Here’s a roundup of the social media news items over the past 2 weeks that have caught my eye:
Facebook is now bigger than Amazon – With Facebook’s share price rising and Amazon’s falling, the social network is now bigger than the online retailer in terms of market capitalisation. This is calculated by multiplying the share price buy number of shares issued and last week Facebook’s market capitalisation was $170 billion and Amazon’s $165 billion.
Pinterest launches updates site and apps – Pinterest’s new mobile site includes an updated sign-up flow, new board page plus recent boards are now displayed in the board picker. Pinterest says the new mobile website offers a “great alternative” to the mobile apps with further updates to follow in the coming months. Visit www.pinterest.com on your mobile device to try it out. The mobile iOS and Android apps remain the fastest way to access the site and now display over 10 million GIFs that have been uploaded. The iPad app now supports place pins which contain geo-location information. Place pins can be used to plan travel or map out locations of sights, venues and restaurants in a city they are planning to visit, or keep a map of their favourite bars in their town.
Twitter introduce scheduling – Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Buffer and it’s scheduling features. Twitter have now introduced scheduling but only as part of its Ad Platform so you’ll need to sign-up for access although you don’t have to pay to promote tweets to schedule. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to change the Los Angeles time setting. If you’ve figured this out please let me know.
Twitter users are growing but not quickly– On Thursday 6 February, Twitter announced that it averaged 241 million monthly users in the 4th quarter ending 31 December, up 3.8 percent from the previous three months. The stock market considered this to be slow and Twitter shares dropped nearly 25%, wiping out about $9.8 billion in market value. This was despite better-than-expected 4th quarter revenue of $243 million. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is growing its membership at a rate more than double that of Facebook and nearly double Twitter. It’s monthly active user growth for the 4th quarter was 7% – faster that either Facebook or Twitter and LinkedIn monthly active users now number 277 million monthly active users.
And finally….a photo taken by Mikal Ludlow tweeted by @GlosEcho showiing the extent of flooding in Tewkesbury.
Echo photographer Mikal Ludlow has taken stunning aerial shots of our flooded county http://t.co/0JHh5Z7D8H pic.twitter.com/MA5F6Lanpg
— Gloucestershire Echo (@GlosEcho) February 18, 2014
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