HootSuite is one of the more popular Twitter applications, one specifically geared towards power users and businesses. It has been on a roll recently, launching integration with Wordpress and rolling out new updates to its iPhone and Android Apps.

While Mr. Holmes didn’t divulge many details about the MySpace and Foursquare integrations, we can make some educated guesses as to how they will work. MySpace integration will most likely look the same as it does in Tweedeck: You’ll gain access to your MySpace feed and gain the ability to update your MySpace status.

The Foursquare integration is far more interesting. It could possibly be part of the iPhone and Android apps, as Foursquare is a mobile application and not really meant for the desktop (though we won’t discount the possibility of some web integration).

See the full article at mashable.com

Congratulations to all those hotels who have grown their fan base. A special hat-tip goes out to the Faithlegg House Hotel who have grown their fan base by over 100 in the past week and are now sitting at number 28 on the list!

The list is by no means final so if you feel we’ve missed you out, please let us know by commenting below.

The list is based on the number of fans the Facebook Page has and is open to all hotels in the Republic of Ireland.

The top spot has been claimed for a second week by Fitzwilton Hotel, Waterford. Keep up the good work guys!

(list is correct as of 8^st March 2010)

This list only considers Facebook Pages as opposed to groups and personal profiles.

A Page or a Groups, which is better? Well the answer to that depends on you and what works for your business.

Facebook Groups:

1. Set up for more personal interaction, they are highly active and require constant engagement.
2. Connected to the profile of the people who administer them.
3. When you post something as a group administrator, it appears to be coming from you and is attached to your personal profile.
4. Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause.
5. If the group is under 5,000 members, group admins can send messages to the group members that will appear in their inboxes.
6. Permissions settings make it possible for group admins to restrict access to a group, so that new members have to be approved.
7. Groups can’t host applications.
8. You can advertise your group.

Facebook Pages:

1. Access to a Page, however, can only be restricted by certain ages and locations.
2. Page admins can send updates to fans through the Page, and these updates will appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ inboxes.
3. There is no limit on how many fans you may send an update to, or how many total fans a Page can have.
4. Pages can host applications, so a Page can essentially be more personalized and show more content.
5. Pages can benefit from social ads that publicize the fan connection between a Page and a specific user.
6. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.

Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members.

So it’s up to you which best suits your business right now and going forward.

Just to note a few hotels who have a strong group presence on facebook.

The Morgan Hotel, 2212 members

The Beacon Hotel, 437 members

Be sure to check back every Monday to see if your hotel has made the list!

Download the list as a PDF here

The data in this list differs slightly to that of our Facebook list and is ranked according to the hotel’s influence on the twitterverse*.

We’ve used twitter.grader.com to rank each hotel on twitter. This clever little app considers many different factors including number of followers, number of followings and number of posts (among many others). This creates a score, enabling each twitter account to be ranked out of all the accounts that have been graded in the twitter network.

It basically gives you an idea of the impact each tweet has.

The grade is out of 100 and represents the percentage of accounts that have less of an impact than yours. For example, a TwitterGrade of 95 means tweets from your account have more of an impact than tweets from 95% of all other graded accounts on twitter. Pretty impressive hey?!

As with our Facebook list, we’ve done our best to recognise every contender for the list but a few are bound to have slipped through the net. If you think your hotel should be included on the list, please let us know by commenting below, remembering to include your “@” twitter account name.

Congratulations to Travelodge Ireland who currently have the most impact out of all the Irish hotels and hotel groups on twitter.

(list is correct as of 5^th March 2010)

Be sure to check back each week to see if your hotel has made our twit-list!

Download our twit-list as a PDF here

(* Where TwitterGrade’s are the same, the number of followers will be used to determine the ranking)

Basically, unless your web visitor is clicking your Twitter link from the Twitter.com website, it won’t show up as a direct Twitter referrer in your analytics (it will simply appear as direct/bookmark traffic). Therefore if the user is visiting from a desktop application like TweetDeck, or a mobile phone app like TwitterFon, it will come in wrongly as direct/bookmark traffic instead. And unfortunately a pretty high proportion of all Twitter traffic comes from mobile or regular Twitter apps, and not from the Twitter.com website.

Luckily there are several great ways to track your success better and address some of these tracking issues. So, lets take a look at some great ways to track and measure your success (or current failure) on Twitter…

- Use Tracking Codes! Put tracking codes in the URLs that you use in Twitter. This is fairly easy if you use Google Analytics campaign builder- yes, I know its a pain to do so, but trust me, it will help you see the true impact of your Twitter usage, including its impact on your site goals like sales or signups. And to make it even easier, you can use this great Google Analytics Twitter hack to take out the annoying manual part of doing this.

- Use a better URL shortener! Instead of using the default Twitter URL shortener, you can use a better one like bit.ly or ow.ly – these include built in tracking codes so you can monitor clicks, and who is Twittering about the URL that you put in your link. And they show up in your analytics as their own referrer (instead of as direct traffic), no matter whether the clicker uses a Twitter application, or Twitter.com, so you can measure your Twitter usage better!

- Measure your influence! There is also a great free tool that actually gives you even better Twitter analysis – its called Twitalyzer, and lets you measure your influence, not just measuring clicks. It uses a system to calculate things like your reach, genorousity and clout in the would of Twitter. Definitely worth a look!

See the full article at RichPage.com

Travel publisher Lonely Planet have named 10 of the world’s friendliest countries. Ireland appeared in the list along side countries such as Fiji and Malawi which are famed for their friendly inhabitants. The list was derived from Lonely Planets 1000 Ultimate Experiences.

