The past few weeks have been an exciting time for Football in terms of Twitter engagement. The Manchester Derby (Manchester City Vs Manchester United) on Monday night recorded over 1 million tweets about the game in the space of 3 hours, with 3000 tweets per minute still rolling in 45 minutes after the final whistle.

An almost even amount of tweets for each team where recorded with Man City’s mentions clocking up 360,000, beating Manchester United by a total of 3000.

Although this is a fantastic amount of interaction on twitter for a sporting event it wasn’t enough to beat the Chelsea – Barcelona tie this week before. This game clocked up a record amount of tweets with 3.4 million being recorded, with the peak of engagement seeing 13,684 tweets a second!

The only reasons I can see why the engagement was so high for the Chelsea game was that it was set upon a European stage whereas the Manchester Derby had more of an impact solely on the UK, that and an unexpected late goal for Chelsea and Barcelona being the fond favourites.

This year will most definitely become the digital age for sports and we can only expect to see more of these levels of engagement once the Olympics and Euro 2012 Football Tournament kick off!

The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

The good people at Google have announced that they are rolling out an updated redesign of their social network Google+. The main aims of the redesign are to make it a more customised and aesthetically pleasing user experience.

Google Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra had this to say - “It accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google”

Naturally they are also hoping that the new features will take an extra slice out of Facebook and Twitters vast social media empires, as a few of changes such as the large cover photo at the top of the page, and the ‘trending topics’ (Explore) feature mimic Facebook’s Timeline design and twitters primary function

The other prominent feature that comes with the new profile is the customisable navigation ribbon, featured on the left hand side of your profile. The ribbon gives Google the space to add more features (which they have hinted at doing in the next few days) and the user more freedom to pick and chose which apps they use.

So far the change has been deemed positive by the experts in the social media world, but is it enough for Google to really try and challenge Facebook? Or is it just an improved version for their 170million+ users?

Let us know what you think in the comments!

The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

With over 175 million twitter users it can be hard getting people to follow you,half of the battle if getting people to your page, the other half is keeping them interested and getting them to follow you. A great way to gain instant interest (and hopefully a follow) from viewer of your page is to design and implement a custom twitter background.

A custom twitter background allows you to:

1. Stand out from the crowd:

A custom Twitter design separates you from every other standard twitter background.

2. Strengthen your brand:

It can tie in with and strengthen your brand, as long as you use the same brand colours and logo. This means that viewers will find it instantly recognisable with your other branded marketing materials.

3. Add more contact information:

You can take advantage of the extra space available to you to include contact information which you couldn’t fit into the 160 characters twitter limits you to in your bio. (see this post to optimise your bio http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-to-optimise-your-twitter-bio-to.html)

4.Market Social Media and Blogs:

You can also use the space to market your other social media channels such as linkedin / Facebook / Youtube / Pinterest or your Blog if you have one, driving more traffic to those sites too.

5.Promote a Special offer:

The space can also be used to promote a specific offer that you are offering, a good call to action can entice people to buy your products or visit certain websites etc

6.Show off Your Personality:

Using images is one of the best ways to convey your personality, and this is an opportunity to let your personality to shine through.

The following 2 profiles have been designed by myself for my own profile @tim_eem and @socialjamm:

We will show you how to design a custom twitter brackground in our next post. So take these reasons and brainstorm what you would like to include on yours!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm