Facebook is under fire; last week the social networking site enabled facial recognition on photos worldwide. And not everyone is happy about that. Also in this social media update: social media boosts turnover and profit, Twitter launches a built-in URL shortener and Facebook most used platform for online sharing.
Social media boosts sales and profits
We've known this for a long time, of course, but a little proof never hurts. More and more companies are using social networking sites, blogs, microblogs and forums to attract new customers. And with success! In 2010, 48% of Dutch companies managed to win new customers via social networking sites. A year later, this percentage had risen to 57%. Research by Regus (PDF), among 17,000 managers and business owners in 80 countries, also shows that more and more companies are using social media as a channel to maintain contact with existing customers and to inform them (52%). In the Netherlands, this percentage is even 61%.
Most organizations (74%) believe that social media is an indispensable part of the marketing communication mix. However, 61% are convinced that a campaign that only uses social media cannot be successful. The tables below clearly show how companies that use social media had a much higher increase in turnover and booked more profit in the past year than companies that did not.
SNS Facebook is once again under fire for a privacy issue. A new application, which mexico phone number list has been quietly installed, can scan faces in photos and recognize users in them. From now on, when you upload a photo, Facebook can recognize your friends in your photos and give you suggestions to 'tag' them. The US House of Representatives last week strongly criticized this functionality: "If this new feature is as useful as Facebook claims, it should be able to stand on its own two feet, without an automatic sign-in that changes users' privacy settings without their permission," said Democrat Edward Markey.
Facebook apologized. The SNS said that they should have done more to inform people that this functionality was coming. If you do not want your friends to receive suggestions to tag you in their photos, you can turn this functionality off. Via account - account settings - privacy settings - things others share, you can turn off the function 'Suggest photos of me to friends'. Source: Facebook blog.
Twitter launches automatic URL shortener
Finally, a much-requested feature is being implemented: Twitter is launching its own built-in URL shortener soon, which will automatically shorten URLs you paste into your tweet from www.twitter.com to https://t.co. While each shortened link will get its own t.co ID, links will be displayed as a shortened version of the original link, giving users an idea of what they’re clicking on. A smart move by Twitter, especially considering the large amounts of spam links that regularly appear in your mentions. Source: Twitter blog.