Lowcountry Geek

My two cents on the #NewTwitter is that I find it bulky and will continue not to use Twitter.com other than for those random occasions when I have to.

One of the most annoying things is that it doesn't auto-refresh and offer a true live stream but instead requires me to click to update.

As long as Tweetdeck remains a free service I'll probably stick with that on the PC and Droid. 

I won't get into all of the ins and outs of the #NewTwitter, but something I've found as it was rolled out to me this morning that was not covered with the official Twitter announcement (at least not that I saw) is that the new layout drastically narrows the rails and subsequently eliminates a large portion of the area that was open to a custom background.

The rails are so narrow that designing anything worthwhile in those sections will be very difficult and really not of much use.

Before

After 

I'm looking forward to presenting tonight at the Savannah Social Media Club's Summer Camp session on Facebook.

I'll be talking about "Raising a Fan Page," sorta like raising a kid, or two in my case.

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Facebook has taken away the ability for fan pages to push "nonfans" or those not logged in to customized landing tabs.

Now, only authenticated pages or those with more than 10,000 fans can push people to those landing tabs. Instead, you now only can push fans to your wall or the info tab.

Read more on the announcement here.

Many small businesses are lamenting this change, as they say the landing tabs are the only way they can recruit new fans without paying for an ad campaign. 

Others don't think the change will make that much of a difference.

I, for one, have made significant use of the landing tabs, and don't like this change. But it's not in our control, so you adapt and move on.

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Seems an overwhelming majority of my blogs begin with a question; or, to be more accurate, a form of skepticism.

In this case I’m referring to the value of social media.

Even those who recently have jumped on the social media bandwagon still question the Return on Investment (ROI) for a social media campaign.

“How much is my fan page worth in earned marketing?”

“Will I make my money back?”

“Is it effective?”

Vitrue, a social media company out of Atlanta, thinks it has a formula that will help you answer that question.

Vitrue has come up with a Social Media Evaluator. Basically you plug in the url for your Facebook fan page and it spits back an annual page value based on the page’s most recent 30 days of activity.

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So #hashtags (better known as the pound or number sign) tend to be one of the most problematic issues for people first entering the world of Twitter.

What do they mean?

How do I use them?

How do I follow them?

How do I start one?

Those are all common questions. And most of those can be answered through Mashable's Guide to Twitter.

Mashable will teach you things like how to find, track and organize hashtags.

But I'd like to address another use of hashtags that's less popular but I find to be just as important: a clue as to what you're talking about when you send me a tweet.

Often I send out tweets and hours if not days later I'll get something sent my way that looks like "@irleslie yes" (for you Twitter novices out there the @irleslie means someone is responding to a past tweet of mine.)

So what am I supposed to make of this simple 'yes' response? Which of the 21 tweets I sent out over the past 3 days (according to How Often Do You Tweet I log about 7 tweets a day) are you responding to?

Was it the one when I asked if the black socks match the brown shoes? Or was it the one when I asked if the red cord was the one I needed to cut to disable the bomb? 

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I wonder how most judge the emotional commitment that comes with 'liking' something.

How much do you have to like something before you proclaim your adoration for it? 

It brings back the old note in elementary school: "Do you like me, or do you like me like me?"

That note only was second to "Do you like me? Circle yes or no." But I digress.

So again, I'm talking about Facebook.

The social media giant this week changed its "Become a Fan" function to "Like."

So now you're not a fan of a page, but you like it. So now what should we call fan pages? Like pages? Obviously Facebook thought that out about as much as Jobs thought out the naming of the IPad, but again I digress.

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