Top 5 Social Media Apps for iPhone
Guest Post by James Clark.
Social networking sites for smartphones are what make the smartphone experience all the richer. You can get the entertainment and socialization aspects of using a full time PC all in a handy device that is not only portable but can be safely tucked into your pockets or bags. Modern technology really can be a blessing but availing the luxuries can be a bit tricky. With so much progress happening on the smartphone front, there is also a lot of malware and spyware being produced too- – a counter reaction almost for all the things you can use smartphones for.
Of all the platforms for smartphones, iOS ranks number one when it comes to safety. There is just no doubt that an iPhone is the safest platform what with the closed OS and Apple’s strict review policies for apps. So if you feel that you want a social app experience and are safe from cell phone monitoring, keyloggers, and all sorts of malware and adware that spreads through social networking sites, iPhone is your best option. And so, here are the best social apps that will help you socialize with ease and no fear of spyware on your iPhone.
There can be no surprises here. Facebook is King App when it comes to comparing social networking apps for any platform. When we talk about iPhone, we know that the people over at Apple have managed to master social networking app creation and have a great free app version on iTunes. The app is very close to the real website and offers almost everything that is available on the site. The rating is 5 out of 5 and is the most used social app on iPhone.
Meebo
Though Meebo also has an excellent rating (5 out of 5 like Facebook), it still will have to come in a close second behind Facebook since the latter’s preference outdoes anyone else’s. But what is great about Meebo is that you can use it and still avail Facebook chat along with dozens of other chat services all rolled into one iPhone app. The app is free and very easy to use.
IMO Instant Messenger
This is a great app that also allows you to keep in touch with friends through multiple social network platforms and services. Among services it incorporates are AOL, MSN, Facebook, MySpace, and many more. Unlike Meebo, it supports Skype which gives it an edge over some other apps for Skype fans. IMO Instant Messenger is free and allows users to sort out and organize contacts, user push features, search chat history and more. The rating for this app is 4.5 out of 5 but personally, this app is a better option than Meebo.
TweetDeck iPhone App
This is a favorite among Twitter fans. Though it’s the free version of the Twitter app, fans flock to it since it does offer a lot of good features despite holding back many for the users on the paid version. With TweetDeck users can manage more than one Twitter account on one simple interface. The ranking is 4/5 and hard to beat for a free Twitter app.
Now this app is quite possibly the most comprehensive one when it comes to accessing multiple services. Instead of just incorporating the big names, users can also keep tabs on Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Instagram. All the news feeds come to the users in magazine style updates, keeping everything fresh and fun. Flipboard ranks great with a 5 out of 5 rating.
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James Clark has been in the business of providing quality information on Mobistealth Mobile Spy Software for a while now. He’s an expert at all things spyware, but his main forte is iPhone spyware which has captured the interest of many.
Read MoreSocial Email Marketing: Small Tweaks, Big Impact! The Power of A/B Testing #SMMSF
This presentation took place at the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact. The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA. In this session, Shelley discussed how even the most simple tweaks and A/B testing techniques in email can improve KPIs and significantly impact traffic to your site.
I felt bad for Shelley, as earlier in the day some folks had bagged on MySpace. But Shelley recovered nicely and the testing data she presented was informative and sometimes surprising! The speaker was:
- Shelley Beaumonte, Online Marketing Manager, MySpace
Bullet Point Review!
- Almost any email variable can be tested.
- Determine your success criteria before sending email.
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Variable Open Rate CTR CTO Subject X Design X X Frequency X X - Lessons learned:
- Test 1 variable at a time, or else you won’t know what factor actually affected the data.
- Don’t abandon the losing variable completely, you can still tweak it.
- Know the objective of your email.
- Never assume a small change = small results.
- There’s no standard minimum sample size. No one number but you want it to be statistically significant.
Here’s Shelley’s’ slide presentation:
Social Email Marketing: Email for the Generations #SMMSF
This presentation took place at the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact. The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA. In this session, we learned how to use social tactics to trigger responses from the Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials effectively.
I loved this presentation, not only because it was packed with useful marketing information, but also because I learned a bit about myself. I had no idea that I was Generation Y and not Generation X. I enjoyed hearing the characteristics of people in these generations and thinking about people I know who follow the characteristics to a T! The speaker was:
- Jennifer Neeley Lindsay, Host of The A-List on Blog Talk Radio (@jennifered)
Bullet Point Review!
- Characteristics of Millennials (born between 1977 and 1994):
- Real Time communication is key.
- Visually oriented.
- Need immediate gratification.
- Friends=family (they make decisions in groups).
- Share information they consider valuable easily.
- Most likely brand advocates.
- Empathetic.
- Calls to Action for Millennials:
- Prefer to share via text or Twitter.
- Impulse buyers.
- Will share deals as well as valuable content.
- Internet or mobile coupons are ideal.
- If you hit a sweet spot, they’ll create content for you.
- Characteristics of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1976):
- Time considered a precious commodity.
- Actively use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.
- Shop and price compare online.
- Use email and text interchangeably.
- Self reliant & individualistic.
- Mistrust institutions.
- Calls to Action for Gen X:
- More than 80% text or email deals.
