In May’s webinar, we learned that women are more “social” online, but now, in June we learned that even if women are more active on social networks, it’s men that are more influential and more influenced. A Business Week study showed that when women recommended something on Facebook, men were one and half times more likely to bite the bait than fellow women. The study also found that in general, men are 49 percent more influential than women.
Hmmm…
What else did we learn? Well, here is Miriam’s 40-minute monthly web trends lecture from June.
And below are some of the main points from the lecture. Please let us know what you’d like to hear about in future lectures. On July 31th, Miriam will be talking about the most important steps you need to take to make your WordPress site social-friendly. Or, shall we say, sociable.
Expanded tweets: Now in your mobile app you’ll be able to see rich media like photos and videos as part of a tweet.
@replies for verified Twitter accounts: Twitter now gives celebs a way to verify their account because of all the fake celeb accounts out thee. 1-2 years ago Twitter made it so that you cannot see @reply tweets to people you aren’t following. But now you can see them for verified accounts. You know it’s a verified account because it has a blue check next to the name.
Twitter Cards: It’s like Open Graph from Facebook where you can control how the title, image and other elements of your content appear in Twitter. This includes giving attribution to the correct Twitter account. That means that no matter how many times a page is shared from your site, your Twitter account will always be attached to it.
You add it similarly to Open Graph, in the header code of your site. (More info at 5:15 including how to add it to a WordPress site.)
YouTube
No more downloading MP3s from YouTube: There are many third party services that allow you to download MP3s or MP4s from YouTube. MP3 download sites are popular because people like to download just the songs, without the videos. This goes against YouTube’s terms and services and it is a copyright violation since many people upload copyrighted content to YouTube. YouTube has blocked the major offenders from the site.
How to turn off facial recognition: For a while now on Facebook, after you upload pictures, the systems tries to recognize the same face in different pictures. Now, since Facebook acquired an Israeli (woohoo!) company, face.com, facial recognition is being taken to another level. However, if you want to minimize the big-brotherness of Facebook by a notch, and don’t want Facebook telling your friends to possibly tag your face in more photos, do the following:
Go to: the small down arrow in the top right hand corner of the screen > Privacy settings > Time and Tagging > Edit Settings. Click on “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are upload,” and then in the dropdown change the option from “Friends” to “No One.”
This service is opt-out, not opt-in. In other words, you’re automatically allowing the facial recognition unless you choose otherwise.
Facebook email address: They changed our default email address to our Facebook emails.
Also an opt-out service. How to change it:
Your profile > About > Click “Edit” on Contact Info area. Change the settings next to the email addresses:
There are two settings for each email address. In the left column you decide if your email will be viewable by no one, friends, everyone or custom. In the right column you decide if the email will show on your timeline. Of course you should hide your Facebook address if you have no use for it.
Facebook and diplomacy: Check out an innovative use of Facebook for diplomacy by the American ambassador to Syria at 13:48.
Export Facebook events: You can now export Facebook events to your email or your calendar! Learn how at 14:30.
More attribution tagged to pins: Last month Pinterest added attribution from other sites. For example, if something is shared from YouTube, stuck to the pin is attribution to YouTube and the page it came from. Very important for giving proper credit.
Now it’s been added for more sites. This attribution will also be added retroactively which is really cool.
Targeted Status Updates has been rolled out to everyone: You can post an update to a specific demographic so that your post can be specialized for those viewers while not worrying about wasting other people’s time.
A new followers insights page: Just like in Facebook. It includes stats about your visitors, engagement, etc.
WordPress launched 3.4 (and 3.4.1)
Lots of new things to talk about here!
Easily embed tweets: Take the URL of the tweet and paste it in the editor. Unlink it and then in the front end it will show a live tweet with retweet, favorite icon and everything.
Add links in photo captions: You can now create a link in a photo caption and link it anywhere you want. Now if only WordPress would make custom links from a photo in a gallery…
New theme customizer: You can make changes to your site and see the changes you’re making as a live preview. Make the changes, see what it looks like and then once you publish the changes, they will actually be live.
In RTL installations, a LTR button. Writing in English on a Hebrew or Arabic WordPress site just got a lot easier. Read more about it here.
And way more! This is an outline of the first half of the lecture. To hear more about SEO in WordPress and other topics, continue watching from 24:00.
