360PR Blog

New social media tools, apps, and sites crop up every week. And the most well-established ones, like Twitter, set the bar higher by adding new features, bells and whistles. Over the past couple weeks the much-buzzed about Twitter.com, as well as the sometimes forgotten Delicious.com both launched new homepages. And both revamps seem to focus mostly on search – doing whatever it takes to make spotting the latest news and topics easier for consumers.

So how exactly have these sites changed and what should brands and PR know?  Read more….after the break.

• For starters, Twitter’s brand new and much cleaner looking homepage makes it easier for new users to get acclimated with the site and brings search to the forefront. At the new homepage, you’ll see that the Twitter search bar is now the most prominent feature, making it simple for people to search for information and discussions about certain topics. They’ve also laid out the hottest trending topics by the minute, hour, and day. In addition, the search bar now allows people to search the Twitterverse WITHOUT having an account – crushing that previous barrier to entry.

These changes make perfect sense – and are good news for brands already on Twitter because it hopefully will spur new (and quality) users. It’s also worth noting that in addition to the homepage changes, Twitter also recently launched the Twitter 101 Business Guide (http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/) – a great resource for brands and another way Twitter is trying to make itself more “accessible” to the masses.

• Even though Delicious is sort of like the step-child of social media, I think it’s a dark horse and a very useful social bookmarking tool. For example, 360PR has a page where we compile various social media news, case studies, and stats for our teams and clients to access. It has helped us keep on top of all of the information that crosses our desks on a daily basis.

Like Twitter, Delicious has also launched a new home page with a revamped search function, allowing users to dig a lot deeper, as well as view video and images from the site. They’ve also rolled out a new “fresh bookmarks” tab, which lists out bookmarked links by the number of related tweets that they’ve garnered. They’ve also incorporated Twitter into the bookmarklet tool, allowing users to Tweet links as they bookmark their favorite websites – my favorite addition!

Filed under: Digital PR, Social Media |