The Social Media Channel |
- Facebook flaw allegedly prevents you from revoking app permissions on mobile
- Social video success for brands on Vine and Instagram: Your 6-to-15 seconds of fame
- Twitter passes 241m monthly active users, 184m mobile users, and sees 75% of advertising revenue from mobile
- The 4 keys for social success: How does your product measure up?
| Facebook flaw allegedly prevents you from revoking app permissions on mobile Posted: 06 Feb 2014 01:21 PM PST  A new Facebook flaw reportedly allows a hacker to stop mobile users from being able to disconnect a mobile app connected to the social network. In other words, once you give a mobile app permission to access your information on Facebook, it is allegedly impossible for you to revoke those rights on your mobile device. If you try via Facebook's own app or the mobile website, you'll be presented with one of two rather generic errors: The issue was discovered by MyPermissions, a startup that helps you track which connected apps have access to your personal information on social networks and Web-based services. At first, MyPermissions co-founder and CEO Olivier Amar uncovered more than 15 apps that could not be disconnected or removed from Facebook mobile, but after digging deeper, he realized anyone could replicate run a script to replicate the problem. The first question we asked Amar was whether an affected user could still remove the app on Facebook.com by going to Your Apps like so: "Yes, there's no question about it," Amar said. It's possible the vulnerability exists on the desktop as well, but if it does, it's only limited to desktop apps. "We didn't test if we could exploit the vulnerability on desktop," Amar told TNW. MyPermissions offers the following example of a scenario where this could be exploited:
Amar told us that MyPermissions stumbled on the vulnerability while stress testing a new version of its own app. He explained that anyone could exploit this particular flaw as it is relatively easy to do so. "If the mobile app uses Facebook Connect, we were able to disable it," Amar told TNW. "Doesn't matter who wrote it. When we were testing, we could literally take down 250 apps at a time." So there are two problems here. Firstly, a hacker could create multiple malicious apps, convince users to install them and connect their Facebook account, after which they could then disable the permissions page. The second is that a hacker could target existing apps and make them impossible to remove. In either case though, users can still go to Facebook.com and revoke the permissions that way. MyPermissions says this morning it reached out to Facebook, which is "taking care of this promptly." Facebook told the startup to submit the flaw via its White Hat program, which Amar told us MyPermissions has already done. We have also contacted Facebook for more information but the company declined to comment as the issue is currently under investigation. Facebook dill tell us, however, that it hasn't been able to reproduce the behavior yet and is in contact with MyPermissions to investigate the claims. We will update this article based on the company's findings. Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Social video success for brands on Vine and Instagram: Your 6-to-15 seconds of fame Posted: 06 Feb 2014 08:39 AM PST  Time is almost always a vital limiting factor in engaging with customers, but Vine and Instagram each impose a strict maximum (six and 15 seconds, respectively). This may seem like a short amount of time, but consider instead how long it takes someone to scroll past a tweet or an individual photo on Instagram. Comparatively, video content gives you at least 10 times more eyeball time (also, Vines garner nearly four times the screen space of a typical tweet in a Twitter feed). Shouldn't your brand capitalize on that opportunity? To do so, it's important to understand how to construct an engaging video and how to measure the success of a post or campaign. Engagement: Techniques and StrategiesTool: Pitch'd Time constraints can create pressure to cram as much content as possible into a finite space. Resist this urge. Instead, tell a story that suits the medium, embracing it's structures and limitations. The Tribeca Film Festival took this to heart in 2013, creating a #6secfilm hashtag competition where contestants submitted their videos directly through Vine. To stimulate storytelling, each submission needed a beginning, middle and end to qualify for the contest. Specific yet non-prescriptive guidelines unleashed film enthusiasts' creativity, and thousands of submissions poured in. If that sounds overwhelming, a tool like Pitch'd facilitates easy creation and management of such competitions. The contest mentioned above was so successful that TFF has already confirmed a 2014 version of the event. See one of the winning submissions from 2013 below: Instagram video, Vine's slightly lengthier competitor in the social video space (up to 15 seconds of recording time), is perfect for sharing clips with multiple cuts or scenes. The slightly extended running time allows for a less frenetic pace, reducing chances of viewers' queasiness from watching your video. Add continuity throughout scenes by keeping either the foreground or background of a shot consistent, even while the other changes. The athletic wear and lifestyle brand Adidas features several stellar examples on its Instagram account (and more on the @adidaswomen feed), showcasing carefree, stop-motion product demos on a neutral background. Activewear competitor Lululemon does the opposite, following a woman doing a single yoga progression through various locations and climates. Either way, a single visual theme keeps social videos focused