New Social Features: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Twitter.com Now Automatically Shortens Links: This is something Twitter users have wanted for a long time.  Now all you have to do is “just paste a link of any length into the Tweet box on Twitter.com” and Twitter shortens it for you.

After you’ve composed your tweet and you hit the “Tweet” button, Twitter shortens the link so it only takes up 19 characters.

YouTube Adds Creative Commons Library: “You can now access an ever-expanding library of Creative Commons videos to edit and incorporate into your own projects.”  And you can also label your YouTube videos under this Creative Commons license. There is only one choice of Creative Commons license and it allows for commercial use with appropriate attribution.

Any video you create using Creative Commons content will automatically show the source videos’ titles underneath the video player.

Facebook Turns on Facial Recognition for Tagging by Default: As Facebook continues to roll out tagging on their facial recognition features, you may want to check your privacy settings. Tagging is currently enabled by default. You can find out how to turn it off here.

You can turn off the default tagging suggestions through your privacy settings.

Broadcast Live Video on Ning: There’s now a Ning extension for Ustream available for all Ning Plus and Pro subscribers.  “The Ustream integration with Ning is designed to be easy to use so you can be up and running within minutes and play streaming video directly to visitors and members on your Ning social site.”

Use the Ning Ustream extension "to run a workshop, talk through a tutorial, or broadcast a live party."

Here’s a social media study worth noting:

New Study on Social Sharing: ShareThis (that little widget that gives users access to many social media sharing buttons) and Starcom MediaVest Group conducted a study on social sharing.  They looked at the sharing activity in March of this year across ShareThis’ network of 1 million sites (7 billion sharing signals analyzed) and concentrated on how and what people share and how sharing spreads content. Here are some of the big takeaways:

• Almost all sharing and clicking on links is “first generation” with little viral effect, which leads to the conclusion that sharing matters more than virality
• Out of 7 billion sharing signals analyzed, sharing accounted for 10% of visits that included 730 million page views
• Sharing accounts for 31% of referral traffic (nearly half of what search accounts for)
• Shared links are clicked on an average of 4.9 times, although this rate varies by sharing channel

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What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.