by Wayne Sutton
How Much Money Do Community Managers Make? [INFOGRAPHIC] via SocialFresh
![How Much Money Do Community Managers Make? [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://socialfresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/comm-man-research.png "How Much Money Do Community Managers Make? [INFOGRAPHIC]")
A few data points:
The Vincos Blog posted an infographic of the World map by Social Networks use. It’s an updated graphic from their 2009 version. The 2010 World map infographic clearly shows how Facebook is dominating social networking use. Coming in second and third for the United States is MySpace and Twitter.
For more information about social networks use across the world see http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/
Do you think a new social network if launched today could gain as many users as Facebook? Do you think Google’s rumored +1 Social platform will be as dominate as Facebook in the upcoming years?
Tonight Mark Zuckerberg was on 60 minutes, announcing a few updates about the Facebook platform and a look at Mark’s growth as a successful entrepreneur running the social networking site. During the interview Mark announced that Facebook is rolling out new Facebook profile pages. The new Facebook profiles features a snapshot of who you are, a new section that shows common interest with your friends and a way for you to group your friends by relationships. The tagline for the new Facebook profiles says “Now with more ways to show and tell your story.”
If you want to upgrade your Facebook profile you can visit http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/ and click on the “Get the New Profile” button.
For more on the new Facebook Profile pages you can watch The New Facebook Profile introduction video below.
You can see a screenshot of my updated Facebook profile below or click on the badge below to see the new Facebook profile on Facebook.
Wayne Sutton | Create Your Badge
If you watched the 60 minutes interview what did you think of Mark Zuckerberg? Are you going to upgrade to the new Facebook profile or wait until Facebook forces you to?
The saying is a photo is worth a thousand words and if that is the case books are being published in popular mobile sharing applications such as Instagram, Path, picplz, Burstn, Treehouse and more. Stories and experiences are being shared by uploading photos and new mobile social networking communities are being formed. Yesterday I posted an overview of Instagram and how Instagram lands its first brand partner the National Geographic. While the popularity of mobile photo sharing apps seems to be growing, I believe we will see more brands use photo sharing applications as another tool to engage with customers or gain new customers or as another marketing channel.
While more open photos sharing apps like Instagram, picplz and Burstn continue to gain users, another sad but inevitable trend we may start seeing is more users trying to increase their followers and treating photo sharing apps like another Twitter or social networking site. Just yesterday someone was searching “how to get more followers on Instagram” and landed on this site. Gaining more followers at this point just means more people will see your photos but soon as more brands partner with photo sharing applications to offer incentives for let’s say, best photo or a caption contest the race to get more followers on photo sharing apps could start.
With the rumors around how many users Instagram has and the news around Path and picplz VC funding, it will be curious to see what is next for photo sharing apps outside of multiple platforms support (Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, iPad and Tablets). Will photo sharing apps create dashboard for users and brands to see analytics on photos? Will photo sharing applications create APIs for other services to pull in photos? Will leaderboards be created from photo sharing applications like Twitter had that lead to its early success?
Regardless, not just iPhone users although Instagram is said to have one million iPhone users alone, but it seems mobile phone users are joining photo sharing apps and uploading thousands of photos. The only thing left now is monetization, brands and agencies start seeing opportunities to use photo sharing apps as a way to increase customer engagement or for marketing and when they do…. please do not call it social media.
Until then, here are few ways brands can use Instagram and other mobile photo sharing applications for marketing or customer engagement.
Really… do not laugh, Instagram is full of cat and other animal photos. I’m not a big animal person and not a fan of ads but a brands could have “show us your cat” and pick the winning photo for free cat food for the month. They would have to follow the brand on Instagram to win. Then the brands could reply to announce the winner in the comments.
There are a lot of baby photos being uploaded.
What is your favorite artist or What CD should you buy?
Ex: Show us your Christmas Tress
So far I have seen photos being uploaded of brands such as Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Old Spice, Staples, McDonald’s, and various energy drinks. For brands and agencies, what is one of first tips we said in social media class 101? Participate where customers are talking about your brand online. As for photo sharing applications, it’s participate where people are posting photos about your brand in mobile applications.
Do you think we’ll see more brands partner with photo sharing applications in the future?
Also read:
Will Instagram become the next big mobile social network or just one awesome photo sharing app?
On Thanksgiving Instagram is all about the Turkeys! 9 Thanksgiving Day Turkey photos on Instagram
The 7 most popular photos on Instagram, there’s more than lol cats!
Instagram the fun easy iPhone photo sharing application is a hit for professional photographers, bloggers, and just about anyone who loves to take photos using their iPhone. I’ve been using it heavily over the past few months, but more often when I started posting movember photos. Since then my Instagram activity has increased tremendously and I’m enjoying seeing amazing photos from friends and others around the world.
Still, like any online or mobile community, after joining you will start to see a few trends. One trend for Instagram is cat photos but there are lot more than cats being posted. Here are the five popular photos you’ll find people sharing on Instagram.
1. City scenery
2. Babies
3. Food
4. Coffee cups
5. Cars
6. Dogs
7. Nature
8. Cats
There’s also a lot of face photos of mostly women that are show up fast on the popular photos section.
If you use Instagram what are some the photo trends that you have seen?