- Reduce their pressures of everyday life.
- Communicate ways to keep kids engaged.
- Deliver quick hit info.
- Help with their work/life balance.
- Characteristics of Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964):
- They’re a squeeze generation, taking care of both their parents and their kids.
- 1/3 are actively online.
- Need to feel catered-to.
- Regular online shoppers and big spenders.
- Like spending recognition (rewards, points, etc.)
- Comfortable with email.
- Twitter is an untapped outlet.
- Calls to Action for Baby Boomers:
- Reach all of them.
- Cash back or savings programs.
- Up-sell areas of interest:
- Prescription medication
- Insurance
- Gifts for grandkids and kids
- Entertainment
- Travel
- Discount wines by the case
- Characteristics of the Greatest Generation (born before 1946):
- Value-oriented – want to discuss areas of interest.
- Spend most of their time online with email and message boards.
- Their Baby Boomer children influence their adoption of technology.
- Actually asking for more social features on their phones
- Calls to Action for the Greatest Generation:
- Emails & messages boards are good for targeted messages about senior discounts.
- Messages need to be in a large enough font size to be seen.
- Message about ways you cater to the age group.
There were some good questions after the presentation about the different email providers, such as AOL, Gmail, etc. She said that the different providers definitely cater to different generations with their levels of difficulty. Older folks tend to like the simplicity of things like AOL, wherase younger folks enjoy more optimization and personalization with Gmail. Link shorteners also matter – older generations are less likely to click a weird looking link (bit.ly, tinyurl, etc) whereas younger generations know what they are and are more likely to click.
Jennifer was kindly enough to put her awesome slideshow online, so check it out here:
Read MoreWeb 2.0 Expo: Optimize Your Organic Search Results Leveraging Social Media & Blogging
Session Description: I’m all a Twitter ‘Cause your MySpace hurts my Facebook when I’m Linked-in – Learn how to leverage social media and your current website to DOMINATE search engine results and improve your organic rankings! Sponsored by Verio.
Industry expert and published author Heather Lutze gives you the rundown on her social media strategies from her new book, The Findability Formula. This breakout will give you actionable tactics you can implement immediately to get your website ranked higher in search engine results. Social media is HOT and delivers results if you know how to use them to their fullest potential. Learn how to use keywords effectively with Twitter, Linked-In, Youtube, Facebook, as well as your own company website to increase your search engine rankings. It is all about knowing and understanding the Findability Formula – and that is what you’ll learn in this workshop!
This session took place Thursday, April 2, 2009. The speaker:
- Heather Lutze, Lutze Consulting
Heather had a lot of great things to say; it was a shame that she didn’t have enough time to really go over it because of such a long pitch by Verio, the sponsor of the session. One thing Verio did that was annoying but I can’t really fault them for, was parking someone at the door and using the leads scanner to scan the name badges of the people coming in. Annoying, but since they were sponsoring the session, I can’t really fault them for it.
Bullet Point Review!
- Social media gives you a platform to position yourself as an expert in your field.
- Strategy:
- Connect with the right search keywords.
- Edit your social media profiles and elements with keywords.
- Track the results in Google search results.
- Know how users search:
- 15.2% are 1 word search phrases
- 31.9% are 2 word
- 27% are 3 word
- 14.8% are 4 word
- 6.5% are 5+ words
- The longer the keyword, the faster you’ll show up.
- Longer search terms are looking more to purchase, less informational or shopping.
- Resources: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.
- Tool: Google External Keyword Tool
- Tool: Keyword Discovery
- Connect with the customer when they’re ready to take decisive action.
- Misspellings can rank highly (sometimes they convert higher).
- Look at the pages and be sure you actually want to show up amongst that company.
- Anything over 100 searches, long tail.
- Open tool, whats most targeted keyword, then write blog post (put the keyword at the front).
- Recommends All in One SEO Pack, ShareThis for WordPress.
- On LinkedIn, when you put your last name in put a dash and your keyword.
- Start on the long tail and work your way backward.
- Do it for your name, do it for misspellings, rank the whole page to push out the “sucks” terms.
Because of the 20 minute pitch for Verio at the beginning of the session, there was zero time for questions, which was a shame. I was hoping for some more real-world examples that weren’t just about Heather. There was time for one where a woman who is a voice-over talent was looking at it from her standpoint and Heather walked through the practical application, which was pretty cool.
Overall it was a good session once Verio was done talking, and I wish she’d shared her slides with the Web 2.0 Expo folks, but alas it’s not on their website.
Read MoreSocial Media Marketing Summit: Segmentation/Diversity
This session took place October 1st and promised to teach those in attendance how marketers can reach very specific groups of users via behavioral targeting, niche social sites, campaigns at specific demographics, hyper targeting and more. The panel consisted of:
- Chris Saad, Founder and CEO, DataPortability.org
- Will Moss, CEO, ConnectPlatform.com
- Ian Swanson, Founder and CEO, Sometrics
To be honest I didn’t like the unorganized nature the panelists took, but there were some decent take-home notes to be had from the session.
Bullet Point Review!
- Methods to find a niche are Google Search and Twitter Search.
