The exclusive publishers of the famous Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment, CPP have produced an infographic that illustrates what they believe your favorite social network says about your personality.

Some of the main from the infographic include:

• Of the 16 personality types about 65% reported using Facebook, and on average individuals with a tendency towards extraversion used facebook about 69% while those with a tendency towards introversion on average reported using facebook about 60%.
• When using Facebook, those with a tendency to feel (as opposed to thinking) browsed about 75%, interacted about 49%, and shared information about their personal life about 23% of the time. In contrast those with a tendency to think browsed about 67%, interacted about 40%, and shared information about their personal life about 15% of the time.
• On LinkedIn, those with a tendency toward extraversion (40%), intuition (41%) and thinking (38%) reported using LinkedIn more than introverted (28%), sensing (29%), and/or feeling (30%) individuals.
• On Twitter, individuals with a tendency towards intuition (13%) were much more active than those with a preference for sensing (8%).

Do you agree with the study’s findings? Do you think your favorite social network is a reflection of your personality type and if so how?

Recently, Creators the official YouTube Partners  & Creators Blog announced a makeover to YouTube publishing.  They have implemented over the last few months to show that they are listening to user feedback.

Highlights of the Changes Implemented

• Videos will reliably go live and appear in publishers’ feeds based on published time
• To give you more visibility subscribers and their feeds will be notified when videos at the time that they’re  made public, rather than the original upload time
• Now videos can be private until a specified publishing time
• No more than a few minutes will pass between when the video is published and ready to watch to both the poster and the subscribers
• In the video manager, they have added a feature that shows when your video was published in your local time zone\
• To ensure satisfaction, they’ve set up an email address scheduled-publish-team@google.com so that users are able to express your feedback and YouTube is able to constantly improve

Yelp is a free, online urban city guide used to find a variety of interesting places to eat, drink, shop, relax, etc. It offers familiars and tourists alike a platform to offer up reviews, recommendations or share both good and bad experiences on. It provides a very useful and meaningful social, community platform for people to discuss their opinions.  Yelp officially announced  a website makeover on August 14, 2012 and so there isn’t much feedback on the changes yet, but with a site like Yelp where reviews fuel their site, it’s a safe bet that the reviews (both good and bad) will flood the internet soon.

Since it’s free, run well, and offer’s a good service, it has gained not only popularity but a good reputation over the years.  It’s a very useful site to businesses and customers alike, and has become one of the most popular sites of its kind.

The Yelp team spent a long time designing the new webpage, and the properties of the new design will be unveiled for the next few weeks.  On first glance, it appears more user friendly  but the article“Yelp: Extreme Home(page) MakeOver” clarifies that the changes are more complex:

The new design places a greater emphasis on activity from you and your friends. In addition to long-standing favorites like Review of the Day, Hot New Businesses and Fresh Lists, now you’ll be able to see all sorts of new stuff, including (but not limited to)

photos and Tips left by your friends,

events they are going to,

recent places you’ve checked-in to &

Useful, Funny, Cool votes your reviews have received.

And since this is Yelp, you’ll of course be able to send compliments and give other feedback on your friends’ activity right there.

In a public announcement, they revealed that high usage of cellphones was a big factor in their new website design. Recent years have shown a large increase in both smart phone  and social sites usage. In short, what does that mean in the grand scheme of things?  Yelp might just be the beginning of a business trend…at least those that are listening to demand. What do you think about the changes?

Keynote recently asked 5,388 people 25-50 questions about their mobile habits and preferences, and 3,145 were smart phone users while 1,976 were tablet users.

The study shows that nowadays people are spending a lot of time on their smart phones and tablets, and it’s safe to infer that the number of users and time spent on these devices are only bound to rise! In addition, it also shows how they like to use their smart phone or tablet. The information is going to be very useful to businesses across the world!

The top 3 activities on a smart phone

1.        88% accessing local information
2.        82% Searching for information
3.        76% using social/media networking sites

The top 3 activities on a tablet

1.        Read news
2.        Search for information
3.        Watch videos

Facebook just announced some of its biggest news in a long time! Up until now, Facebook has advertised by using region, language, and brand engagement.

Is the change good or bad?

When Facebook was originally designed, they boasted about minimal ads and so the new change could be have negative interpretations.If advertisers are too accurate with the information and use it too frequently, it could make Facebook come across as being an intruder of privacy. Additionally, by over targeting they could easily end up excluding audiences that don’t include all their information on Facebook or audiences that don’t fit stereotypes.

With that said, location and age will undoubtedly prove useful to local businesses and product makers. Marketers will definitely be able to make their advertisements more detailed to better target their audiences’ preferences. Marketers will be able to make their ads more relevant and will happily enjoy the new feature. However, will facebook users see it as invasion of privacy on a site that is used mostly to connect?

This infographic is based off from 200 billion Facebook Ad impressions managed through Nanigans’Ad Engine in Q1 and Q2 of 2012. Ecommerce industry trends were originally published by eMarketer and Forrester.

