We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #108

Mashup
adam.bernstein

Facebook announces partnership with mobile carriers to offer carrier billing
Today at Mobile World Congress, Facebook announced what could be a potentially game-changing move: it’s created an ecosystem where people can pay for things on their mobile phone bill directly through Facebook, in just three steps.

Facebook set to launch new premium ads and speed up Insights
According to a document leaked to Gigaom, Facebook plans to update its premium ads product by requiring their premium homepage ads to be in page post format.

According to Facebook, page posts significantly outperform other types of ads with 80% more chance of being remembered, a 40% increase in engagement, and a 16% increase in fan rate. These changes are expected to go into effect on Wednesday.

Facebook is also giving Insights, its analytics tool, a revamp. It is expected that they will soon show Page performance data in real-time or near real-time rather than on a 48 hour delay. This is an opportunity to give businesses the understanding necessary to drive higher ROI, which will in turn attract more brands and advertisers to the platform. According to Chad Wittman, EdgeRank Checker’s founder, making real-time Insights data available through the API “will give Page owners an opportunity to see how their Page actually lives and breathes”.

Twitter’s global takeover

Twitter now has over 500 million users just ahead of its sixth birthday. This phenomenal global growth appears to have no plans to cease, with Twopcharts predicting it will hit 600 millions users in around 108 days. On top of this, Twitter has taken yet another step in its international growth by announcing that Google’s Russian rival, Yandex, is their new real-time search partner. Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets” covering all languages. This is an extremely clever move for Twitter in both extending its coverage and utility beyond its home market and English.

LinkedIn launch ‘Follow Company’ button
As of today, LinkedIn have launched an embeddable ‘Follow Company’ button, which companies can add to their sites, to allow anyone to follow their company on LinkedIn. Big news for those who like to stay connected.

Google+ integrates with Google Voice, adds ‘More By’ to search results
Google have announced that Google+ will now be linked to Google Voice by bringing information from your Google+ circles into your Google Voice phone account to make it even easier for you to organise your contacts. This means it will be easier than ever to manage your callers – i.e. ‘Creepers’ go straight to voicemail. It’s another step towards Google bringing Google+ to every Google web app, indicating that Google+ is now the “new mode of usage of Google” that its leaders envisioned – at least from Google’s perspective.

Google have also recently added a new ‘More By’ link to the authorship tag in search results which when clicked, brings up a personalised search results page containing all content by the author. At the top this features information about the author from Google+ and then below lists all the blog content. This is expected to soon be populated by more social content.

Pinterest hype not backed up by the numbers
Looking at the latest research from comScore, Pinterest actually lost users in the UK in January, despite only having 300,000 users to start off with. I’m sorry to burst the bubble, but Pinterest is the ultimate embodiment of the Emperor’s New Clothes – just look at the graph! As for the rest of Europe, it’s barely even registering.

PeerIndex launch reward scheme
PeerIndex – a competitor to Klout – has launched a reward scheme, called PeerPerks, which offers free products and discounts, to those they consider influential. Visitors to PeerPerks.com can choose the offer they’re interested in and then find out if they have the Klout clout to be eligible for it.

NBA All-Star game adds social media offering
Yesterday’s NBA All-Star game saw two separate social activations. First, the annual Slam Dunk contest was opened up to Twitter, with users able to vote for their favourite player – by using their surname and the hashtag #SpriteSlam.

Second, and perhaps more interestingly, they teamed up with Shaker, a virtual nightclub which lives within Facebook. This allowed them to create a site which gave fans a chance to interact, chat, watch exclusive interviews and highlights, and test each other’s NBA knowledge. The by-product of all this is that is has been dubbed the most social NBA All-Star game, ever.

Could ‘Fringe’ be saved by a hashtag?
US TV-show Fringe was threatened with cancelation – because its audience was too, um, fringe. But a clever social media campaign has reached a lot of people, suggesting that it might be saved. It’s worth reading the full story to learn about the viewers’ strategy to save the programe, and how they’ve managed to reach such a huge online audience with their campaign.

Ford crowd-source ideas for mobile innovation
Around this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ford are looking to crowd-source answers to this question: What will communications technology in vehicles help us do in the future? The most interesting responses will be collated into a “customer vision” for mobile-vehicle interactions, and published via social media storytelling tool Storify. Users will need to focus in order to give Ford the fiesta of ideas they’re looking for.

Eurostar launch new social platform, Eurostar Live
Last week saw Eurostar launch their new social platform, Eurostar Live, with a little help from us here at We Are Social. It brings social media commentary by the general public about Eurostar’s destinations to 363 public display screens across London and the South East.

Kelloggs develop Totes Amazeballs cereal after Twitter suggestion
Kellogg’s developed a cereal for The Charlatans front man Tim Burgess after he announced his interest in developing a cereal to his followers on Twitter. They created Totes Amazeballs, after Burgess tweeted that he wanted to create a new super cereal which would be Rocky Road flavoured, using the hashtag #totesamazeballs.

Having seen the tweets, Kelloggs decided to commission the idea in the singer’s honour, with the cereal ultimately containing Kellogg’s Coco Pops Rocks, marshmallows, shortbread pieces and raisins. It remains to be seen whether this was a one-off, or whether Kellogg’s will make this a serial feat.

Absolut London Instagram competition
As part of the launch of their newly-designed bottles, Absolut London are running an Instagram competition to win one of the limited edition bottles.

People like big chocolate bars
Last week Mars announced it was cutting back the size of a whole range of its products, in order to ensure none were more than 250 calories. Judging by the comments on the Snickers Facebook Page, people like big chocolate bars. Picnic.

‘Occupy Obama’
For months, Google+ had been banned in China. When last week saw the firewall mysteriously removed, thousands of Chinese web users flocked to President Obama’s Google+ Page, in a move dubbed Occupy Obama. Yes they can.