With more than two billion video views each day, not only is YouTube the second-largest search engine, but viewership continues to rise and millions of videos are favorited on a daily basis. With numbers like that, it is no surprise that the demand for live-streamed videos has increased, as people turn to YouTube for more and more of their entertainment and news needs. YouTube has previously hosted select live events, such as concerts, sporting events and speeches from President Obama, and the company recently announced that through YouTube Live, it will “integrate live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform for the first time.” 

 

So what does this mean for companies who are already using YouTube to connect with key audiences? With more live streaming options, companies can now give fans a chance to experience an event or announcement in real time and can share the information with an even broader group of attentive viewers. Consider using YouTube Live to share an executive speech taking place at an important industry tradeshow, the first demonstration of a new product, an interview with a key customer, or provide a first look at a new technology. Live video can be incorporated into any existing video communications plan and gives viewers a new reason to tune into a company’s online channel, especially if the information is being shared for the first time. 

 

According to data from Nielsen, the average user spent over an hour and fifteen minutes on YouTube last month, which means there are plenty of opportunities for a viewer to find out about and watch live streaming content. YouTube Live makes it easy for viewers to find upcoming broadcasts through the “Live” tab at the top of every page. Here, users can see events that are currently being broadcasted, as well as upcoming broadcasts and which events have been the most popular. 

 

By embracing live streaming, YouTube is establishing itself as an even bigger player in the entertainment and news space, and with such a wide audience, it has the potential to face network and cable television head-on. The competition between online broadcasting and traditional television will likely benefit marketers and consumers, as both will have increasingly more options to share and view content. 

 

Look for more information about the evolution of live video feeds and how to incorporate live video into an existing communications plans in next week’s SMS!

 

Social media platforms at their outset allowed us to share information on what’s happening in our daily lives with friends and family. In the past few years, we’ve seen these channels gain credibility as we’ve been granted access to breaking news (Twitter), opinions (blogs) and visual content (YouTube, flickr, Twitpic, etc.) through them. 

As we’ve seen in coverage on The New York Times, the media do not hesitate anymore to integrate social media elements into their stories, but social media by itself offers so much more potential for storytelling by its immediacy and its unfiltered authenticity.

 

Storify gives users the opportunity to leverage the storytelling potential of the social Web – it’s a creative way of social bookmarking with full stories, rather than just links. To create a story, indicate a few keywords and topics of interest, select the source of information (Twitter, blogs, news, videos, Wikipedia) and build your story by selecting the most relevant messages based on your interest. For example, we created a story about the rise and fall of the Huffington Post. Consider running a search the next time your brand makes an announcement as a unique way of reporting the day’s events. 

 

Part of the appeal of Storify is that users have the ability to update a story on-the-go as events unfold. Users can also reply to tweets that have been selected to appear in the story interface, making it easy to connect with people and participate in related conversations. 

 

Other tools are getting in on the storytelling trend, such as:

It’s not only about curation anymore (a big buzzword at the moment), but also about selecting information and sharing a story around your browsing.

 

Twitter analytic tools are a dime a dozen these days – many simply spit out numbers without providing any context for how those numbers can be used or interpreted. However Crowdbooster, a startup from three Stanford graduates, is breaking the mold with its actionable insights and user-friendly data design.

 

Crowdbooster is the latest in social media marketing measurement dashboards and helps users identify what content is resonating and when. More than just providing numbers to users, Crowdbooster performs analysis and data mining to come up with insights that explain the best time to post content and how far the messages reached. What results is a color-coded graph that explains, “How are my tweets doing?”

 

The various dots provide more details: the higher up on the y-axis, the more impressions the tweet received; the farther right on the x-axis, the more retweets a tweet received; the larger the circle, the more replies. Hovering over a particular dot provides additional insights to the reach of a specific tweet:

 

Once a Twitter account has been in the Crowdbooster system long enough for it to measure a user’s patterns, the dashboard provides insights on the best time to schedule tweets:

 

On Fridays, Crowdbooster also recommends other users who might be worth a Follow Friday (#FF) mention for being your top retweeters and “mentioners” for the week:

 

Crowdbooster offers users the opportunity to link up to three accounts for free (paid users can link up to 10) and also offers a subscription to a weekly digest of activity, which recaps each account’s updates for the week: the change in followers, number of retweets, number of @ mentions and best tweet that week by impressions.

 

With any analytics tool, however, there are a few things that should be taken with a grain of salt. Crowdbooster provides a list of a user’s “most influential” followers, who are, in theory, the users who could have the biggest impact on overall visibility. However in taking a look at my most influential followers, Barack Obama is at the top of the list:

 

True, of all of my followers, Obama has the highest follower count – but the likelihood of him actually seeing my tweet and responding or retweeting? Slim to none.

 

The other issue to note is how Crowdbooster calculates a particular tweet’s reach – by taking the number of a user’s followers and adding it to the followers of the users who retweet or respond. A simple calculation, but likely not accurate because every follower is not reading every tweet that crosses his or her tweetstream. In any case, the stats are still useful for seeing how many retweets and replies a tweet received, which can allow users to make assumptions about how far a message reached relative to others posted. 

 

Crowdbooster continues to improve its service and has plans to roll out a full reporting suite as well as a Facebook analytics dashboard. For now, the site is in beta and available to users by invitation-only (request an invitation here).