and on-message. Aside from learning to produce content for particular time constraints, be sure to experiment with the quirks of each platform. Vine plays each six-second clip as an infinite loop, and the corresponding #loop hashtag is a recurring trend. Clips that take advantage of looping are satisfying to view – and they encourage watching beyond the typical six seconds. Vine and Instagram video are the two Internet-age platforms that lend themselves to marketing most analogous to traditional television spots. While the above techniques play off the particularities of each platform, a single-shot clip or dramatic scene plays well on social video. In other words: brands can post ads as content. But the onus on relevant, interesting content is even higher. Remember, viewers are inviting brands into their feeds – not merely enduring momentary interruptions between their chosen show. Whether a brand pays for ad promotion on these platforms or not, quality content is the only way to secure a 'follow' and ensure a customer sees every new post. Social video must be clear, creative and visually arresting to capitalize on the opportunity for viewers to share and promote your brand. Metrics & Analytics: Is the brand succeeding? How do you know?Tools: Hashtracking, Simply Measured Mention 'sharing' in the context of any social network, and a discussion of goals, metrics and analytics is never too far behind. How is success measured in social video? This is the main divergence point for Vine and Instagram. Vine, purchased by Twitter even before its app went public, includes a 'ReVine" function for viewers to easily re-share a Vine with their followers. If you're already comfortable analyzing account performance on Twitter, the close integration of Vine and Twitter makes analysis of Vine performance second nature. For example, use a free service like Hashtracking to measure the success of your Vine hashtags or contests on Twitter. Look for replies, shares and favorites of a post to track engagement with your video content. Instagram is a bit different. While there are #regrams and re-gramming apps, they're generally clunky and not widely used. Hyperlinks and click-throughs are also absent, so on-platform engagement is simplified to four categories: comments, likes, hashtags and @name tagging. An Instagram video is unlikely to send people to a specific corner of your website – nobody will take the time to type an intricate URL into their browser bar – but you can engage people directly on the platform, and your goals should center on the aforementioned four items. Also look at the performance of videos compared to photos on the platform. On both Vine and Instagram, brands often reference themselves as a hashtag instead of an "@" link to their profile. Fashion labels were among the first to employ this technique. Instead of their brand conversation centering on a single profile, pushing out advertising, hashtagging opens up the discussion to include user-generated content. Now, any customer can tout their most recent purchase right alongside the latest fashion week videos for #Burberry. For Vine and Instagram alike, this is the gold-standard for engagement. A trending video obviously benefits a brand. But a brand's trending hashtag essentially gathers and promotes testimonials and independently-created advertisements. Hashtags and related contests fully exploit the social aspects of Vine and Instagram. Befitting this reality, social media analytics platforms can also track the performance of hashtags meaningful to a particular brand or industry. Whether you're using Vine, Instagram video, or both, weigh the performance of your social videos against other branded social content to discern what your customers interact with the most. If you're using both, try a service like Simply Measured with tools to track and compare success on Vine and Instagram. Focus on where creativity and message are rewarded with engagement, as you would with anything your brand publishes. Then, replicate the lessons you learn across your social accounts. That's what it takes to turn microseconds of social media into long-term brand loyalty.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 05 Feb 2014 01:07 PM PST  While sharing its financial results for its fourth quarter, Twitter today announced a number of new milestones that showed the service's user growth has slowed while its mobile advertising share has grown. The social network has now passed 241 million monthly active users, 184 million of which were monthly active mobile users as well. The company also revealed that it generated $242.7 million in revenues, $220 million of which came from advertising. Of the latter, a whopping three-quarters came from mobile. Here are the numbers as they appeared in the release:
When Twitter's IPO filing was made made public in October, the company revealed it had 215 million monthly active users, 100 million daily active users, and was seeing 500 million tweets per day. Those were round numbers, and the company only offered an exact figure for the first metric: 218.3 million average monthly active users in the three months ended June 30, 2013. During the same time period, Twitter found 75 percent of that number accessed the service from a mobile device (phone or tablet), or about 163.5 million monthly active mobile users. According to the numbers released today, that percentage is now at 76.3. As you can see in the chart above, user growth is slowing, as is the growth for the percentage of mobile users. Twitter also said at the time that over 65 percent of the company's advertising revenue was generated from mobile devices, and that it expected that proportion to grow "in the near term." Indeed it has: 75 