We’ll start this week’s post with some very big news: Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The question is: Why? Well, Skype is an innovative service that has seen exponential growth since its launch. The company rules the roost in online video calling—when your brand name becomes the word people use to describe your service, you know you’re on to something (many people say they’re going to “Skype” when they mean they’re going to video chat). So it seems [...]

Last week, Facebook launched the new “Send” button, which will replace the “Send an email to a friend” button. It looks fairly similar to the “Like” button. If you click on it, a pop-up will appear and you will be able to send the article or page to friends, groups or any email address you like. One improvement is that you can now add a personal message. It’s actually pretty similar to a “recommend button.” Read more on Mashable.
Social responsibility [...]

Let’s start with Twitter this week instead of my usual (Facebook).
During the last few weeks there were some management changes at the top of the micro-blogging service (which is now worth more than $5 billion, by the way). And I recently found different stories about how it was started. For one version, Business Insider’s article called “The real history of Twitter” is a very interesting read.
How do I get people to watch my video and to talk about it? I [...]

Let’s start this week’s blog post with “happy” news—at least for the Germans (like me). According to a study, Germany is the happiest country on Twitter. Alex Davies, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, analyzed the tweets of 25 countries (countries where there was enough tweeting to make the rating possible). The parameter to determine the levels of happiness was the high-level correlations between words and emoticons like or . By the way, the saddest [...]

Let’s call this Week in Social Media the “Visual Week.” I found quite a few interesting and funny infographics and videos, all of course concerning our favorite topic: social media.
What would Facebook look like, if it was a city? Actually, it would be humongous, with its 600,000,000 inhabitants (20 times bigger than the most populous existing city). Have a look at this infographic on getsatisfaction.
LinkedIn has recently surpassed the 100 million user mark—and to that, we say congratulations! Mashable marked [...]

Hello and welcome again to another Week in Social Media
Let me surprise you: I won’t start this week’s blog post with Facebook but with something I often end with: an infographic. Check out “Social Media: Facts & Figures for B2B” on Pete’s Blog.
And to shake it up even more, I want to share an interesting blog post I recently found as inspiration over the last weeks, when we’ve had quite a few brainstorms. Sometimes it proves to be pretty hard [...]

Welcome again to another Week in Social Media.
What’s new with Facebook? Actually—quite a lot. To find out more you should download the new eBook about Facebook marketing on Hubspot. It contains all you need to know about the benefits of customized tabs, geo-targeting and location on Facebook, contests on Facebook…and who it is doing it right.
And it seems as if there are quite a few brands that are doing “the right thing.” Have a look at the 10 best Facebook [...]

Here we go with another Week in Social Media.
Facebook has conquered the world, right? I mean, it is almost as big as Google. But judging by this post on Pingdom, there are quite few places in the world where the largest social network still isn’t really visible.
But if you look at the countries, especially the Western ones, you can see that Facebook outreaches Twitter, for example, by far. According to Mashable, 50 percent of Americans use Facebook, but only 7 [...]

Hello, and welcome again to another Week in Social Media.
Facebook—my beloved social network and, as always, the first topic of this blog post. But this time it is not about the platform itself but the users. With almost 600 million of them globally, there is a lot to learn about the demographics. Have look at this SlideShare by Amodiovalerio Verde.
What would the Class of 2011 look like, if social media were a high school? Interesting question, right? What about [...]

Hello again, and happy seventh birthday, Facebook! What has happened during the last seven years? Tech18 explains it in seven interesting points.
That’s all about Facebook this time. But that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been other interesting social media topics during the last week.
Apple and News Corp., for example, finally launched the Daily iPad newspaper. “New times require new journalism. Our challenge was to take the best of conventional journalism…and combine it with the best of new technology,” Rupert Murdoch [...]