter strategy and launch its own Trending Topics feature.The topics selected will appear on the news feed, where Facebook will group recent notifications, publications, and comments related to a topic of interest to the user’s contacts. This feature will allow the user to know what’s going on while discussing it with friends on the network. To compile all news in a single notification, Facebook will use its search algorithm on the users’ status updates, the same system used for birthday alerts.Source: TreceBits
Share your images on Twitter
At the beginning of the year, Twitter surprised its users with an integrated URL shortener and promised to work on a new photo uploader. Now the popular microblogging social network invites users to upload images using a button on the message window, with no need to go to external sites.The steps are very simple, and you can preview the image before tweeting it.For questions or problems,Twitter provides a Help page with details on how to use the new application. Source: TreceBits
Twitter’s conversion to a social network
If Facebook is to copy Twitter’s successful functions, as in the addition of Trending Topics, why should Twitter not imitate its rival? Although Twitter never claimed to be a social network, its new format seems to contradict its own words that it is exclusively a microblogging site. Giving more visibility to the way user activity is presented, the new development offers summary information about tweets marked as favorites or retweeted, as well as tweets that were most interesting to the users you are following. As described on the official Twitter blog, a new tab integrates a summary of your account information: favorites, retweets, mentions, and new followers. A second tab (Activities) is about Twitter activity in the accounts you are following. This allows you easily to monitor what your contacts are talking about.
Source: RedWriteWeb
Social platforms to measure political participation
Argentina has a platform to channel and promote political participation. Its objective is to motivate Internet users to suggest ideas and to discuss candidates’ proposals on social networks.
VosyVoto collects posts to the vosyvoto.com web site from its own Facebook application or through the hashtag #vosyvoto on Twitter and organizes them within its platform.
VosyVoto classifies users’ comments and opinions and ranks the most popular ones so that topics of greatest interest or concern topics can be evaluated at a glance.
Source: La Nación
Cristina Rigutto | Managing Director | Intuic Italia
