Alberta Business Marketing

Admit it, it’s frustrating when you’re adding your social profiles to new websites. You can remember your Twitter URL, your Stumble Upon page, LinkedIn, Flickr…But what about Facebook? Well prior to today it was a randomly assigned nine digit ID number like 098768594.

Who can remember that?

Now when someone asks you if you’re on Facebook you don’t have to say “yes just look me up”. That might be fine for someone like me who doesn’t have a common name, but if you’re a John Smith or someone with an equally common name, good luck!

Tonight at 12:01 ET Facebook will be opening the flood gates and allowing it’s 200 million users to select a unique URL to identify their profile on a first come first serve basis.

This move by Facebook will keep them in line with other social media tools (as mentioned above) who already allow custom URLS, as well as being more SEO friendly. Blogs have been doing this with blog posts for years, so it’s nothing new or groundbreaking, but a nice tweak on Facebook’s part.

Users and businesses must choose their URL carefully, however, as they are not changeable once selected. So names like “boozeymcdrunk” or “bongmeister” might not be the best of ideas, so choose wisely kids.

Have fun out there!

Tags: social media
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I was forwarded an article today from the BBC detailing some Harvard research titled Twitter hype punctured by study.

As detailed in the article, the Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and very, very few people listen consistently.

The research concludes that despite the hype, Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network. That Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends.

The BBC posted a question I thought would be interesting to discuss here: Do you think that micro-blogging will play a big part in the future of the web? If so, are marketers going to use and allocate budget to this in the future? Is it happening now?

Tags: social media
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