February 22, 2013
The battle of the soap operas in social
This week, we took a look at how the battle of the soap operas can be witnessed online in the social space, with many of us now ‘Tweeting’ and ‘Facebooking’ whilst snuggled up on the sofa watching our favourite soaps. Eastenders is the champion, leading the way on every social platform! @bbcEastenders Twitter profile has a follower base of 301,108 and on Facebook it has a whopping 2,900,000 fans and counting! The soaps clearly have created content strategies, engaging their fans with dramatic images and questions.
“Horse-gate” and the importance of crisis management in social media
The horse meat saga remains a hot topic with the scandal getting darker every day as more and more brands are dragged in. As the concerns of what we are eating continue to grow, 62% of customers are now taking their customer service questions to the branded pages on Facebook. Brands must be proactive and fully trained for this type of crisis management. Findus is a prime example of a brand that was unprepared; with their homepage claiming that it uses “only the best ingredients” with a picture of a “beef” lasagne for a number of days after the crisis broke. You can find out more here.
This week we have seen a course of high profile Twitter hacks; these hijacks started on Monday with Burger King’s Twitter profile pushing out messages claiming that the company had been sold to McDonalds. The unknown cyber hackers also changed the fast food company’s avatar and name to ‘McDonalds’. Coincidentally, just one day later Jeep’s Twitter account was hacked, with tweets including ‘WELCOME BACK CADILLAC #300’ being sent out.
Having your company Twitter account hacked doesn’t seem all bad, Burger King received 5,000 more followers within just 30 minutes of the hack kicking off. MTV even jumped on the bandwagon and created a ‘Twitter hack’ publicity stunt.
For those of you who like signposting content with URLs you will now be constricted to 117 characters. This latest change by Twitter comes into force this week. It means that any tweet which includes a URL will be reduced by 2 characters. Those of you who are keen tweeters will know that this 2 character reduction can make a big impact to your tweets!
Pinterest catching up quickly with Twitter
Facebook is still clearly leading the way when it comes to social domination, with Twitter coming in second. However, a recent study by Pew has indicated that the leadership table might be changing. Pinterest’s popularity has exploded, quickly making it a runner up behind Twitter. As of 2012, Twitter attracts 16% of social media users with Pinterest only 1% behind with 15%.
Picture courtesy of Pixabay, Cartoon boarder horse, Pixabay.com under a Creative Commons 1.0 universal license