Keeping Up With Social Media: New Tools & Tricks
5/7/2010 2:49:46 PM

By Apryl Ehmann, Media Relations Specialist

The weirdest thing happened to me a few weeks ago: a Facebook friend “poked” me. I was so taken back because I couldn’t remember the last time somebody used that feature. We have moved on from “poking” to participating in a more engaging experience that we’re often turning into meet-up or tweet-up of some sort in the “real” world.

In this ever-changing social media world, new tools and techniques are constantly emerging for the sites we just got used to! With social networks like Facebook and Twitter opening up more access to consumers and media, it’s important to stay on top of what’s new. So here’s a quick recap of recent features that have popped up:

The “Like” Button and Facebook’s Open Graph: What? My Facebook fan pages no longer have fans, but instead “likers”? This change took place when Facebook announced the start of Open Graph. Open Graph pulls information about the websites a person visits, the news stories they like and the books or activities they favor - and share all of that information with their Facebook friends. While some folks may “like” it the changes, some have criticized it for the Pandora’s box of privacy issues it seems to open.

Sponsored Tweets: It’s been a long time coming: Twitter is getting into the advertising business. The new advertising platform, coined “Promoted Tweets,” is designed to ensure tweets from major brands that could otherwise get lost in a user’s cluttered Twitter stream get seen by them if they’ve recently tweeted relevant content to that brand. While the ad platform is based on a pay-for-impressions model, Twitter eventually intends to launch a metric that will judge how much reach and impact individual sponsored tweets have based on user interaction such as retweets and favorites.

Twitter Lets Them Eat Pie: Goodbye screen grabs! Twitter’s newly launched “Blackbird Pie” tool allows users to embed Tweets on any web page or blog. Until now, bloggers and journalists used screenshots or direct quotations when they wanted to highlight a certain tweet. As if that weren’t tasty enough, the embeddable tweet feature provides direct links to the tweeter's Twitter account so you can see more tweets from them.

Want to learn more about new social media tools and features? Send us an e-mail, a Tweet or post a question to our Facebook wall.