Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted, thanks to a deal giving the Web company access to Twitter’s firehose, the stream of data generated by the microblogging service’s 284 million users, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. Google previously had to crawl Twitter’s site for the information, which will now be visible automatically....

Huge's social media team hard at work. From left: Jessica Lindsay, Megan Toth, and Andrew Cunningham...

But what most people don’t know is how much time and effort goes into curating these accounts, writing tweets, and filling your news feed with content people actually want to see. For instance, it can take a team of 13 social media and advertising specialists up to 45 days to plan, create, and get approval for one corporate social media post.

To learn more about the process, I spent a morning at Huge, a digital design and advertising firm that runs the social media accounts for eight different brands, including TD Ameritrade and Audi. At the agency’s New York office, a team of five social media gurus spend their days keeping tabs on conversations across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and whichever social app pops up next....

One of the key components for marketers to look at while deciding on the performance of any of their social networks is measurement. While Facebook always had Facebook Insights to give out the details of your owned presence details along with the post level activity, we always had to rely on third party estimated data for Twitter. Now with Twitter going public and aiming to generate more money via advertising, they have certainly stepped up their game with the introduction of Twitter Analytics for different components on Twitter....