Social Media Icons & Their Functionalities

Presented by –Kaushik Pal

Social Media Icons … what are they?

Few of the popular ones:

Social Media Icons … why?

• Allows easy access to bookmark content appreciated by the reader.

• Share content over Social Media platform.

• Important component for quick navigation and reference.

• Icons catch attention and are easy to use.

• Webmaster’s toys.

• Use of these icons helps in SMO.

Twitter

• Founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in 2006.

• A social networking and micro blogging site.

• Users can post updates within 140-characters through web form or instant message.

• Links posted within the updates help as great reference tools and pushes traffic through Google Real-time results.

• Twitter now has over 145 million users and over 300,000 Apps developed through its APIs.

Facebook

• Facebook is world’s largest social networking site.

• Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students.

• In Jul’10 it crossed the 500 million mark of registered users.

• Allows sharing of updates, audio, video, photos of members.

• Facebook Fan page exhaustively used by businesses for promotions.

• Microsoft has invested $240 million for 1.6% stake in Facebook, raising the company valuation to over $15 billion.

Flickr

• Created by former game designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake.

• Online photo sharing network was founded in 2004.

• Since then blossomed into a premiere photo sharing network globally.

• Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in Mar’05.

• Flickr continues to compete with other photo sharing sites including: Photobucket, WebShots, TwitPic, Bebo, Zooomr

Delicious

• Formerly Del.icio.us and pronounced by ‘delicious’.

• A social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks.

• Site founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for about $10-15 million.

• Currently has around 10 million users and over 200 million unique bookmarked URLs.

• Categories bookmarks over Fresh Bookmarks, Hot List, Popular Tags.

Reddit

• Launched in 2005, Reddit is a social news website.

• Displays news based on personal preference and the preference of the community.

• Preferences are determined by the user’s history of voting stories up and down.

• Founded by 2 University of Virginia grads, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman .

• Conde Naste, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit during Oct’06.

• Compete data shows it to have more than 2 million users per month currently.

Digg

• Founded by Kevin Rose during October’04.

• Conceptualized the idea and paid Owen Byrne on eLance to develop the idea for him. Paid $99/month for hosting and around $1200 for the domain name.

• Everything on Digg is user-generated. Users can submit content for others to ‘digg’ and read. If a particular content receives enough ‘diggs’ then it is promoted to the front page.

• Got populated during Feb’05 when Paris Hilton’s cellphone got hacked.

• Has received around $28.7M in Series C funding.

Technorati

• Technorati Media, is an integrated online media company with an Ad network, 3 owned web properties, and an Ad technology platform.

• Launched in Jun’08, Technorati.com, the flagship site, is world’s first and largest blog search engine with the robust community blogging platform.

• Blogcritics.org is a journalism 3.0 site with over 3500 authors contributing more than 85000 articles.

• Twittorati.com shows what top bloggers are tweeting about, and how these trends compared to blogosphere trends.

StumbleUpon

• StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds the best of the web, recommended just for you.

• Uses positive and negative comments to form collaborative opinion about website quality.

• When users ‘stumble’, they will only see pages and content which friends and like-minded people have recommended.

• Has more than 12 million users currently and delivers more than 25 million personalized recommendations daily.

• Was acquired by eBay in 2007 but bought back by Garett Camp (founder), Geoff Smith, Ram Shriram, Accel Partners and August Capital in 2009.

Tumblr

• Founded by David Karp in 2007 – currently has over 6 million users and 1.5 billion pageviews a month.

• Is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts.

• Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr”, bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly

• There is little to no learning curve involved in using tumblr. Features are intuitive and quick to establish. Users simply sign up and begin posting in a minute.

Posterous

• A Y Combinator startup that was founded by Brett, Sachin & Gary in mid 2008. It’s a simple web publishing platform via email.

• Users are not required to create an account to use Posterous. To start, users simply email content to post@posterous.com and a “blog” is autocreated and sent back to the user.

• Posterous embeds video, MP3s and other media into a player and turns images into image galleries. PDFs and other office documents are displayed in a Scribd embedded widget.

• Users can also add friends and family’s email address to any Posterous site they control. When the emails have been added, users can post by sending content they want to publish to post@sitename.posterous.com.

MySpace

• MySpace was started as a side project of the internet marketing company eUniverse (now called Intermix Media).

• Started in August 2003, it is one of the world’s largest social networks, with about 125 million users.

• In mid 2008, MySpace participated in a major site redesign. The chaotic and disorganized interface was redesigned to make the main page more streamlined and clean.

• Highly customizable user pages with widget integration from SLIDE or YOUTUBE adds to the popularity.

• Has launched an iPhone version too but losing out on traffic and competition.

Vimeo

• Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein co-founded Vimeo.

• Currently the project is owned by IAC / InterActiveCorp and operated by Connected Ventures.

• Vimeo is a video sharing website that allows to people to publish their videos for public consumption.

• Supports High Definition Video since 2007, further establishing itself as a leading video hosting platform.

YouTube

• Founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim (former employees of PayPal).

• YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs and email.

• In Nov 2006, Google Inc. bought over YouTube.

• Advertising model on YouTube includes – YouTube InVideo Ads, YouTube videos in AdSense, YouTube Video Identification (for withhold copyrights)

Tripadvisor

• Tripadvisor is part of Expedia network which is in turn part of InterActiveCorp (IAC).

• A free travel guide and research website that provides reviews and information.

• Users can quickly and easily post their vacation videos.

• Travel marketers can showcase their properties by featuring their videos and articles.

• “My trips” folder to list preferred hotels, tours, restaurants and attractions.

• Users can also check hotel pricing and availability

• Can be further customized by adding maps, photos, notes and detailed travel plan.

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is the most powerful professional networking site globally.

• Allows members to create business contacts, search for jobs, find potential clients and create communities.

• Individuals / businesses can create their own professional profile for others in their network to view.

• LinkedIn tops 70 M users and over 1 M business profiles.

• LinkedIn runs on the network of “Connections”

• “LinkedIn Answers” allows registered users to post business-related questions that any other registered user can respond.