Everyone these days spends quite a good amount of time on various social networking sites, so make sure you’re not wasting your time by posting during peak times!  

Click on the following infographic to view the best and worst times…

In a new study looking at ‘How Stuff Spreads,’ Facegroup has identified key components that make things go viral. Looking at the spread on Twitter of two global memes, Gangnam Style vs Harlem Shake, Face discovered eight common characteristics which it says led to them becoming viral phenomena, generating thousands of spin-off versions and billions of views.

The eight common characteristics are:

1. Bursts and Rises: There are 2 models of virality.

The Burst model is bottom-up: the variations are more powerful then the original seed and there’s no clear leadership or narrative. The meme relies on community relevance to spread.

The Rise model is top-down: the original seed is always stronger than its variations and has a clear leader dictating the narrative.Bursts spread widely more quickly but don’t endure. Rises spread more slowly and less widely but they tend to endure because the meme has a focal point. Chose your model of virality and plan according.

2. Triggers.Whatever the model, virality is triggered by surprise, cultural relevance to a community, and endorsement by a leader or the media.

3. Waves. Whatever the trigger, virality is not asteady affair; it spreads in waves and spikes.

4. Communities drive viral spread way more than influencers.

5. Glocality. Memes transcend geography but a successful meme needs a balance of both local relevance and global appeal.

6. Leadership. A meme needs a focal point to live longer. Virality is only sustained through a strong narrative and leadership.

7. Slow and spikey wins the race.Weak ties and communities sustain for weeks but they don’t give you scale in the short term. Top-down media and celebrity endorsement gives you instant scale but burns out within a couple of days by decreasing the shareability of the meme.

8. Memes are like currency: you need to balance supply (or accessibility) and inflation.

In order to achieve high shareability and high popularity the meme supply has to be expansionary but strategically controlled so that it doesn’t negatively affect its shareability. This at the same time gives the meme the scale that can trigger and sustain exponential growth.

Face compared how the top 5 versions of each video were shared on Twitter, looking at 8 dimensions of each meme: Shape (number of shares per video, over lifetime of the meme); Lifespan (number of consecutive days where people shared the meme 500+ times); Popularity (number of unique users sharing the meme over its lifetime); Shareability (total Twitter shares per each million of YouTube views; Globality (how international was the meme); Amplification (how influential were the people who shared the meme); Variation (how much did attention to the meme vary day-by-day); Diffusion Network (hubs and nationalities who drove the spread of the meme).

Using their recently launched social media intelligence tool, Pulsar TRAC, they tracked any social media conversation containing a specific URL and analysed who is talking about it, gateways and hubs, topics of discussion, geography of the discussion and key channels.

While Harlem Shake turned out to be 3x more shareable than Gangnam Style, it still ended up being 4.5x less popular in terms of the number of uniqe users sharing it. It is a difficult balance for a meme to strike. Popularity doesn’t mean Shareability, and Shareability doesn’t imply Popularity. Community drives Shareability but doesn’t give you Scale (Popularity). Top-down influence drives Scale (Popularity) but kills Shareability. While Shareability is a key requisite of virality, scale is what enables and sustains exponential growth.

Source: Music Think Tank (by Kellan Drumgoole)

Last fall, Twitter bought We Are Hunted, a “music discovery” startup that made a popular app for Spotify.

Apparently Spotify is paying attention: It just bought Tunigo, another music discovery startup with a popular Spotify app.

Spotify isn’t announcing terms for the deal, but says that all of the Swedish company’s 20-or-so employees will come to work at Spotify’s offices in Stockholm and New York.

The Tunigo Spotify app will keep running (there’s also an iPhone app), but presumably Spotify’s new hires will be put to work on Spotify’s main service, which has 24 million users and six million paying subscribers. Tunigo had reportedly raised $3 million.

The We Are Hunted and Tunigo deals aren’t exactly parallel, since Twitter used We Are Hunted to build a brand-new music app, and Spotify doesn’t need one of those. But they do show that digital music companies are putting a renewed emphasis on helping people find stuff they like — which has the obvious benefit of keeping them on the service longer, and/or convincing them to pay for them.

Internet radio service Pandora has always been about discovery, but lots of other services have been content to assemble millions of tracks and ask listeners to poke through them on their own, or to ask their friends for recommendations.

Now lots of companies are starting to emphasize curation. That’s the entire point of Jimmy Iovine’s new Beats/Daisy music service, scheduled for launch later this year. And if Apple is able to hammer out deals with music labels — last I heard, they’re still stuck haggling with Sony Music and Sony/ATV, its related-but-separate publishing company — it will launch an iRadio service that combines elements of both Pandora and on-demand services.

