Author: kullin

Delicious auto-saves your links before you hit “Save”

There have been some problems with the new Delicious site after it was relaunched the other week. One thing I discovered today is that when you use the Delicious bookmarklet to save links, it automatically saves all links as soon as you click the bookmarklet, i.e. as soon as the pop-up window opens. Take a look at this short screencast to see how it works.

It shows you my collection of Delicious bookmarks. Then I go to an article that I wish to save on Delicious. I click the “save on delicious” bookmarklet and the pop-up window immediately says that the link is saved. I didn’t click on Save, so the link is saved without tags and in my case automatically tweeted to my 3,000+ followers. As you may see in the video, although the box “this link is private” is ticked, the link is saved as Public.

When you save a link directly on Delicious.com, it is also saved automatically before you hit the Save button (and are able to add tags), but at least there you are able to choose Private mode before it is saved to the site.

I use Delicious every day and for a number of reasons, many of the links that I save are not meant to be public. I hope Delicious/AVOS will fix this problem soon.

The brands on Facebook that most people are talking about

So you are a large brand that have managed to attract a lot of followers or fans on Facebook. That’s great, but how much engagement is there around the content that your brand is posting on Facebook? That’s what Facebook’s new metric “People Talking About” is trying to measure. The metric “represents the number of people that are talking about the page, sharing content from the page and further interacting with the page, thus creating stories. Its basically a metric of active fans”.

This number can be found on Facebook pages, below the number of fans. But what is a good number? How can you determine if you are doing better than your competitors? To get a better understanding of how the most popular brands are doing in terms of engagement, I looked at the top 40 brands according to a list compiled by Ignite Social Media. There are other pages on Facebook with more fans, like sports teams, but this is a good list to look at.

walmart-facebook

National Geographic fans are active
It turns out that for most of the top consumer brands, engagement levels are somewhere between 0.5 – 2% of the total number of fans. So if you have 10 million fans, you probably have about 50,000 – 200,000 “People Talking About” your content. That’s a good benchmark to look at when you study your own page. At the top of this list is National Geographic, which is a media brand. Media pages often have even higher levels of engagement, possibly because they are very good at creating rich content on an ongoing basis. For example, the Guardian has 124,800 fans and 8,000 (or 6.4%) people talking about its page.

Among the non-media brands, Burberry, Walmart and Disney seem to do an outstanding job in getting their fans like, comment and share their content.

All the top 40 brand pages can be found in this Slideshare document, which you can also download for better viewing.

Top 40 brands on Facebook  

View more documents from kullin

Other pages with really active fans can be found among sports teams (not on this list). Real Madrid (5.28%), Manchester United (3.21%) and FC Barcelona (2.99%) are some examples.

What I haven’t been able to determine if the value of “People Talking About” will aggregate over time or if it is a measure based on a period of time, for example the last 6 months. UPDATE: it measures the number of people that have interacted with your page during the last 7 days. Do you have any other examples of Facebook pages that many “People Are Talking About”? Please share in the comments.

Footnote: This metric does not measure how many times a brand is mentioned on Facebook.

Update: Hat tip to Markus Welin for the info about the 7 day period of measurement.


How to publish your Delicious links on Twitter

Social bookmarking site Delicious was recently bought by AVOS, a company owned by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. A new version of Delicious was launched a few days ago and it includes a new sleek design and new features such as the ability to create “stacks”, a form of curated bundle of links within any topic.

But other features have either disappeared or requires some tweaking to continue to work (for example, I have not been able to get my iPhone/Safari bookmarklet to work so I am having trouble saving bookmarks on my phone). One feature that I have been using is to publish or share my saved (public) bookmarks on Twitter. I have used Twitterfeed.com and the old RSS feed that I used was this:

http://del.icio.us/rss/kullin

This no longer works so I need to find the updated RSS feed. You can find it under your profile image on your Delicious page.

New Delicios RSS

The new RSS feed is http://del.icio.us/v2/rss/kullin (basically the only difference is the addition of /vs/ ) and yours will look the same, just replace “kullin” with your username.

To publish your links on Twitter, register with Twitterfeed.com and create a new feed. Paste the RSS link and then tick the box for making the feed active (you can do this later if you want to try first).

