Tag: social networks

Facebook post has a shelf life of 18 hours

Once in a while people ask me why do I still have my own, personal, standalone blog instead of just posting to some social networks.  There are a few reasons to that, and one of the is the life span of the post.  Blog posts live practically forever.  I think, I’ve even mentioned before that the homepage of my blog is not even in the top 5 visited pages of the site – older posts, sometimes even from years ago – are staying at the top of the chart.  With social networks, posts disappear pretty quickly.  None of the social networks that I’m familiar with – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and others – provide any decent way of working with archives.  They are more focused on the “now”, and I’ve known it for years.  But it’s always good to find a confirmation of your own beliefs.  Today, via this tweet, I came across this blog post that references the study that states 18 hours is a shelf life of a Facebook post.

This might come as a bit of a shock to brands who pour their heart and souls into putting together the best Facebook posts that will get people talking and sharing for days. A recent study shows that the average shelf life of a Facebook post is just 18 hours. We thought we were in a 24/7 culture when it comes to online, but even 24 hours it seems, is now a bit of a stretch.

The findings come from a study by OMD, who studied how long people continued to actively engage with a post after it was made.  Off the back of the announcement that pages will only reach about 16% of their fans through postings, this is particularly unwelcome news.

WordPress + Tumblr, and thinking behind

Matt Mullenweg, insightful as always:

While the tech press often likes to paint companies in a similar market as competing in a zero sum game, the reality is that all are growing rapidly and services feed each other and cross-pollinate more than anyone gives them credit for. Tumblr built a dashboard reader product that has tons of pageviews and lots of followers, which can provide distribution for blogs much in the same way Facebook and Twitter do. (Its 85%-on-dashboard-centric usage looks more like a social network than a blogging network, actually.) WordPress has fantastic content that people on Tumblr love, and Tumblr has a rich and diverse content and curation community that can drive new visitors to WordPress — it’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

It’s true that we’re becoming simpler and more streamlined and it’s a process driven by our design vision and our community, not what any particular competitor is doing. WordPress has always flourished because it’s a hassle-free digital hub — a home on the web you can control, customize, and truly own due to the fact that it’s Open Source software. WordPress is the antidote to walled gardens.

The new Bit.ly – a Delicious déjà vu

Bit.ly is a famous and widely used URL shortening service.  Or at least it used to be until a few days ago, when a new Bit.ly was introduced.  I managed to miss the announcement, so it was only today that I saw it.  Being a fan of (almost) all new and shiny, I looked around.  And within seconds I had this strong feeling of déjà vu.  And this time I didn’t even have to think hard to guess where I saw this before.  The answer was obvious and it was staring at me – the good old Delicious, social bookmarking service.

From a simple URL shortening service with popular API and some stats on clicks, Bit.ly is transforming into a social bookmarking service.  Here are just a few things that stood out for me:

  • More and more ways to add bookmarks – browser addons, mobile applications, etc.
  • Social aspect of bookmarking – bit.ly now integrates Twitter and Facebook friend’s public bookmarks into your network stream.
  • Bundles – I think that’s one of the major differences between a URL shortening service and a bookmarking service.  With URL shortening there is no need (or it is really small) of organizing URLs – you can always just shorten it again.  With bookmarks some sort of organization is a must.
  • Bookmark notes – these are pretty much identical to those of Delicious.

Social networking reshuffled

OK, now that I’m almost sure that new setup for social networking works, I can give you guys an idea of what I had and how I changed it.  In case you’ll notice any differences between this description and the actual behavior, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve things, please let me know.  Without any further ado …

In my previous setup, I used Twitter as my social glue.  Everything was synchronized with Twitter – my Google Reader, Evernote, delicious, a few RSS feeds, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube, etc.  Periodically (once a day until recently, now weekly), my tweets were automatically aggregated into a blog post using Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress.  This allowed me to make sure that I had a record of my online activity synced back into my own blog, something that I own, cherish, and backup.

That setup had a serious drawback.  Not everyone is on Twitter.  A lot of people are using Facebook these days.  And while in my previous setup there was an automatic push of tweets to Facebook, it wasn’t ideal.  Tweets are more limited than Facebook posts – in length, previews, and formatting.  Which means that even though something was synced to Facebook, I wasn’t taking a full advantage of Facebook.

From now on I have a different setup.  I’ll still use Twitter as my social glue, but I won’t be limiting myself to only Twitter.  I will push content independently to Facebook and other social networks when appropriate.  I will try to keep Twitter in sync by posting directly to several social networks simultaneously.  My tweets will still be aggregated at my blog on a weekly basis.  But there won’t be any automatic synchronization between Twitter and Facebook anymore.  The con of this setup is that not all content will get pushed everywhere. But it is, I think, fairly compensated by a pro of having tailored content and format for each social network.

Either way, nothing is set in stone yet. And even if it was – things move and change way too often, and I’m just trying to keep it real.  Let me know if notice any issues with these changes, and, especially if you know how to make things better.

P.S.: Yes, if Twitter and Facebook had better integration in terms of links, photos, videos, and locations, none of these would have happened.  “Blame Canada!” (c) South Park.

Trying out Social 2.5

A few days ago, Alex King announced the release of the new version of Social plugin for WordPress.  It’s one of those that can broadcast your blog posts to Twitter and Facebook.  But not only that.  It can also synchronize Twitter re-tweets and replies and Facebook shares and comments back into your blog, as comments.  Now that sounds pretty interesting.

I’ve installed the plugin and connected it to both Twitter and Facebook easily – no need to create your own apps or anything like that.  But given that I already have some sort of synchronization between Twitter and Facebook, I wonder how weird things will go.

This is a test post.

Update #1: Social plugin seems to work really well.

Update #2: Disabling broadcasting to Twitter from Twitter Tools plugin should decrease the amount of dups posted.

Updated #3: It is still not obvious how to keep the synchronization between Twitter and Facebook while avoiding dups.