Trevor Young - PR Warrior | Where PR meets social media meets content marketing

Big Trend for 2013: Visual Aggregation of the Social Web

If you were looking for pointers as to where the social web is headed, I can sum it up in two words:

Visual aggregation.

As we all know, visualisation of the social web moved ahead in a big way in 2012 - THINK: Twitter and Facebook header images and the incredible growth of Instagram and Pinterest.

However, as the year drew to a close, I turned my attention to three platforms that aggregate individual tweet streams in visually appealing fashion. I'm speaking of:

• Twylah
• RebelMouse
• Glossi

Below are some screen-grabs (including quick summation) from each:

Twylah

Twylah is more magazine style and curates your tweets under frequently-used subject headings (although you're able to 'pin' three topics you want positioned at the top of the page).

For example, as you can see from the screen-grab below, topics I tweet about often include content marketing, social media, Spotify and Instagram (the 'Bookmarked' heading comes from the fact I will often tweet about an article or post that I've bookmarked on Delicious.com).

Twylah also lets you send 'Power Tweets', which are tweets you send from Twylah's platform to your Twitter followers that include links back to your Twylah page complete with the text of your tweet, embedded content from the link you've shared, and other related tweets of yours.

RebelMouse

Of the three platforms mentioned in this post, RebelMouse is my favourite, if only for the fact I think it looks the best. Very Pinterest-like, eh?

I also like the way RebelMouse makes it super-easy for people to re-tweet (or update on Facebook) your tweets, or re-post other people's RebelMouse entries on your own page. Again, like Pinterest.

You can also elect to incorporate feeds from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Google+ etc.

If I had to pick just the one social aggregator, this would be it.

 

Glossi

Glossi is the latest aggregator to come to my attention.

As you can see from the example below, Glossi (actually, it's Glos.si) puts your Twitter avatar and background front and centre, so you need to scroll down to get to a person's content.

Glossi has a heap of social networks it can pull feeds from - more than RebelMouse - including Vimeo, LinkedIn and YouTube. It also allows you to add an RSS feed (for example, I've added the PR Warrior feed; RebelMouse also allows you to do this).

Glossi also allows you to determine whether photos, text or video dominates your page, which is pretty cool.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Are you using any of these aggregators?

Which one do you prefer?

Vizify is another interesting platform you might like to check out, although it's more about visualising your 'bio'. By way of example, here's my Vizify page.

 

My Rules of the Social Road

I'm fond of telling people that when it comes to the social web, the best advice I can give (in a nutshell) is "be nice, play fair and add value".

Having a think about this though, there are other attributes that will work in your favour as you traverse the social networking landscape. Of course, this doesn't just apply to the online world - they're handy attributes to have in real life too! 

So without further ado, for what it's worth here are my rules of the social road.

Be nice.

Play fair.

Get involved.

Have an opinion.

Show respect.

Hat-tip others.

Recommend good people.

Be inquisitive.

Ask questions.

Add value.

LOL.

As someone (not sure who) once said: "Be interested AND interesting".

What do you think? Any other suggestions?

 

Social Media - Fad or Revolution?

This is a great video jam-packed with observations and seemingly up-to-date statistics that support the astounding growth of social media (excellent soundtrack too!) - by @equalman, author of 'Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way we Live and Do Business'.

For a list of the statistics contained in the video (plus sources) - Socialnomics - Social Media Blog.

(Hat-tip to Ribeezie.com).

Download this eBook For Your Social Media Library

Technology has revolutionised communications,  massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society. 

So says Philip Sheldrake in the introduction to his new Social Web Analytics eBook.

Sheldrake, who is director of Racepoint UK, says:

"If you could go back to the mid-90s and offer a marketer a little box that could sit on her desk and let her listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far- fetched that she’d probably call security. This eBook is about that reality."

At close to 100 pages, the eBook briefly squares away the 'early days' of the social web before delving deeper into what Sheldrake calls 'social web analytics' -- "... the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence". 

Don't let the tech speak put you off. 

This is a good resource to have sitting on your computer desktop. I downloaded it today and, while I've only managed to skip through it at this stage (I got caught up with the many external links on offer!), I will definitely re-visit it in more detail as well as keep it on-hand as a 'go-to' manual.

Social Web Analytics eBook can be downloaded here.