If you have a Spotify subscription and haven’t played with Tunigo, by the way, it’s worth checking out: Like Web radio service Songza, it is focused on mood- and theme-based playlists, and it’s pretty good.

Source: All Things Digital (by Peter Kafka)

Twitter may be the best way to figure out what’s happening around the world right now. But it sure ain’t great at telling me what’s going on in my world — that is, what’s happening down the block from me.

That may change. According to multiple sources, Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location. The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are in the world, serving up tweets from others around you — whether you follow them or not.

The feature, as I understand it, came out of the company’s recent hack week at the beginning of this month, where a few engineers worked on projects related to local discovery. A number of employees have been testing the feature in the Twitter app ever since.

The type of tweets you’d see, ideally, are the most relevant ones nearby, especially when they follow a trend or a flurry of closely connected activity. So a football game or a concert, for instance, may be a great use case here.

Or perhaps even more importantly, it could be used in completely unplanned, spontaneous instances.

Here’s an example, and a real kicker: I’ve been told that a few employees were testing the new feature in Boston last week, around the time that the brothers Tsarnaev allegedly carried out a series of horrific bombings during the city’s annual marathon.

When reached for comment, Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said the company had nothing to share on the matter.

It’s fascinating to me that Twitter is toeing the waters of discovery through a local lens more explicitly than ever before. Currently and historically, the company already factors in location when suggesting content inside the Discover tab and also when serving you ads. It also goes without saying that to try this stuff out during the recent Boston tragedy — which was arguably watched by much of the world through Twitter just as intensely as it was over broadcast networks — is incredibly interesting, if only to imagine what possibilities it could hold for other mass events in the future.

The big question for me: Twitter, what took you so freaking long?

For a company that prides itself on its interest graph — the pulse of what everyone in the world is talking and thinking about — something like a localized version of discovery seems like a natural extension of what it means to use Twitter in a meaningful way.

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ThingLink, the most popular interactive image platform for publishers, brands, agencies and consumers, today added interactive image sharing to Facebook Timeline.  Now when publishers share ThingLink interactive images to Facebook, viewers can ‘touch” them to experience the content inside the image — without leaving Facebook.

ThingLink’s proprietary, patent-pending web-based solution allows publishers to create, tag and share any image, in any environment, quickly and easily. ThingLink allows content producers to better understand how their images are being used by consumers on the different social media platforms, both in terms of interactions with the image as well as a wide range of social behaviors.

Publishers and individuals can now use ThingLink to transform static images on Facebook Timeline into a discovery experience — with music and video players, social links and brand content that appear inside an image when it is “touched.” Rich media tags from services like Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, Imgur, Flickr, and Twitter are supported from the beginning, and support for custom third-party tags will be added in the coming weeks.

“Images are becoming forums for conversation and discovery that include sharing, touching, commenting, and remixing rich media content created by others”, said CEO Ulla Engeström. “ThingLink is now enabling a new kind of discovery experience on Facebook Timeline that evokes emotion and brings moments to life in ways that drive higher engagement.”

Example: Mèdecins Sans Frontiérs on Facebook Timeline via ThingLink: https://www.facebook.com/msf.english/posts/10151343426237385

Founded in 2010, ThingLink is the leading interactive image platform with over 130,000 publishers. ThingLink’s enterprise level account for publishers, agencies and brands offers such key features as group account management and the ability to create and launch custom image apps and icons that enhance engagement. ThingLink also offers advanced metrics for measuring image performance across social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, enabling valuable, new insights into consumer engagement.

At launch tomorrow, we are supporting YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Imgur, Flickr, Twitter, iTunes, and all Open Graph tags inside images. We will add support for more tags (including custom 3rd party tags) in the coming weeks. 

How does it work: Touch the FB sharing icon on any ThingLink image or drop a ThingLink image url to FB Timeline directly.

When ThingLink interactive images are shared into Twitter, brands have commonly seen 5-30x improvements in engagement. Wherever ThingLink images are used on Web pages,  the discoverability of content inside images makes those pages”stickier”, with increases in time spent on page.

For more information visit ThingLink.com and ThingLinkPress.com.

Source: ThingLink press release

You no longer have to be Ryan Seacrest, Ne-Yo or Jason Mraz to play with Twitter’s new music discovery app. After testing the app with music artists and influencers, Twitter #Music will be available starting today at https://music.twitter.com and as a separate app for the iPhone through the App Store.

