The usage of specific hash tags has proven helpful in the wake previous natural disasters such as the ones affecting Haiti and Japan. On their own site Hope140.org, Twitter publishes information about encouraged social movements and -initiatives on Twitter. Check out the site here if you want to know how you can get involved.

• Successful tweets
• Tweets that have made people to un-follow
• The most influential user that reply and re-tweet your messages

In the chart below you can see how some of this data is charted:

The graph shows over 6 hour increment for your mentions, follows and un-follows, for example and you can filter tweets by categories that are defined as “best, “good” and “all”.

Third-party vendor Hootsuit is providing a similar tool but plan to turn into a pay model for big users. Twitter has no immediate plans to charge for the use of Twitter Analytics, and that will give the micro blog service the upper hand.

Twitter’s Evan Williams – final speaker at the Web 2.0 Summit, commented on the lack of cooperation form Facebook regarding data sharing, good results on the promoted Tweets program and potential Twitter version of Klout

Twitter’s next problem is “information overload” and that’s a real issue. With so many people jumping on the Twitter train, the ability to aggressively sort and filter data is becoming increasingly important

Now we all hope that Twitter Analytics will be the first step towards finding a better way to manage all of the data.

Go to socialmediaexaminer.com to watch the video

The key learnings:

• Use social media for pre-launch
  Build relations with your audience and create pre-launch buzz
• Supply key influencers with shareable content
  Make people talk about your brand and product
• Be present on key sites and platforms – Ford Focus on Facebook
  Make sure you have the strongest presence on arenas where your audience prefers to be
• The Ford Story
  Put effort in creating exclusive and sharable content

This is an example of how word of mouth and social media is used in a perfectly integrated way.
Many thanks to Social Media Examiner and Michael Stelzner for sharing the story!

Starting monday november 1st Twitter started dropping ads in their users streams/timelines. First to get a share of the new service is Starbucks, Virgin and Red Bull.

Marketers have since a while back been able to pay to get their own tweets to appear at the top of the list on searches at Twitter.com. This is however a new service that allows ads to appear in the users timelines without the user following the marketer or having searched for it.

So far the ads only reach the 900 000 using the Canadian third-party client HootSuite. Depending on the success more of the 175 million users on Twitter will be reached by the targeted ads in the future.

All users of HootSuite on Twitter will not see the ads as they are targeted based on which persons and companies the user follows. If you follow travelagencies or people who tweet about their travels then maybe Virgins tweets will appear in your stream.

To see ads pass by in their timeline will be a change for the users. If they will be welcomed or seen as a disturbing distraction by the users remains to be seen.

Read the full article here

The dollar gain was clear:

Eventbrite’s own case shows that Facebook is the most referring site for traffic to a company’s site, surpassing Google. Each Facebok share drove 11 visits back to eventbrite.com.

Conclusion: make Facebook sharing more friction-free. All companies should implement Facebook Connect.

Read the whole report at venturebeat.com

Less predictable, perhaps, is the fact that West Coast tweets were “happier” than tweets from the East Coast. Although West Coast Twitter users expressed emotions in the same cycles as the East Coast users (with a three-hour gap, of course, because of time zone differences), the West Coasters didn’t dip as low in mood as the East Coasters by a significant margin.

When in the middle of a developing work it is easy to just focus on the moment and forget about the following steps that are about to come. Therefor we would like to stress some trends, worth keeping an eye on.

1. Location

Now you can tag you geographic position in Twitter-posts and Facebook recently announced that they also will support location based information in posts. This kind of feature will grow and the supply of services based on this technique is about to explore the market. This is only the beginning of a great journey of check ins, badges and mayors.

2. Mobile ads

To be able to reach potential customers right before the decision of purchase is a dream for many of us. With the techniques of geo location and ad systems like AdMob and iAd it is only a question of time before mobile advertising will conquer ad land.

3. Mobile payments

In Sweden it is still a quite new type of service, we have seen it on wending machines from Selecta “Pay by texting…” and that is only the beginning of what will come. A range of actors in financials like Visa has worked with the development of a mobile pay system for quite a while now and Paypal already have an app that works for micro payments. Soon we will be able to make even bigger payments with our smart phones.

4. Collective offers and benefits

Groupon is a new type of service that allows users to group in order to receive offers and benefits from local vendors. The service is localization based and the offers activates when a certain number of members from the same area checks in during a certain period of time.

5. Social media policy

As more and more companies dive head first down into the social media pool, the more commonplace it have become to have a strategic policy for how to use social media. In some cases though it could be good to think about what strategies to use out there and not only think about being present but to really take use of the present in a strategic way.

ExtraTarget have put together some classy infographic.

More than 50 % check their e-mail before visiting other websites and 11 % start out the day with Facebook. 69 % of all daily Facebook users ”Like” at least one company or brand. 68 % of all daily Twitter users follows at least one company or brand.

Where do you start out your day? With incoming mail or on Facebook?

In addition to Facebook, Twitter content will as well be a part of the search result. Up dates from Facebook pages and the most popular shared links will compose the top search result.

Bing promise that the links in top of the search will be based in updates that are ”shared with everyone”. The company also announces that users name and picture will not appear in the search result.

In a blog entry, Bing explains:

“Searching for ‘World Cup’ will show what links Facebook users are sharing on the topic – with a caption that is extracted from the original article shown below the link.”

For the time being, bing.com/social is only available in the U.S. and we will have to wait until it will be launched in Sweden. The new feature makes Facebook even more important when it comes to search and Bing takes a step closer to Google as a try to level of its enormous advantage.