Thursday 21 March 2013

BBC Weather the latest victim of a Twitter hack

@BBCweather appears to be the latest Twitter account to become a victim of hacking. The series of around 10 tweets posted this afternoon appear to be by the Syrian Electronic Army, a cyber group that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. 



The group took control of the account and posted 10 tweets, the tweets have since been removed from the account, the BBC are yet to comment.
 
It appears to be becoming a worrying trend on twitter, I hope business accounts are taking the right steps to safe guard their passwords.
 
Speak soon,
 
Social Garble :)

Happy 7th Birthday Twitter

Launched on 21st March 2006 Twitter is celebrating its 7th Birthday today and has release a video to comemorate the occation:

Twitter has growen massivly over the past 7 years and now boast over 200 million active users sendin

Wednesday 20 March 2013

LinkedIn goes down... twice!

It first became apparent to me early on this morning that LinkedIn seemed to be experiencing some problems after each time I tried to log on I was greated with the same message:


And 4 hours later I am still seeing the same thing,  and unable to log into my account. It looks as though LinkedIn solved the first problem this morning and got the network up and running again, only to experience a second outage. 

LinkedIn has taken to its Twitter account to explain to its users that they are aware of the problem, and are looking for a solution to the problem.

I'm hoping the issues will be resolved soon so I can get onto my account, but until then, watch this space for any more news.

Speak soon,

Social Garble :)

Monday 18 March 2013

The hashtag takeover!

So Twitter started off using the hashtag, then it was Google+ that jumped on the band waggon, Pinterest use them, as do Instagram and LinkedIn. 

Last week there were reports that Facbeook is looking into how it can incorporate hashtags into its feeds and today I have read that Flickr is using them on the new iPhone app to.

Are hashtags taking over the world?

Watch this space!

Speak soon,

Social Garble :)

Friday 15 March 2013

Ohhh I like spacing my Tweets....

....but how many others will?!


So today Twitter has rolled out spacing in Tweets:


Which is  great, especially if you want to try and make your Tweet stand out. But how long till everyone is doing this and I get thumb ache from having to scroll so much further on my iPad? I do hope it doesnt get to irritating.

Speak soon,

Social Garble :)

Thursday 14 March 2013

Facebook News Feed redesign - 1 week on

So this time last week, Facebook told us all about the all new news feed (coming soon!) We have all had time to read into what this changes are and how it will look, but what does this mean for brands?

lets first of all recap what the changes are...

In the words of Facebook, Goodbye clutter, Hello Bright, beautiful stories!

The three main feature of the update are:
  • Bigger Images
  • Multiple Feeds
  • Mobile Consistency

  • Many have compared the new design to that of Google+ and having looked at the two designs there are many similarities and I would agree with those comparisons.

    Facebook boasts that the new design is "Busting with Colour, Vibrant new visuals bring your News feed to life". This would suggest they have taken a leaf out of the Pinterest book, with imagery becoming more popular, this is the right direction for which Facebook needs to travel
    They are also going to give us more power over what we see in our news feed.

    So it all sounds good to me... right?!

    Well it certainly does to the everyday Facebook user, but what does this mean for brand pages... where are these posts going to be shown?



    I'm sure every social media marketer out there has noticed a huge drop in the number of people seeing their page posts, as little as 10% of my brands page Facebook fans now see our posts, getting above 10% is now a great result! This all appears to be down to a Facebook attempt to monetise Facebook, and every day I see more and more brands promoting their posts in order to get them seen. Cancer Research has been doing this a lot of late for the Race for Life. Is this just another move by Facebook to get us brands spending more money to tell our stories? If so, this doesn’t help the charity sector too much.


    I've signed up to try the new News Feed as soon as trails roll out, watch this space for a review as soon as I get it.

    Speak soon,

    Social Garble :)

Wednesday 6 March 2013

A new look for Google+

Google+ have changed the sizes of their cover images - and now they are huge!

I have set this for the PDSA account, and as you can see the cover image now takes up the majority of the screen.

The profile picture has also changed, and now appears as a round image that overlays the cover photo. 

Personally, I'm not a fan, I like cover images as it allows you to get convey a brand message to your fans, however  I think the changes to the Google+ cover image is a little too large and makes the whole browsing experience rather unpleasantt, on my desktop it fills the whole screen.

Google+ revert back to your old ways!

Speak soon,

Social Garble :)

A new look for Pinterest

Pinterest has me all excited once again as they test out another new feature, and lucky me gets to preview it!

I love login into Pinterest and seeing a new feature to preview. This time, they are testing a new design that involves bigger picture. 
So how does it look?
Old design
New Design


As the pictures above show, in the new Pinterest design the white boxing around each image in the old design has been removed and this makes the images appear bigger and clearer, and for an image based platform I think the new design is great. On the whole the new design makes the viewing experience much cleaner. 
It will be interesting to see if Pinterest roll out the design and if more features are to be tested in the coming moths. Last month I wrote a blog piece on a new news feature they were testing. This has now disappeared, personally I found it hard to see what images of mine had been repined with this new feature, so I was glad to see the old feed back.

Speak soon,

Social Garble :)