The usage of smart phones  and of social media sites such as  blogs, podcasts, YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. is causing a cultural phenomenon that is changing the way all businesses operate. Customers are demanding more social media interaction, because they want to be heard and connect. Social media networks make it possible for hospitals to directly communicate with patients in a personal way that wasn’t possible before.

 If you want to stay current and gain an edge on competitors, then you need a social media strategy! 

(The information is from Hospital Social Network List and the infograph above was designed by PowerDMS and found at Healthcare and Social Media [infographic].)

Why is Social Media Critical for Hospitals?

A recent study by PwC of 1,000 consumers and 124 healthcare executives revealed vital information:

• 57%  of consumers said a hospitals social media connection would strongly influence their decision to receive treatment at a facility
• 41% reported that tools like “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and online forums influence their choice of a specific hospital, medical facility or doctor”
• About 33% use social media to share or seek medical information.

Grow as a company by increasing positive publicityJust a few of the potential uses of social tools currently available to hospitals:

• Make credible information about health, news, and events easily accessible
• Better understand and communicate with customers
• Attract well-suited staff
• Increase customer loyalty and brand recognition,
• Allow customers to create online appointments or have access to useful apps
• Evaluate your own company

There are some basics to social media strategy for hospitals that you should bear in mind because of regulatory policies and legal risks.  For your reputations, it’s crucial that your strategy has cohesive, comprehensive goals that maintain privacy, adhere to legal polices and provide oversight.

To begin, you need to outline strengths and weakness to be highlighted in your media campaign, to compile a list of opportunities and threats, and to fully understand the culture of social media among hospitals. There should be a cohesive form of communication that infiltrates the entire organization so that it’s consistent.

Then you can proactively respond to patients and strengthen your brand recognition and loyalty. The strategy should start small and go slow so that you have time to build on success and learn from mistakes along the way. Lastly to ensure goal attainment, constant improvement, and success of the strategy, metrics should be examined on various media platforms with regularity.

Among hospitals, there are lots of social media success stories that show social media being fully utilized to its potential.

To illustrate social media’s power, there are two anecdotal success stories provided below:

1. With Facebook, At University of California, San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital, they surpassed their $100,000 goal and raised over a million dollars for an 83-bed UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay.
2. With Twitter, at Scott & White Healthcare during the Ft. Hood shooting crisis, an employee tweeted real-time updates about a victims to the large amount of people near and far. Updating Red Cross and reporters, it provided emergency room access and hospital operation status.  As a result, their twitter followers increased by 78% in 3 days; “Scott & White” became a trending topic; and during the crisis even pushed the hospital’s YouTube ranking to one of the most viewed non-profit channels.

A paradigm shift among hospitals is currently taking place, and you must show your customers that you are listening to their demands. We not only understand the intricate needs and culture of social media among hospitals but we also want to help you create and implement a smart, manageable and realistic marketing/business strategy that fits your organization.

Don’t get left in the past, you need to get started on your business’ social media plan now in order to thrive!

Here is ONE simple questions about social media:

What’s the 1st thing you think of when you hear the term ‘social media’?

A brief survey conducted by AYTM, a leading marketing research company, posing two questions to 500 Internet users on their use of social media in 2012 as compared to 2010, and also to gauge their thoughts on the future of social media.

Do you agree with the infographic?

McAfee and Intel will make it a little safer to share you photos on Facebook by launching the McAfee Social Protection .

According to Mashable, with the Social Protection plug-in, Facebook users can select which friends have access to their photos and make the pictures appear blurry to everyone else. No one will be able to download, take a screen capture, or otherwise use the photos without permission, even people on the “approved” list.

The plug in also lets you know when someone uploads a picture you are in so it will keep people from making fake accounts with your identity.

The plug-in will work with  Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome on PCs when it launches; Mac, iOS and Android versions will be available by the end of the year.

How is this any different than setting you privacy to share your pictures with friends and family ONLY??……unless you have friended a lot of inappropriate people and that is a bad judgement to begin with

If you ever wondered what image sizes to use to showcase your brand on social networking sites, well…..think no more as Original Ginger put together this infographic showing the images sizes on major social media platforms: 

YouTube has finally made the change to their home page feed based on the feedback from people, here is the summary of they wrote in their official blog:

1) Bigger video thumbnails with more information about uploader activity

2) More control over what you see in your feed - To bring up this menu, simply hover over an item in the feed and click the arrow that appears in the upper right of the item.  You can then choose to hide the item you have selected, opt to only show uploads from that user, or unsubscribe from that user, all directly in your feed.

3) A differentiated view of videos you’ve already watched - Videos that you’ve already watched are clearly marked in the feed, so you can better decide what to watch next.

4) A Note about Highlights View

The Highlights view, which is currently the default view of activity on the homepage feed, can help to increase overall video viewership. If you want to see each and every item from all channels, you can always select the Everything view.