TAKA DESIGNS

If you do a quick search on Google for “common social media mistakes” you’ll pretty much find the same points being covered again and again.  Everything from not posting enough, failing to stay engaged, not having a plan, etc. I think by now a lot of these are pretty much ingrained into our heads. So instead, I wanted to point out a few mistakes that may not be so obvious:

1. Placing social media icons without links to profile pages
2. Using hashtags on Twitter for #everything
3. Automatically linking your Facebook updates to Twitter or vice versa.

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I recently had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion for the UCLA Social Media Group, which I manage and run. We had a diverse mix of undergraduate and graduate students from UCLA and discussed how they used social media in their personal and academic lives. Our topics ranged from usage and behavior, privacy, advertising and the value of interaction with brands, companies, campus departments and student services.

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In May of 2011, UCLA Marketing & Special Events was approached to help create a more engaging and dynamic Commencement experience online through the use of social media.

With only a few short weeks to make this happen, we began to think strategically about what opportunities and tools existed given our limited time and resources.

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Has Twitter become so ubiquitous in our lives that brands and journalists are now using tweets readily as endorsements and quotes? It’s been happening for some time now, but with the rise of major brands like American Express and The New York Times now on the bandwagon, Twitter continues to be a major source information and value. Let’s take a look at some examples of how tweets are being used.

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About a year ago on Happenings, UCLA’s event calendar, we implemented Facebook’s “Like” button (we renamed ours “Recommend”) for every event to help create a more social and engaging site. It’s been a huge source of engagement for our users and is the 5th largest referral source of traffic to our site.

Yesterday, we launched a new feature called “Most Recommended” that takes this one step further.  Users can now see every event that has been recommended in Happenings from the most popular to least popular. It’s a truly crowd sourced list, showing popular events happening around UCLA as recommended by our users. Even though it may seem very basic, it’s a direction in which the web has been heading towards for some time.

Bing has already integrated Facebook’s “Likes” within its search results  and Google with +1.  As the web continues to evolve and integrate closely with social, we’ll see even more extremely personalized and targeted recommendations for everything from social connections, product recommendations, news and information. We’ve just begun to scratch the surface.