So what does the service do? Well, it does what you might expect from a music app from Twitter — it helps you find music that’s popular on Twitter and music based on the bands you follow. The app is centered around four pages or tabs, which you can swipe through to access.

The Popular page shows you new music that’s trending across Twitter while the Emerging tab shows “hidden talent found in tweets.” While those two parts feed you information about what the collective Twitterverse is jamming to, the last two focus on who you follow and your personal music taste.

The Suggested tab shows artists you might like based on the artists you follow on the service and who they follow. And finally the #NowPlaying tab shows songs your friends are listening to or tweeting about. For instance, if your friend tweets that they are listening to a song by Justin Bieber, that song will show up on that page.

The iPhone app, which “Good Morning America” got an exclusive early look at, has a slick and polished design. All the pages have a grid made up of artists and songs; tap one of those and the song will start playing along with a fun spinning CD animation in the bottom left corner. Tap on that and you get an enlarged CD — you can drag your finger around the CD to fast forward or rewind within that song.

And the fact that you don’t have to leave the app to listen might be one of the best parts. Twitter has integrated current music services like Rdio, Spotify and iTunes to allow you to play the songs right through the app or webpage. With iTunes, you will only hear a preview, but with Rdio and Spotify, users can log in with their accounts to hear the full tracks. Twitter says it will continue to work to add additional music providers to the app.

Twitter put artists and bands at the center of the experience. You can go to artist’s Twitter profile pages within the app and see what artists they follow and listen to. As Twitter says, it’s like getting recommendations from your friends, except they happen to be music superstars. You can search for artists through the search field and play a selection of songs from them.

Twitter announced last week that it had acquired “We Are Hunted,” a music recommendation and streaming company based in Australia. Twitter also released Vine, a dedicated six-second video app, in January.

“There are times when you need a single-purpose driven knife in the kitchen and there are times when you are out camping and you want a Swiss Army knife. We have different apps for different purposes,” Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of product, said earlier this week at the “All Things D: Dive into Mobile” conference when asked about the different apps Twitter has been releasing. Last week Facebook released Facebook Home for select Android phones. Home provides a Facebook experience deeper than an app.

The Twitter #Music app will be out later today in the Apple App Store; there is no Android app yet.

Source: ABC News (by Joanna Stern)

The past week has seen a flurry of activity around Twitter’s purported new music streaming service, #music. As previously reported, Ryan Seacrest told his followers last Thursday that Twitter #music was real, and he was already playing with it. Over the last two days, a number of prominent musicians have also tweeted about the service, which reportedly pulls in tracks from a number of services including Rdio, Spotify, YouTube, Vevo, SoundCloud, and iTunes.

In one tweet, Nikki Sixx calls #music revolutionary, while Moby, Alt-J, and Ne-Yo all appear impressed with it as well. Moby, after listening to a James Blake track through the service, called it “a really interesting music resource,” Ne-Yo said that “Twitter has some insane things in the pipeline,” and Alt-J called it “rad.” As AllThingsD points out, Ryan Seacrest has been known to engage in “faux-stealth marketing” in the past, so it’s a little tricky to take these new, overwhelmingly positive comments at face value.

It’s not clear when Twitter will make #music available publicly, nor do we know exactly how it will work. Earlier rumors pointed to a launch to coincide with the Coachella festival, but that’s now come and gone. In the meantime, you can console yourself with the fact that more important people than you are having the time of lives using the service.

Source: The Verge (by Aaron Souppouris)

Twitter has published a music.twitter.com webpage with a #music hashtag and a so-far-non-functional sign-in button, suggesting that Twitter’s new music application will launch as soon as this weekend.

Twitter Music will almost certainly suggest artists to follow and songs to listen to, likely built on the music discovery platform We Are Hunted, which Twitter bought last year.

An internal test of the service by We Are Hunted founder Stephen Phillips revealed last month that it publishes expanded tweets about what you’re listening to at any given moment with album art, an embedded audio file containing the song itself, and the ability to “heart” the song, share it on social networks such as Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest, and — of course — retweeet or favorite it on Twitter.

Here’s an example:

Currently, while the site is up, it’s just a placeholder. You can click the sign-in button to initiate a logging in with your Twitter identify, but upon signing in are simply presented with the sign-in page once more. According to some reports, however, the service will go fully live as soon as today.

This weekend is an appropriate time to launch: massive music festival Coachella 2013‘s first weekend kicks off today.

