Further to my previous post about Pear Analytics’ Twitter usage study, it’s probably a good time to point out that Facebook very recently purchased fellow Silicon Valley social networking company FriendFeed.

FriendFeed’s service allows users to collect together details about what they’re up to on a vast range of different sites, such as Flickr, Youtube and Facebook, all into one place. This information can then be viewed on the FriendFeed site by others, or published to, for example, Facebook.

FriendFeed also has a built in chat system, which one would assume would result in a lot less of what Pear Analytics called Twitter’s conversational and “pointless babble” posts.

The other really cool thing they have up their sleeves is their real-time search. If you go to FriendFeed’s website and do a keyword search, you’ll find the results update right before your eyes as relevant posts are made by FriendFeed’s users.

With Facebook’s acquisition of the company, we can expect to see a lot of this kind of thing incorporated into their own site. In fact many believe that as Facebook picks up more momentum they will simply start to swallow up companies and incoporate their innovations into it’s own site - and FriendFeed is to be no exception.

Whichever way things go, it looks like FriendFeed and Facebook (FriendBookFeed, FaceFeedFriend, FriendBookFace..?) could be a much more viable option for promoting your business than Twitter.

According to a report released by US research firm Pear Analytics, 40.55% of Twitter posts are “pointless babble” like “I am having a sandwich”, and 37.55% of them are “conversational”, and of no particular value to others. And 3.75% is spam.

So basically, 81.85% of Twitter posts are pretty much worthless to anyone thinking of getting involved. Supposedly.

I wouldn’t say that these findings mean you shouldn’t use Twitter to promote your business. If anything I’d say it goes a long way to prove that Twitter is very popular among Internet users. But popularity has it’s drawbacks - the main one being that your business’ carefully crafted Twitter updates can simply be drowned out by all the “pointless babble”, spam and general conversation.

It’ll be interesting to see how viable Twitter is as a tool for company’s to get in touch with their target market once the initial craze for Twitter dies down.

Check out Pear Analytics’ full report

More and more people are finding the value an online shop can bring to their business both in sales and marketing. Not only are they much cheaper to set up than a physical shop on the high street, but can raise awareness of your business as clients search for the products they want to buy on the internet - most importantly, people are actually buying online.

According to a recent report by the Office for National Statistics, Internet sales represented 7.7% of the total value of all sales by non-financial sector businesses in 2007. That’s £163bn, up around 30% year on year - a figure which is growing rapidly. You can read the full report at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/ecomnr1108.pdf and bear in mind this is data from over a year ago now so current trends are likely to be even higher.

Primate Designs have a range of ecommerce options for those looking to venture into selling online:

• “Buy It Now” Shop - add in products with Paypal or Google Checkout buttons for a one-off cost.
• Simple Shop - create categories and products, integrated into a secure payment gateway of your choice for a lease fee and one-off integration cost.

Both of these options are compatible with our Silverback Editing Platform and can be bolted on to even our £500 templated websites.