Twitter vs Facebook. Which is the best for a social media campaign, for a brand, for personal branding? This is a recurrent question. Since 6 months the answer was: both. But managing a good-quality action both on Twitter and Facebook is expensive and time consuming. So companies starts looking at benefits of each campaing, in order to decide which has to be cut off and which has to be mantained. And until now traffic and conversation generated throught Facebook is definitely higher than Twitter. The scenario is: companies try both Twitter and Facebook. After some month understand that the benefits of Facebook are 10-30-50 times higher than that of Twitter, and drop Twitter.

This because Twitter since 1 year seems like a stone. With the last graphical upgrade it focused on media consumption and news fruition. But a new group of startup, captained by Flipboard, offers a better solution. And so the “new Twitter” directly becaome old. And remains old for too many months. Months in which Facebook relased a lot of novelties (Facebook Questions, Facebook Deals, new Pages, etc). Facebook focused on improving conversation quality. This startegical decision lead to a growth of contents shared on Facebook. He wins.

Twitter kept still. Since one week he didn’t notify you when someone retweeted your contents or mentioned you. Hard to belive, but this is the fact. The graphic of a conversation among a tweet is bad. Far away from the real-time. But why Twitter made this error? Because he remains too tied to his first concept: a stream of tweets. Stop, nothing more. It was good, great, it sounded good…when we where in the age of the birth of Web 2.0! Now users need something different, and Twitter is not able to understand this.

Another big big deficit of Twitter? He is too less cross-platform. Look at Facebook OpenGraph. It is full of bugs, that’s true, but it is quietly fantastic. Look at Facebook Comments: fantastic too. Where is Twitter? What is able to offer Twitter to your website? A fucked button of Tweet This with the number of “re-tweets” recieved by your content. Is it enought for a website or a company which want to embrace social media? Another had to believe thing: three weeks ago Twitter rolled out a new Follow button, which could be embedded on website: in this way who is on the website could start following the Twitter account of the website! It is fantastic no? Wow! We are in 2011. This is not fantastic. This is obvious. This is not enough.

Day by day Twitter is less social. Interact with others is not improved, integrate Twitter out of Twitter is not possible. Month after month Twitter is less and less social.

Now Twitter is a trend created by web and journalism. A lot of tv-shows talk about Twitter, a lot of VIP uses it. It is a trend. But if it will not be able to demonstrate to companies that it is really useful, it will be forgotten, like pink t-shirts.

Twitter needs a revolution. A radical revolution.

Mi piace tenere informato chi mi segue su quello che faccio e sulle collaborazioni in corso (anche perchè in questo modo ho l’alibi per la mia bassa frequenza di posting sul blog). Da qualche settimane ho iniziato una nuova collaborazione con Banzai, come Social Media Consultant.

L’obiettivo di questi primi mesi è stabilizzare e rafforzare la presenza su Facebook di Liquida e Studenti.it. Staremo a vedere! Nel frattempo se vuoi dirmi la tua, queste sono le due pagine principali: Liquida Page e Studenti.it Page.

The Panda Update will land also in Italy, affecting the Google Search Results and changing their hierarchy. What is Panda Update? Is a change in the Google algorithm. What kind of change? Google promises that it will give us more quality search results, chasing off websites of lower quality. And what are the websites considered by Google “lower wuality websites“?  The content farms and the news aggregators (Digg, TechNotizie, etc).

The result? A lot of websites which until yesterday have million of pageviews have seen their traffic cut off. You can say me: “This is good, because this kind of websites are evil!”. Yeah..or not?

The fact is that the new Algorithm works automatically, trying to find out if a website is or not a “lower quality website”. The result? A lot of quality websites, which provide good information aggregating contents from external sources, have been penalized. Some exemple? Liquida, MasterNewMedia, eHow, etc. They are not lower quality website. But yes, they use to aggregate other’s content in order to create value. This is not bad! But they have seen their traffic cut off.

So they start looking to others traffic sources, like: Facebook. The Google’s contending. They start investing on Social Media Marketing, on social media strategies, etc. They are trying to get back the traffic they have lost from Google, using Google alternatives.

And so, my conclusion: I think that these website will discover a new powerful referral, which in past years they have not explored. And this scenario will invest Facebook and scale down Google power. So, despite the Panda Update has been done to offer better results and quality, it can bring Google in the chasm.

Today I’ve discovered Gigwalks, a startup which strikes my attention. Why? Simply: it’s brilliant.

The basic idea is that of crowdsourcing, mixed with the technology of geolocalization. The result? A smartphone application that proposes you some tasks you can complete in the location you are. What kind of tasks? Very simple and quick, that you can complete directly using your smartphone. Every task has his own fee, and completing it you start earning.

Obvusly we are not talking about huge earnings, but task after task you can raise interesting amounts.

On the other side companies and brand can take advantage of improvised – local – workforce.

If you own or manage a Facebook Page for a brand, I suggest you to pay attention to the SEO aspect of this page. Google just starts paying attention to the positioning of Facebook Pages, so this became a task you have to take care.

Fortunately on Facebook Pages the SEO optimization is more simple than on a webpage, because there are definitery less aspect to consider and where you can act.

What are the tricks you have to pay attention? If you move to the Info page of you Facebook Page you will see some textboxes that you can fill with informations about the brand of your Page. It’s really really important that you fill these information paying attention to the keywords density. My advice is to fill these textboxes with sentences which contains keywords you want to appear in Google. remember that Google – in terms of positioning – consider more keywords which are contained in the first 3-4 words of your sentence. So, try to include your powerful-keyword at first in your sentence.

Last but not the least is the Vanity URL of your Page. If your Page has more than 25 Fans, you can ask Facebook to give to your Page a human-friendly URL. For example on Jack we have set this URL: www.facebook.com/jacktech.it. This is really important to do.