Bing, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, General Electric, Hewlitt-Packard, Intel, and JetBlue are just a handful of the 21 brands selected as Twitter Launch Partners for their brand pages. Unfortunately for all other companies with standard accounts, only these brands will have unique access to Twitter’s 100 million active monthly users, who incidentally have to use the new version of Twitter in order to see them. Twitter is saying that brand pages will be rolled out to all users at the beginning of next year.

For Twitter, launching brand pages could be a way of challenging Facebook as the secondary branded destination for a company after its own website. If brand pages become enticing destinations with rich content experiences, Twitter’s advertising products become more appealing as a means of directing people there.

Brand pages have two key elements, both of which are free. Pages can be customized with large header images to display the brand’s logo and tagline more prominently than under the standard format. In the past, branded elements of the page design were often partially covered by the time line of tweets.

Brands can also choose to keep a particular tweet at the top of their time line, and that top tweet will auto-expand to reveal an embedded photo or video from Flickr, YouTube or other sources, without requiring the user to take action. Brand pages also feature:

- Differentiation between replies and mentions

- Embeddable tweets (embed a tweet onto your website, giving visitors the ability to reply or RT right from your site)
Twitter also announced that they will unveil a new design for desktop and mobile versions. Brand pages will ultimately be deployed for Twitter’s mobile clients but not until a later launch.

Check out this article from the eMarketer.

“Most brand followers report increased purchase intent

Social media marketers looking for an indication that their efforts are helping the bottom line will be encouraged by findings from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate that social friends and followers feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of.

More than one-half of Facebook fans said they are more likely to make a purchase for at least a few brands, and 67% of Twitter followers reported the same.” Click here to continue reading.

“Social media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here are the week’s top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Is Either Gender More Social Online?
• Facebook Shows Strong Presence In Asia/Middle East
• Google Launches an App Store for Google Apps
• General Public Believes in Wide-Reaching and Open Internet

Is Either Gender More Social Online?

Liberty Mutual released a survey on social media use that was aimed at analyzing usage differences on social networks between men and women. The survey runs opposite of other studies in the same arena and goes against typical perceptions of social networking online.

According to the study, men are likely to use ‘other’ social media accounts at least a few times a week. Also, men are more likely to friend a boss or co-worker and men are also more apt to maintain more than one social networking account (perhaps a Twitter and Facebook profile). Another interesting dynamic: men are more accepting of CEO’s tweeting about their company (51% to 37% of men vs. women, respectively).

Do these statistics and observations mean men are more social online? No, it doesn’t. This study is taking specific online habits and patterns and putting them through a gender-lens. The study does not take into account time spent on social networks, number of friends/connections and other interesting patterns, by gender. These data points would be very interesting to see in the future.”  Click here to continue reading.

“Initially, Omniture and Facebook will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and access analytics that measure customer engagement on the social networking service, although the two companies indicated that the partnership will expand even more in the future. The closer tie builds on the Facebook (and FB apps) analytics capabilities Omniture announced in May 2009. With the new solution, Omniture customers can now utilize the company’s new SearchCenter Plus product, essentially an enhancement of its search engine marketing management application with new functionality for purchasing Facebook Ads. Omniture customers will thus be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network using tools they’re already familiar with.“  Click here to read full article.

“With reports of young people abandoning e-mail to communicate via social networks, Facebook developing its own full-featured Webmail system and predictions that in a few years even business users will have exchanged traditional e-mail for social sites, it would appear that the success of social networks was hurting e-mail usage.

Based on data from customer relationship marketing agency Merkle, time spent with personal e-mail as of fall 2009 was even with the prior year. Nearly three-quarters of respondents spent at least 20 minutes a week e-mailing friends and family.

Merkle also found that social network users check their inboxes more frequently than those who shun social sites,” Click here for full article.

“Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the industry — if it sneezes, everyone feels it,” he told TechNewsWorld. “When they came out with an email client years ago, that took away share from Hotmail. Their IM product is not as a good as AOL’s, but people use it anyway.”

Google Buzz will take advantage of the massive user base of the company’s ubiquitous Gmail client. “It will leverage those captive eyeballs as people send emails and messages,” said Sinek.”

Click here for the full article.