Monday News Round-Up

August 20, 2012

Olympic sponsors: the social winners

Whilst athletes were vying for medals during the dubbed ‘Socialympics’, the official sponsors were hard at work battling for social media dominance. Social Media Influence have released the sponsor leaderboard. 

Visa and P&G come in joint 3rd position. Visa saw steady growth of their Facebook fan base and enjoyed great success on YouTube with video views rocketing by 42.5%. Whilst, P&G’s ‘Thank You Mum’ campaign created a swell of YouTube views.  Samsung win the Silver medal, where again YouTube was the star network for the brand. Finally, Coca-Cola win the Gold, outperforming competitors on all networks, rapidly increasing their audience bases.

New platform news flash

There are 3 new social media platforms to be aware of, all created by the people behind Twitter:

  • ‘Medium’  – a new publishing platform that allows users to collect quotes, images and other pieces of content
  • ‘Branch’ – users invite others to take social conversations onto ‘branches’ to go into further depth. You have to be invited to chat in the branch, but you can follow or subscribe to one freely
  • ‘Lift’ – a smart phone app called that socialises your habits. You add things that you like to do to a list and you tick them off when complete

Read more here.

Google+ gets vain

Last week, Google + announced that the introduction of vanity URLs to its service, a feature that has already been adopted by other social platforms. Google+ is offering this to a selected number of users before full roll-out to brands and individuals.

An up and down week for Facebook

Down: Facebook shares have again fallen by 6.27% to a value of $19.87 – a stark contrast to its original $38 starting price. This drop occurred after the first lock out period expired, allowing shareholders to sell their stock.

Up: The Office of Fair Trading gave Facebook’s takeover bid for Instagram the go ahead, following concerns that that the takeover would prevent people from uploading pictures from Instagram to sites other than Facebook. Facebook is now a step closer to the acquisition. Watch this space.

Have a social week everyone. Until next week… 

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