Recently Twitter revised its ‘Terms of service’ that covered issues like tweet ownership, API and spam. The note-worthy point is the one on who owns tweets.

Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder says, «The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership. For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter.»

Twitter’s guidelines for API are still under construction. The present API guidelines are:

• Identify the user that authored or provided the Tweet, unless you are providing Tweets in an aggregate form or in anonymous form in those exceptional cases where concerns over user security and anonymity are involved.

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The rising popularity of social networks like Twitter is posing enormous problems in the area of security to the Net users. The spurt of security risks in the past few weeks are proof for this.

A recent study released by AVG and CMO Council says that a majority of social network users do not perform the basic security measures regularly, some of which are:

1. Changing passwords (64% infrequently or never)
2. Adjusting privacy settings (57% infrequently or never)
3. Informing their social network administrator (90% infrequently or never)

Some more statistics revealed by the study are:

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With so much attention being given to the social networks recently, it is important to learn the right way to be a great user.

1. The first thing to remember is that it is meant for social interaction. Just like choosing friends, you should pay attention to the working of the portal, when you join one. Instead of having thousands of followers with whom you have no contact, have limited followers and stay in touch at least occasionally.

2. It is estimated that more than half of the social media users are inactive. After all, there is no point in joining a social network and staying inactive. Ultimately, you are the loser.

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It is reported that Facebook will soon begin testing for a new Ads Manager. This Ads Manager along with another new bulk-uploading tool will be made available to selected advertisers, the company informed Inside Facebook.

The new Ads Manager will have better facilities for in-line editing and search than the present one. This is expected to make the ad campaign management smoother and efficient, especially for those managing multiple Facebook Ads. It is also designed to make creation and editing of Ad Creative easier.

The new bulk upload tool, as the name suggests, helps uploading a number of ads at the same time. In the present system, ads are created in the campaign manager.

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Many of the popular social networking sites are disclosing their users’ personal information to third-party tracking sites, which are used by them to track their users’ browsing habits.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) revealed this fact in a new study. Craig Wills, professor of computer science at WPI, explains the sequence of events that lead to this.

Social networking sites assign a unique identifier to each user. This has a string of numbers, characters or both that leads to your profile. When social networks use third-party tracking sites to spy on their users, they pass on information about your browsing activities to them.

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The role of social networks as an online marketing and business strategies tool is gaining ground day-by-day. This demands spending considerable time on social media. It is important to find a balance between the social media activities and other marketing strategies.

The time spent on social media can be utilized in a gainful way by using it to find new talent for your business. When you want to expand your team, this is the ideal place to search for a candidate.

TweetPhoto owner Rodney Rumford’s advice on how to find your new team member sums it up well:

“Fish where your audience is and make personal connections with the talent pool that you want to hire…”

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ReTweeting or RT offers immense potential for businesses. With its rising popularity, ReTweets have captured the imagination of Twitterers.

Tweets are the status updates posted by Twitter users. When another user likes the status and wants to share it with others, they use the same update and ReTweet it by adding the user’s name. As RT is done for Tweets containing links, it offers a viral means of link exposure.

The idea of RT was started by someone who wanted to use another user’s tweet. As more and more users started (mis)using tweets for their own gain and posting RT as their own, the idea caught on like wildfire. Now there are services that use RT as a backdrop to gain advantage.

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The potential offered by social networking sites for online marketing can be exploited to the fullest, by knowing how to find your target audience within the network. Here is a tip on the topic.

Normally, social networking sites are tightfisted in allowing searching for users. However, Google comes to your rescue with their all-encompassing search. To take advantage of this, you should know how to word your search queries. The example given here demonstrates the right way to do it.

Google search using the search query — “site:facebook.com/people led zeppelin”. This query will elicit results from the site Facebook.com, with profile pages that have ‘Led Zeppelin’ in ‘personal interests’ category. However, only those users who have activated the feature in privacy settings will be displayed.

The above approach will help in identifying site users with specific interest. You need to tweak this list to get your target audience by sending them short, crisp and enticing messages. Remember, the social network users use the site for entertainment and may not welcome marketing messages.

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With Twitter introducing real-time search, many search engines have hit the panic button. Even those who were skeptical of its usefulness have jumped into the bandwagon.

To compete with real-search empowered Twitter, Facebook announced its new search recently. This comes right after the announcement of its acquisition of FriendFeed, which comes with an excellent real-time search engine.

Regarding the new search, Facebook’s Anil Wable says,

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EU has often been in the news for demanding better business practices from online firms as well as demanding more privacy for individuals. More often than not, Google has been the target of EU’s demands, but this time around it is the turn of social networks.

On one hand Facebook is testing for greater publicity with user control and on the other hand, EU is demanding rules and regulations that apparently have to do with Facebook’s privacy policy.

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