For most publishers social media has earned itself a prominent seat at the audience development table. However many still face issues with strategy, execution and incorporating social into a cohesive program. This week I took part in an OPA Social Media Day panel on social media for audience development with Lisa Brewer from Time Inc. [...]

What are news organizations doing to increase user activity and engagement on their Facebook pages? To be clear, a large part of any Facebook strategy focuses on newsfeed visibility and on-site promotion through tactics like EdgeRank optimization, frictionless sharing, like and subscribe buttons, Open Graph tags, Facebook Comments and other Facebook Social Plugins. However in [...]

It has been a couple months since StumbleUpon rolled out its Channel pages for all members so I thought I’d check in and see how media brands are doing. StumbleUpon Channels are a good opportunity for publishers (and any business involved in content marketing) because they create a direct pipeline to users that are specifically [...]

What are the best free tools for analyzing a Twitter profile? During a social media audit I like to run a company’s Twitter profiles through some basic analysis tools to set benchmarks and compare them to competitors. I got good response to my post on Facebook analytics tools so I thought I’d do something similar [...]

The rise of Reddit and the steady decline of Digg have been well documented. Just recently Reddit announced that its traffic has more than doubled in less than a year (to 2.07 billion pageviews in December), an impressive feat. Has this translated into a significant change in social news referrals for publishers? Anecdotally we’ve all [...]

News organizations (along with businesses of all kinds) have been able to create official Google+ pages for a couple months now so I thought I’d check in and see how their pages are doing. I’m going to forgo looking at which media outlets have attracted the largest following since that data becomes quickly outdated. Instead [...]

What are the best third-party tools for advanced Facebook analytics? It’s a question I’m asked fairly often so I thought I’d do a round-up of options that are worth checking out. It is fair to say that Facebook is getting better at providing this data itself; the latest version of Facebook Insights offers a wider [...]

Pinterest is getting a lot of attention these days and deservedly so. The photo and video sharing site offers great opportunities for promoting lifestyle content and reaching niche audiences and specific demographics. Need a primer on Pinterest? Kerry Jones did an excellent one on the BlueGlass blog: Everything You Need to Know About Pinterest. While [...]

I was talking with John Shehata from ABC News yesterday about Facebook, and he brought up an interesting question. What’s a better approach for journalists, creating official Facebook Pages or enabling the subscribe button on their regular profiles? Facebook is certainly encouraging the use of the new subscribe button. Journalists were specifically referenced in the [...]

Based on first impressions, I have to say I like The Washington Post’s Social Reader on Facebook. It offers a clean, simple user experience – big and open with lots of white space (in fact too big to capture well in a screenshot): (click to enlarge) There are enough additional sources to offer a wide [...]