Source: VentureBeat (by John Koetsier)

1. Authenticity

First and foremost, communication with your fans must come from you, the artist, in your voice. Not your manager, label, or intern. People aren’t interested in hearing generic updates from your label or agent. They want to get to know your personality, hear about your experiences. Essentially, fans want to feel like they’re on the journey of your career along with you.

Now, can updates sometimes come from your manager/label/intern? Yes, but sparingly, and it should be made clear when the updates are not coming directly from you. For example, on Facebook and Twitter, any updates coming from your management/label could be tagged with “- Team Example Artist”. Nobody else should try to “sound” like you if they’re updating your social media profiles on your behalf.

2. Consistency

Consistency is key when it comes to engaging with your fans. You can’t post an update on Facebook one day, then disappear for several weeks to come back and find that a bunch of fans responded with questions that you never answered. People will likely stop paying attention if you don’t have a consistent presence. There are tons of distractions out there, so to truly break through the clutter, you have to be consistent. Take some time every day to check your social media profiles, respond to fans, ask questions, and start conversations.

3. Sustainability

And finally, when it comes to fan engagement, you have to sustain it over the long term. Don’t expect immediate results. It might take months of being consistent to start seeing more quality interactions with your fans, which in turn could lead to new fans, more people at your shows, and increased sales.

There are literally thousands of distractions out there for people. But if you show up every day ready to engage with your fans in some way; answering a few emails, responding on Twitter, asking questions on Facebook, and you sustain that over months, then years, you will no doubt develop a solid fan base to give yourself the best opportunity to build a sustainable career. 

Never Leave Your Fans Hanging

One extremely important thing to keep in mind when it comes to fan engagement: never leave a fan hanging. If they email you, email back. If they leave a comment on Facebook, respond, or at least “Like” it. If they reply or ask a question on Twitter, respond back. A short answer or a quick thank you can go a long way in making that fan feel special, like they’re an active part of your world.

As an artist, it really has become part of the job description to interact with your fans. And since fans now have access to an unlimited amount of music, if you leave them hanging, chances are, they can easily find an artist that won’t.

Source: Hypebot (by Dave Cool)

For music fans, a mobile phone doesn’t say, “Call me.” It says Call Me Maybe.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s viral hit is one example of how phones, social media and streaming have revolutionized music consumption.

With 119.8 million streams, Jepsen’s viral hit was the most streamed song and video of 2012. The singer has 5.6 million Twitter followers and 5.2 million “likes” on Facebook. A lot of those admirers connected with her via cellphones, a crucial social conduit between fan and artist, according to The Entertainment Consumer: State of the Media Report, to be issued by Nielsen next week.

Via phones, 55% of consumers read artist and band Facebook posts, 53% “like” posts, 30% comment on posts and 28% click on timelines. In the Twitterverse, 26% of fans read artist tweets and 14% retweet.

“It’s the entertainment portal,” says David Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment. “You’ve got a much more engaged consumer and many more opportunities for artists and fans to interact. Word of mouth used to be one-to-one. Now it’s one-to-many, where each fan becomes a micro-marketer.”

Streaming has proven effective as a promotional tool: 29% of consumers are likely to buy music after hearing a stream. Among sites, YouTube continues to clobber the competition with 129.3 million streams in 2012, up 1%; Pandora trails with 14.9 million streams, up 5.2%; and Spotify, gaining ground with a 91.2% spike, tallied 10.2 million streams.

YouTube’s slight growth doesn’t portend a plateau.

“I don’t foresee any flat-lining,” Bakula says. “We’ve seen nothing but acceleration and growth. YouTube has become a more popular consumption channel than radio.”

Other Nielsen findings:

• One third of the U.S. population falls into a class of “entertainment aficionados,” an ethnically diverse group of consumers with an average household income of $63,000. They account for 78% of music sales and 70% of spending across all entertainment categories. The “low entertainment spender,” average income $53,000, listens to more music (6.1 hours a week vs. 4.3 hours for aficionados) but attends fewer live events (2.9 hours vs. 3.4 hours), not surprising given the steep cost of concert tickets.
  
  
• Teens spend six hours a week listening to music, about one hour more than fans 18 and older.
  
  
• Female Internet users 18 and older are more likely than men to buy physical and digital music.
  
  
• Though physical CD sales fell 13.5% to 194 million albums, overall, music sales in 2012 rose 3.1% thanks to a 14.1% jump in digital albums (to 118 million copies) and a 5.1% increase in digital tracks (to 1.3 billion, the most downloads ever purchased in a single year).

Source: USA Today (by Edna Gundersen)