Has Facebook hit its peak?

I’ve just come back from a wedding in Cyprus which, apart from the 24 hours it took to get back to the UK (long story!), was not only a fantastic event but also a great opportunity to make some new friends. As I pondered how adding friends through Facebook had become de rigueur these days I was interested to come across this post on Inside Facebook suggesting that Facebook is seeing a decline in users in early adopting countries.

In particular it suggests that the UK has fallen by 100,000 users in a month. With Mark Zuckerburg predicting Facebook will reach 1 Billion users, is this a sign that Facebook could end up going the way of MySpace and Friends Reunited?

Trust in a Top List?

We had the great pleasure to be invited to this year’s Beauty Focus seminar to talk about the nuts and bolts of social media monitoring. Our presentation was sandwich between an excellent presentation from Richard Stacy discussing what social media is and why it is important and an insightful talk on beauty blogging from Jane Cunningham the British Beauty Blogger.

Jane in particular clearly caught the audiences’ interest and she laid out what blogging means to a blogger (which she has helpfully posted about on her own blog).

Our experience is that brands really want to understand the role bloggers represent in social media marketing and how they can build better relationships with them. Jane clearly highlights the importance of building genuine relationship with bloggers and reminds us that most bloggers are amateurs that blog because they love beauty products. No brand is going to get very far by trying to approach bloggers in the same way as they do with traditional media.

Is the iPad a viable business tool?

The answer is of course yes. We are often out visiting clients to demo our web applications or to run training sessions and having to lug hefty laptops across the city can be a pain. We’ve decided to remedy this by investing in an iPad which combined with a iPad to VGA cable and a projector is a great tool for demoing our websites.

We’ll post up a video soon to show how to do this and how it looks. Now all we need to worry about is retaining our masculinity when travelling with it.

Posted from my iPad (of course!).

Our First Video

Its always been our intention to put together some helpful videos that not only demo our service but also help train people how to use them. Well we’ve final got things going and I can now premiere our first ‘quick tour’ video:

We’ll have plenty more coming soon so why not subcscribe to our channel?

If you have any feedback then please don’t hesite to comment (both here or on YouTube).

We’ve had a face lift

Well, after 5 year with nothing more than an odd cosmetic change we thought it was time to relaunch our home page. Of course this update also coincides with a few other changes at mymarketmonitor.com:

mymarketmonitor.com online

We’ve been talking to some of you already about our exciting new social media management tool but we’ve now gone public with it. We think this is a great way for brands, companies and organisations to manage how they engage with their social media audience.

There are a few other services out there but we think we’ve got one of the best and more importantly we’ve got a great, experienced team to do all the ground work ensuring you get the right insights. We know you want to see where you need to engage first and why without having to learn complicated tools or spend hours ploughing through irrelevant links. With mymarketmonitor.com online we ensure you know exactly what is being said about your brands, who the key influencers are where you need to join the conversation. As you start to use this information to grow your brands position online we’ll also help you produce clear and powerful reports that analysis and measure its value.

The mymarketmonitor.com blog

If you’re reading this its safe to say you’ve noticed we’ve now got a blog. All the team will be posting here regularly as we’ve always got something interesting to share. We’ll also be hosting some guest posts, starting this week with Laura Bacharach former beauty director of Company Magazine and author of the popular beauty blog ‘The Beauty Edit’. Check back tomorrow to see what Laura has to say about the changing beauty landscape.

We’ll be adding lots more to the website over the coming weeks and we’re really excited about our new service. We would love to hear back from you so please do comment or drop us an email and don’t forget to follow us on twitter.

Sean Smith