I personally believe that having an animated twitter icon is a bad idea, and many people on twitter agreed with me. I can see the logic behind a company or person having one, and why they think it would make their tweets stand out in search results and a twitter feed, which it does, but I strongly recommended that you change it to a standard image if you do have one, the reasons for this are as follows:

• It looks cheap. Web design has moved on from the days of the '< marquee >' tag which would make your text scroll across your webpage, as this was seen to be more of a distraction from the copy on the page, which as we all know is the reason why people have visited the page in the first place.

• It’s intrusive, a bit like an advert on TV its very flashy and loud, to gain your attention, but it’s not what the viewer has tuned into view, again strengthening the the fact that it shoud be your tweets that gain your page attention.

There are some of the responses I received: to the question this question I tweeted ‘Do animated #twitter profile pictures attract or distract you?’:

@almalbon – Wrote: @tim_eem Animated profile pics are cheap and gimmicky. Let your tweets do the talking. Quality content is king

@Bizitalk Wrote - @tim_eem Come down on the side of distraction and slightly annoying I think!

In short, you should allow your tweets to gain you more followers, rather than employing a cheap, loud tactic to get your profile noticed. Great copy is always key

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

Web link-shortening giant, Bit.ly has released data about the best times to post on the top social networks.

Optimum Times to post on twitter:

The best time to post on twitter is between 1:00pm and 3:00pm ET (10am to 1pm PT) in the early days of the working week, as this is the period of time that garners the highest click rate. The absolute optimum time is 1:00pm on a Monday, the reason for this being, one can only speculate is that most people tend to check their twitter updates on the first day back to work on their lunch breaks.

Optimum times to post on Facebook:

Facebook differs to Twitter with the optimum time to post being Wednesday at 3:00pm ET. The general rule for Facebook is to post after lunch, (1pm Onwards) as this is the time that will get the most click through rates. These results could be due to office workers looking distraction in the afternoon, to get over the post lunch lull.

When not to post on Facebook and Twitter:

The statistics have shown for both Facebook and Twitter that the worst times to post, in order to get interaction with your followers are in the evening after 8:00pm up until the next working day.

*Twitter Tip – Although you may be tempted to post on twitter first thing in the morning, it would be wise to post at around 11:00am to catch the traffic at lunch time.

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

The people behind the service that allows you to share photos on twitter before twitter did, have released their first app. The app allows users to edit photos and add filters before sharing them to twitter. It is currently only available for Iphone users, with an android version proposed for release in the coming months.

The popular service started in 2008 has over 35 million users, only 15 million users less Instagram, the photo editing and sharing tool acquired by Facebook early this month for $1 Billion.

It is widely known that twitter wanted to acquire Instagram before Facebook made their incredible bid, so is this the reason that Twitpic have decided to release an app? According to Everet, this is not the case; he commented “Our goal is just to provide the best possible product for our users. As far as trying to position ourselves for acquisition by any particular service, that’s not our focus.”

We will have to watch this spacer in the coming months to see if twitpic’s audience grows to the heights of their previous 45.7% share of photos uploaded to twitter (2.25 million daily image) back in May 2011, before Twitter struck a deal with photobucket to have users upload directly without using a 3^rd party service, and if this does indeed prompt twitter to make a bid for this service.

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

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