Instagram features:
If you own an iPhone, like to take photos and share them with your friends or send to multiple social networks then Instagram may become your favorite iPhone application. If you want to share photos with 50 of your closest friends, then Path may be the iPhone photo sharing application of choice, or you may want to try Burstn or picplz. I’ll blog more about Path, Burstn and picplz later but back to Instagram. I would describe Instagram as a mix of flickr, Twitter, ping.fm, Facebook and Foursquare all rolled into one with the context of content based around photos. The core features of Instagram are; upload or take a photo, name the photo or not, share your location of the photo using Foursquare or not, share your Instagram photo on Twitter, upload to Flickr, share on Facebook, or share on Tumblr. Prior to sharing your photo you have the option to pick between 11 unique filters to enhance your photos. The 11 Instagram filters are, X-Pro II, Lomo-fi, Earlybird, Lily, Poprocket, Inkwell, Apollo, Nashville, Gotham, 1977 and Lord Kelvin.
A simple photo mobile social networking application The social networking aspects of Instagram are simple and familiar if you’re a Twitter user. While looking at users profile you can see an Instagram username, their first name, how many photos they have uploaded, how many followers they have and how many people they are following. As an Instagram user you have four options to interact with other users. You can follow them, like a photo, leave a comment on a photo or flag a photo for review. Instagram embraced their inner Twitter by not only how user profiles are shown with the following and followers but if you leave a comment with @username on any photo you will receive push notification as well. Other Instagram push notifications are sent to your phone when someone likes your photo or follows you. Another social feature of the app is the “Popular” photos section which you could almost compared to the suggested users list or trending topics on Twitter. No, I’m not saying Instagram is a photo version of Twitter and please do not call it that, but the similarities are there. Two other social parts that I believe is a key to Instagram’s early success is the “Find More Friends” options where you can easily find other Instagram users via your contact list, Facebook friends or Twitter friends. There is even a news stream to keep you update on your Instagram likes, and new followers.
Instagram is not complex to use even with all of the features mentioned above. The founder of Instagram, Stanford University graduate, Kevin Systrom, a former intern at Odeo that later become Twitter and a former Google employee along with Mike Krieger who is a former Microsoft intern and Meebo employee before joining the Instagram team doing design & development built the app to allow users share photos and interact with others in seconds. The simplicity and usability of Instagram is smart and you can tell they followed the K.I.S.S. (Google it) rules. Along with the thought of enhancing your photos, the Instagram team has built a fun app with a growing interactive community with “likes” and comments.
Cats and Early Adopters
Speaking of community, the type of photos Instagram users are posting ranges from food, models, babies, sporting events, music concerts, holiday scenery, nature, pretty faces and animals. When it comes to animals, you may see a few dogs but as of right now cats rule Instagram. Along with cats you may find some of your favorite web “tech” personalities such as Chris Messina, Robert Scoble, Jenn Van Grove, Chris Rauschnot, Kevin Rose, Tristan Walker, Angela Benton, Dave Delaney, Tessa and John Gruber sharing their photos. A few of my North Carolina friends such as Abbyladybug, TyDowning, Jay Dolan, Mollybuckly, John Lane and GirlonCamera have started to use Instagram too making my experience even better by sharing photos from families places. Regardless of who is using Instagram make one thing clear, as of right now it is not another look at me app or see how many followers you have but Instagram is about sharing your experience via awesome photos. Still if the app continues to grow I’m sure the how to get more followers question will become an issue and a problem for early adopters who right now just love to post photos.
@noahWG @xenijardin the cats are the worst thing about Instagram. 
Robert Scoble
Scobleizer
One Million users?
Last week it was rumored that Instagram has already passed the one million user mark which is truly impressive for the nine month old startup. If you are new to Instagram or never heard of it and asking yourself how do they have over one million users, it looks like Instagram is popular overseas. Having one million users is a marvellous achievement for any startup but to gain one million users in nine months, with 500k in funding, little press, an iPhone only app and no social networking website is amazing. Yesterday one Instagram user posted a screenshot saying the National Geographic has joined Instagram which cold be the beginning of leading social brands starting to use the service.
National Geographic on Instagram (@NatGeo on IG) http://instagr.am/p/ZZfn/
National Geographic
NatGeoSociety
What’s Next for Instagram?
As for what’s next for Instagram, maybe an updated website, longer profile history, an Android version, search options, more notifications options to know if your photo is on the popular page, follow photos, like notifications tracking,leaderboards, profile badges and no startup would be complete without stickers and widgets. Regardless as Gina Bianchini stated in The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a Great Social Product TechCrunch post, “Create a party, not a museum.” As of today, Instagram is a party for sure.
Do you use Instagram? If not what mobile photo sharing application do you use?
Myspace or is it My____ has been in the tech news recently from changing their new home page, new logo, new profile themes, a new focus on music and a new partnership with Facebook. With that being said, I took a few minutes today to update my … MySpace profile. I have not updated my profile for a few years being that it was a social network that was not fitting my business or personal needs. Regardless, that is not a good social networking etiquette practice as I suggest for you to update your social networking profiles every year or if you have a career change.
As for Myspace profile updates, I updated my bio, changed the profile theme and restricted access from anyone who is not a friend to post any type of content on my profile. While updating, I also noticed MySpace has new privacy settings. What stood out to me the most was the two options below: ”
Do not allow my profile information to be accessed by games and third-party services I haven’t connected to.
Do not allow communications from games and third-party services I haven’t connected to”.
Both options I selected. You can see how I set my full MySpace privacy settings in the screen shot below.
Regardless of what some “social media’ people and bloggers may think about MySpace, according to Crunchbase they have 800 employees and 125 million users and with the recent changes Myspace has made 2011 may be it’s defining make it or break it year. If you have a Myspace profile, I recommend you update your bio and your privacy settings. For more on Myspace privacy see “ How do you control your privacy on Myspace?” from the Myspace FAQ section.
Do you have a Myspace account? If so how are you using it?
