To be honest I was never really that much into social networking sites. I’ve boycotted them for years, when there was the big MySpace hype and only started a Bebo account, because my friend opened one for me.

Now that I have moved to Barcelona and live away from most of my friends I see the real value in Facebook and Twitter. It’s an easy way of telling your friends what you are up to and be able to take part in your life from the distance. Now when I start up my PC, I generally check my email, then open Google Reader and check my feeds. After that I normally check Facebook and Twitter. But it becomes quite tedious and time consuming opening all these applications in different tabs. I came across this really interesting post on the Softonic blog Top 5 Firefox add-ons for social networks and found Twitter, Facebook and YouTube add-ons, which are a real time saver.

The Facebook toolbar is really handy, as it enables you to sign into your account straight from there, update your status and customise the toolbar to your specific needs. Also any new updates from your friends appear automatically, just the way you see who signs in when you are signed into MSN messenger or Skype, which enables you to react quickly to your friends status updates, if you like.

Twitterfox is really neat as well, as once you download it, you can sign in straight from your status bar. By clicking on the Twitter “t”, a little window opens and shows you the lastest updates since the last time you logged in. Additionally there is a small window, which allows you to type in your updates easily.

The YouTube “YouPlayer” is also really handy. It is basically a video player where you can enable playlists, very similar to Winamp. It allows you to drag a video link into a playlist and then either just play it or watch it or even download it. Very nice!

Here are a few more, which I didn’t talk about in detail:

1) Flickrfox

2) MySpace Toolbar

3) Bookmarker – opens a sidebar, where you can easily access sites, such as del.icio.us, digg.com, diigo.com, ma.gnolia.com, google.com, mister-wong.de, netvouz.com, linkarena.com, alltagz.de, bobrdobr.ru

Happy networking!

Related posts: Social media posts

written by Feli \\ tags: del.ici.ous, digg, facebook, firefox add-ons, firefox extensions, myspace, Social Media, social networking, toolbars, tools, twitter, youtube

I watched The Gadget Show, the other week and they had a contest between Jason and Suzie to see who would manage the quicker and better online exposure of their videos.
Suzie got a Viral Marketing campaign for which she probably paid an arm and a leg, whereas Jason went down the cheaper route utilising social media channels. The aim was to find out who would get essentially the bigger amount of hits.
I thought this was a great case study for a social media campaign, which is now more and more used by SEOs as part of their link building and/or brand exposure strategies.
Suzie used the a big viral advertising company to create a short viral game “Suzie says” and a short movie to help build the brand “Suzie Perry”. They embrased the not so new “sex sells” approach, were Suzie is seen in the background getting changed, however nothing is ever revealed, as a mobile phone covers the important bits. Watch the Suzie Perry video.
Jason took the low budget approach utilising the Web 2.0 social media options, which are available to everyone at no cost.
He filmed the “Extreme Caterpillar Breakdance” and placed it on various social networking sites, social bookmarking sites and of course on You Tube and other video domains, such as Break.com and Spike.
Social bookmarking sites included Facebook. The social bookmarking sites were Stumble Upon and Digg.
The results were quite different.
Suzie’s campaign only achieved 127,716 views on YouTube, contrary to Jason’s “Extreme Caterpillar” movie, which received 2,876,874 views.
This shows the power of social media and ought to be part of any good SEO campaign. Of course it’s important to identify which social media strategy is most relevant to a client and a page on Facebook and a YouTube movie may just not always be the most effective.

written by Feli \\ tags: digg, Social Media, stumble upon