Then go to advanced settings. There you choose posting frequency, titles etc and you can also add a prefix/suffix to the tweet to explain to your followers that this link is from Delicious. The last step is to choose what networks to publish the feed on, for example Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Connect with your Twitter account and you are done.

New Delicious offers a wide range of RSS feeds and if you want to subscribe to friends, other users, topics or keywords you can create your own tailored feed and then paste it into an RSS reader like Google Reader. These feeds can be found here.

 

H&M and Sony Ericsson among top 50 brands on Facebook

The Ignite Social Media Blog tracks the most popular branded pages on Facebook. In the September update, two Swedish brands are ranked among the top 50 pages. With 8.3 million “fans”, H&M moves up one spot to #32 and Sony Ericsson stays at #50 (with 5.7 million).

Top 10 branded Facebook pages (Sept 2011):

  1. Facebook
  2. YouTube
  3. Coca-Cola
  4. Disney
  5. MTV
  6. Starbucks
  7. Oreo
  8. Red Bull
  9. Converse All Stars
  10. Converse

Instagram now has 10 million users

It took Instagram, the popular photo app, less than one month to add that last million users to reach 10 million members. Instagram wrote in a blog post just a few hours ago:

“Last October, we launched Instagram live in the App Store. Today, less than one year later, we’re happy to announce that the Instagram community now consists of over 10 million registered users.”

Account number 10 million is “homer123” (view on Statigram) but it has not posted any photos yet. Since account number 1 and 2 are missing (first working account is Kevin Systrom at #3), you might say that the 10 millionth account is 10,000,002: “dinbeebis” (possibly Swedish?).

Instagram is also close to reaching a quarter of a billion hosted photos since photo number 240 million was uploaded this morning: http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/240000000

Hat tip to Feber.se. I am “kullin” on Instagram.

Audi ranked the most social luxury brand in China

China became the world’s second largest luxury goods market in 2010, according to consulting firm Bain & Company. It is estimated that China will account for about 20%, or $27 billion, of the total global luxury sales in 2015, so this is the market to watch if you are a luxury brand. And social media is on the rise in China: micro blogs Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo both have in excess of 200 million users, social network Renren has some 120 million users and there are about 300 million blogs in China. No wonder brands are turning to social media sites to engage in conversations with potential customers.

L2 is a think tank which has just released a report on the top luxury brands in China and how they are performing in social media. The L2 Prestige 100®: China IQ study attempts to quantify the digital competence in China of 100 iconic brands. The one brand with the highest overall score is Audi, followed by Burberry and BMW. Seven of the top ten are car brands, and four of these are German brands.

audi kaixin

1.  AUDI – Innovation in technology: maintains presence on six different social media sites in addition to its own OurAudi.com
2.  BURBERRY – Luxury’s digital darling doesn’t disappoint. From Jiepang VIP guest passes for Beijing grandopening to Christopher Bailey soundtrack on Youku, Burberry claims the fashion crown.
3.  BMW – From “beasts to joy”—sheer social pleasure; great translation of a global campaigns for the Chinese market.
4.  VOLVO – C70 Sina Weibo challenges consumers to design the plot for the next Volvo commercial.
5.  BENEFIT COSMETICS – Local e-commerce launch caters to consumers with samples and gift-with-purchase offer; Sina Weibo and Kaixin “Benefit Beach Honey” contests delight.
6.  CADILLAC – Recently released Route 66 short film starring Karen Mok across site and social media.
6.  ESTÉE LAUDER – EL-Lady BBS includes videos, games, Q&A, and link to purchase.
8.  LAND ROVER – “The Evoque Effect” sets the standard for multichannel digital campaigns.
8.  MERCEDES-BENZ – SLK Mask Party contest provides winners tickets to China Fashion Week and site visitors an opportunity to create their own virtual mask.
10.  PORSCHE – Innovative comparison tool and stunning microsites for each model are the engines of their online presence.

L2 also compiled a list of the brands with most followers on Sina Weibo in which the ex-Swedish, now Chinese brand Volvo is at #8:

sina weibo top ten brands

The top brands regarding organic buzz (mentions on Sina Weibo & Qzone and videos on Youku & Tudou):

sina weibo buzz brands

Download the full report here.