- Don’t just observe, participate.
- Lots of people started with apps and then moved to a main web property.
- Find your audience – use demographics, psychographics, behavioral marketing – find them and partner up.
- Partner with fast growing niche networks or create one if it doesn’t exist yet in the niche you’re interested in.
- Experiment with creative ads with the owners of these networks.
- Advertising is yelling, marketing is having a conversation.
- Learn the social contract and participate accordingly.
- Have a process in place on how to respond and join the conversation.
- Put your money where your mouth is and allocate resources to monitor and respond in social media settings.
- There is a need for a new metric. Keywords used to tell people, not so much anymore.
- Need for interests to be measured (APML).
- How do you target? Try – do sample buys, experiment, do lots of little buys.
- Social networks are still cheap to advertise on because they don’t yet perform like traditional ad buys in terms of CPM.
- See what keywords people associate with your brand (quality, sucks, etc).
- Use social networking for lead generation.
- No one’s talking about your product, they’re talking about your brand – so collaborate and build a product that they’ll want to talk about.
- Use social media to saturate a niche market; brainstorm about communities of interest and participate and show your subject matter expertise.
- Use search engines to find individuals and follow them back to their communities.
Points brought up during the Q&A
You might want to go local before going national – not all products and services scale effectively to a national audience.- Widgets are the bumper sticker of the web.
- Develop content and specific tags (zip codes, city names, etc.) in targeting.
- Get analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.
- Keyword ads like AdWords, Facebook, MySpace are great for segmentation.
- Hyper targeting is growing in adoption.
- Open Social – create widgets that will work across multiple social networks.
- If you’re going to buy advertising on a social network, you should also participate in that network.
- Be part of that eco system in as many ways as possible.
- Using engagement to see how well ads work can also be used to see what a particular segment is interested in (e.g. how many people mouse over, click, etc.)
- Data portability will break down barriers to entry.
- Using a 3rd party metric contrasts vs. internal and lends credibility and gives you a comparison of you vs. your competitors.
Even the Q&A portion was just an extension of the session, so it was hard to really distinguish what people were asking. It was a decent session but could have been perked up with a bit more empirical data and maybe some real-world experiences.
Read MoreSocial Media Marketing Summit: James Lamberti
This should be interesting, as the topic is on the intersection of social media marketing and search. The speaker is:
- James Lamberti, Senior Vice President of Media and Technology, comScore.
Started with a comScore plug – that’s kind of a turn off for me personally. I’m the kind of person that is savvy enough to look you or your company up on Google if I didn’t know about you before and actually care to know more going forward. Seems like something a search guy would understand, right? I know that obviously people accept speaking engagements, in part, because it brings attention to their company, but to use it as a platform for a mini commercial is a faux paux – or at least should be – in the conference world.
I digress, overall it was informative if just a bit dry.
Bullet Point Review!
- In 1996, 2/3 of the world’s online population is in the US. Now it’s more spread out.
- Most commonly used internet categories include Search, Entertainment, and Retail.
- Social networking sites are exploding, so are multimedia sites such as YouTube.
- Community and Personals sites are seeing negative growth, likely a result of social networking sites replacing a large part of these sites’ functionality.
- America is slowest growing area given internet maturity, but there’s explosive growth internationally.
- 25.3% year-over-year increase in queries on search.
- Eyeballs -> Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Loyalty -> Buy.
- Most consumers admit to being receptive to more leisurely products like music and entertainment being advertised on UGC sites than necessary items like financial services and utilities.
- MySpace monetization nearly 6x that of Facebook.
- Search is everywhere, not just on search engines but within the communities themselves, like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook.
- 2.5 billion queries within YouTube.
- 68% of web users never click on a display ad, and only 16% drive 80% of all clicks.
- Clickers are predominately younger with lower income.
- 90% of site visitation is view-through with no engagement.
- There are free tools lying all around the internet to help.
- 83% of the sales impact of Search is latent or offline.
- Brand advocates represent about 40% of online buyers.
- Advocates are very avid searchers – 104 queries vs. 72 for non-advocates per month.
- Hasn’t seen anyone really leverage search to create an advertising campaign or tie it to a social media strategy.
- Identify search query points-of-origin to determin optimal markets for print, TV, radio ads.
- Search intersects with EVERYTHING.
- Search is a logical and desired outcome.
- The value of search is almost always dramatically underestimated.
- A lot is being left on the table – too concerned with ROI metrics sometimes.
- Search is an under leveraged asset in the strategic and creative process.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Engagement mapping trying to measure touch points, undervalued. Shave money off your TV campaign and make sure your search is solid. There’s no more an expression of human interest than someone actively looking for your brand.
- Ways to take this knowledge and make it actionable?
Last complaint, I swear! If you have a lot of interesting data points with numbers and facts, don’t skip through them in nanoseconds. There was a lot of interesting data presented, but no time to write it down. Jumping around slides is a bit awkward as well, but if you’re a data nut that wasn’t as concerned with writing things down as I was this was a valuable presentation to be sure. I enjoy sharing facts and percentages with others because they have more weight, but can’t share them when reviewed at 90 miles per hour.
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