Five For Friday: Tweets Within Tweets, Foursquare Gets A Facelift, And More!
August 8th, 2014 by
1. Personal Preferences Killed The Check-In
-Mashable
Once upon a time, Foursquare made “checking in” at a location cool. But as of its latest update on Wednesday (8/6), the app has completely removed that feature. Now, those who want to broadcast their location to their social media spheres can do so with Swarm, Foursquare’s spin-off app that debuted in May.
So what does that mean for Foursquare 8.0? Well, the app has a completely remodeled user experience: new colors, new logo, new layout, and new functions. Once you login, the app asks about your preferences (Are you into Pho? What about Chai Lattes?), then uses those preferences to provide recommendations just for you about places nearby. The app also provides filters to help you narrow down your findings. By using these filters and profiling users’ tastes, Foursquare has successfully become a more personalized version of databases like Yelp, and could potentially change the way people explore their cities. Pretty epic.
2. Get Your Google Reviews On Your WordPress Blog
-Blumenthals
For those with WordPress blogs and websites, there is now a plugin that allows you to share your Google reviews on your page! Google Places Review lets WordPress sites embed Google reviews in two ways: The free, basic version provides a widget in the sidebar showing up to 3 of your most recent Google reviews. The pro version, which is available for $20, provides up to 5 reviews on any page using short codes. The pro version also allows you to filter by star ratings, offers optimized widget caching, and includes a customizable feature for collapsing and expanding reviews. Presumably, posting your reviews on your site can help boost consumer confidence, while providing easy exposure to your good reviews. A recent study by Dimensional Research found that 90% of consumers are influenced by positive online reviews, so get out there and show the interwebs how great you are!
3. #Tweetception
-MediaBistro
For those who feel that retweeting simply isn’t enough, there was an interesting update from Twitter this past week: you can now embed a tweet within another tweet! All you have to do is copy and paste the URL of the tweet you want to embed, and then Twitter takes the wheel. The embedded tweet acts as a link that takes you through to the full version of that tweet (you can see my own #tweetception example below). The best part of this feature is that embedded tweets only use up the same amount of characters as any other shortened link, so you have roughly 115 free characters still left at your disposal.
If you want to get really fancy, the tweet-ception can go even further: you can embed a tweet that includes an embedded tweet into a brand new tweet (!) – and they all link together in a chain. For now, this feature only functions on twitter.com and the official Twitter iOS and Android apps.
4. Facebook Goes Down, So Does News Site Traffic
-Marketing Land
Last Friday (8/1), there was a brief Facebook outage that led to some interesting information. Chartbeat, a service that produces analytics for web publishers in real-time, announced that the overall traffic on news sites fell 3% during the downtime, which was ultimately less than an hour. What’s even more interesting is that the entrances to news sites via mobile devices dropped 8.5% during the outage, further proving just how important Facebook is to driving mobile traffic to online publishers. Another interesting factoid provided by Chartbeat shows there was also a “9% increase in homepage direct traffic,” meaning people look at homepages more when they don’t have Facebook to tell them what they should be reading. While all this information may seem fairly expected, it highlights just how powerful Facebook is as a news source.
5. You Can Now Delete Google Analytics Properties
-SEO Round Table
This week (8/5), Google made a quiet announcement on its Google+ Page stating that you can now delete Google Analytics properties within your various accounts. In the announcement, Google explains that this was not previously allowed due to how the accounts, properties, and profiles were all associated with one another. According to Google, they are “excited to bring this additional flexibility and consistency to our users, which is the first in a series of improvements to managing deletions in Google Analytics.” If you want to delete a property, all you have to do is go to the property settings within admin view, then click “Delete Property” at the bottom right of the page.