percent is nothing to balk at. Like Facebook, Twitter has shown it can make money from mobile, even though its user growth has started to slow. The difference is that Facebook makes a lot more money, and the fraction of its users going mobile continues to grow. This was a decent quarter for Twitter, but there's still a long road ahead as a public company. Investors want to see long-term potential, and if the social network doesn't figure out a way to stop the slowing of its user growth, it will have a very hard time. Top Image Credit: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The 4 keys for social success: How does your product measure up? Posted: 05 Feb 2014 12:47 PM PST  Evan Reas is the CEO and founder of Circle, helping people find the best local information and news available anywhere, anytime. Last Christmas, I visited my parents in Wisconsin and gave my dad his first smartphone – a brand new iPhone 5. But, of course, he never got beyond the dial keypad, using the supercomputer in his pocket only to call me and my mother. (He did recently discover texting, but uses it more like snail mail, checking it no more than once a day.) Aside from learning to never buy my dad a phone again, I thought of current social networks adapting to mobile. Like my dad, many simply transfer the original version (or habits) over to the new device, without capitalizing on the powerful capabilities coiled up inside the biggest technological innovation of our generation. It is no secret that mobile is the future for social. Over 73 percent of Facebook users primarily access it through mobile, and mobile now accounts for more than half of its ad revenue – and we have only just begun to tap into this potential. Today, more Americans adults have smartphones than those who do not. Desktop-chained social networks will become the landline phones of the next decade. Beyond just developing a mobile compatible version of a social network, however, successful future networks must meet consumer-generated criteria in order to stay competitive and maintain relevancy. In 2014, local, instant, visual and everywhere will emerge as the four critical elements that will drive usage, engagement and success (or failure) for every social network. Emerging companies must integrate these trends in order to break through the noise, and existing networks must adopt in order to stay pertinent. Social networks must be LIVE: Local, Instant, Visual and Everywhere. 1. LocalMark Zuckerberg once said, "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." People desire to know what is happening around them now, wherever they are, and smartphones finally give them that superpower. While some major apps have begun to integrate targeted location-based capabilities such as locating nearby friends or local updates, most have yet to do it successfully and sustain momentum. 2. InstantAccess to current and timely information is crucial to keep the community engaged, informed and entertained. The most compelling change brought by smartphones is that it is effectively putting a powerful computer into our pockets, creating the perfect medium to retrieve information in real-time at any given moment. A live stream of updates as seen in Twitter or Instagram demonstrates the latest expectation from consumers. Just as important is that we don't even have to remember to re-open our "pocket computers" at a given moment because push notifications are like a doorbell in our pocket, reminding us whenever there's something we should pay attention to. 3. VisualPictures are worth one thousand words, says a popular Chinese proverb. Social networks, in their simplest forms, are just communication mechanisms between groups of people. Pictures are the highest value form of communication and thus social networks need to take advantage of the fact that smartphones give users 24/7 access to a camera (Barker and Manji, 1989). Snapchat quickly rose to fame with its photo-only interface and the recently-launched Jelly has followed suit. While both may provide a demanded service, viability will depend on successful integration of more factors than simply focusing on photo sharing. 4. EverywhereToo often, people get stuck in the Silicon Valley bubble and create products that are great for a tech-savvy San Francisco resident, but totally irrelevant for somebody from the Midwest (this too, a lesson learned from my father, proudly born and raised in Middleton, WI). To be big, it has to appeal to and be accessible to people everywhere. Four-billion-dollar company Pinterest is one of the best recent examples of a startup that quickly proved mainstream popularity, by focusing and growing in Iowa first. Facebook is another obvious example of this, as users all over the world have a shared desire to connect to and keep in touch with one another. So how do today's social networks stack up in these four focus areas? Here is a look at how Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram rate (on a scale of 1-10, 10 being excellent) against these criteria:
These popular social networks, and others, will be overtaken by new ones if they do not adopt critical, mobile-unique elements. A text-heavy network should be worried about being overtaken by one that is mostly images. A network that ignores location and GPS technology should worry about losing to one that shows relevant location data. A balance among all four features exists and ultimately, this balance of local, instant, visual and everywhere will be the key to the rise of the next big social networks. Well? How does your product measure up against the giants?  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Next Web » Social Media To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