Lonely Planet have a global reputation for accurate travel information and advice on destinations around the world. Their words are often taken as gospel by many intrepid travellers.

Could this recent publication help towards a much needed boom in the Irish tourism industry? We think so!

Following on from the IHF Conference in Galway this week, it is refreshing to see that Ireland has featured in this list. This should tie in nicely with Tourism Ireland’s strategy of getting back to basic’s and the welcoming Ireland we all know well.

See the Lonely Planet article here

comScore recently published some quite astonishing statistics regarding social networking on mobile phones. The report looks at mobile social networking usage in Jan 2010 and compares it to statistics for usage in Jan 2009. The shock is not that it has increased from last year (you don’t have to be Nostradamas to predict that!), it is how much it has increased that has created some tremors.

The stats revealed that Facebook usage on mobile phones has risen 112%. This is a huge increase, bringing the number of people using facebook mobile up to 25,137,000. Even more shocking than this is that Twitter mobile usage has risen an amazing 347%, bringing the mobile usage figure up to 4,700,000 for twitter.

While these numbers may seem low in comparison to the total number of users on each network (11.1% of total users access their social network on their mobile phone), it is the rate of change that we should be paying attention to.

The mobile internet revolution is really on our doorstep, and it wants to come in! Now is the time to get prepared!

Get the full press release at comScore

In November 2008 Twitter reached a milestone of 1 billion tweets. Then, less than a year later in October 2009, the 5 billion tweet barrier was broken.

Now just over 4 months later tweets have doubled, launching the platform towards the 10 billion tweets milestone.

While these statistics are impressive (and watching the total number of tweets increase on GigaTweet really puts things in perspective), my concern is this…Could this huge number of tweets be due to the increasing amount of automated content on the platform?

Ever since twitter opened it’s API, accounts have been popping up all over the place tweeting clearly automated material, turning many accounts into a spam-haters nightmare. Nowadays it wouldn’t be a surprise to come across an automated account that posts a tweet every time the account owner blinks!

While automated tweets aren’t necessarily less important or informative, I feel it takes away the ‘social’ aspect of the platform. I believe that, when considering the question ‘to automate or not to automate’, you really have to consider what your audience will listen to more; an automated robot or a warm, friendly person.

Regardless of whether tweets are automated or human controlled, people are still choosing to post a vast amount of content to twitter, content that perhaps would be lost in other social networks like Facebook. In this respect, twitter really has excelled and is likely to continue to do so.

The total number of tweets is expected to reach 10 billion some time around the early hours of Friday 3^rd March. Next up – 20 billion by August? Now there’s a target for all those who tweet!

We’ve compiled a Top 30 list which includes the most active Irish Hotels on Facebook. We’re introducing this as a regular feature to Marketing Times and our Linkedin Group – Social Media Marketing for Hotels, so be sure to sign-up if you’d like the weekly update.

The list is by no means final so if you feel we’ve missed you out, please let us know by commenting below.

The list is based on the number of fans the facebook page has and is open to all hotels in the Republic of Ireland.

Congratulations to the Fitzwilton Hotel, Waterford who have topped the bill this time round with an impressive 4,239 fans.

(list is correct as of 1^st March 2010)

Be sure to check back every Monday to see if your hotel has made the list!

Download the top 30 list as a PDF here

This addition is the latest in a line now also including social media rivals Myspace and Twitter along with results from blogs, Yahoo answers and other real-time content.

Yet to be added are personal Facebook profile updates which are currently only searchable via Bing.

While page updates can easily been seen as useful, perhaps the integration of personal status updates is taking things a bit too far?…

But what kind of value does a custom Facebook Fan Page offer? What are your fans looking for on a social network that they can’t get from your business website? For some insight, let’s check out how some big-name brands have stepped up their engagement by investing a little more TLC into their Facebook presence.

Interactivity

Social networks are not passive, so your Facebook landing page shouldn’t be either. It’s nice to have a great looking “Welcome” splash, but users are going to want to do something when they arrive.

Facebook is all about sharing, and The Gap has an ingenious promotion on the Baby Gap tab of their Fan Page. The simple splash image has a link to one of their photo albums where fans can upload pictures of their babies wearing their favorite Gap denim gear.

This kind of campaign provides a wealth of free, user-generated content that displays Gap products, and best of all, the functionality of photo uploading is already built into Facebook — no development necessary. This is an interactive idea that any small business could implement.

The Home Depot has built a bit on the shareability of Facebook actions with their DIY Gifts app. From Home Depot’s Fan Page, you can grant the app access to share your gift purchases with the recipient and your friends. While this approach may not work for everyone, it’s a step toward increasing consumer visibility on Facebook — a growing trend.

A Full Website Experience Within Facebook

Some companies go all out when it comes to their Facebook presence, integrating fully fledged mini-websites right into their Fan Pages. Adidas sneakers is a good example. They’ve added a multimedia content hub under the tab “Your Area” that offers photos, videos, and events based on your region. The site is built entirely in Flash and isn’t all that interactive, but it offers a rich media experience without ever leaving the boundaries of Facebook.

Dell’s Design Studio page is another example of a full-tilt Flash site inside Facebook. This one lets you browse and tweak custom artwork for your new laptop before linking you over to the corporate site to complete the purchase. You can also share your design choices with friends, all without connecting a single Facebook app to your account.
These examples have been built for large companies that probably have more web development resources than the average small business. But if you’re serious about your commitment to Facebook engagement, consider taking some inspiration from these examples and exploring the possibilities that custom pages and apps can offer your business.

See the full article at Mashable