Weekly Social Recap

Facebook

This week Facebook unveiled "Groups" which gives users a place to participate in various activities such as document sharing, chat, photo-tagging and email lists with a select group of friends. Other than the name this is very different than their previous "group" functionality. This was built internally by Facebook with an effort to mirror "real-world" groups, allowing users to control the distribution of their messages, and build them around multiple contexts. Zuckerberg promises, something “so simple that everyone on the site will want to interact with it.”

Here is good demo & overview from Mashables' Ben Parr:


Twitter

For many of us Twitter's new User Interface or User Experience (UI / UX) was implemented this week. Twitter has been busy rolling out it's redesign over the last few weeks. The redesign integrates multimedia into the stream on "Twitter.com" taking elements from many of the third-party applications available. So far the response has been positive, and likely the redesign will help create stickiness on the "Twitter.com" website versus sending their users elsewhere across the web. This also opens a new world of revenue and advertising opportunities for them.


Interesting uses of Social Media

Staples

Staples is a great example of a big brand using their social media channels in creative ways. They use their Twitter Page for community updates, customer support, and overall feedback. With several writers under various tags (^MO) they have managed to give the brand a personality and even mix in some humor. They have also devised a creative way to create new followers, like donating a dollar to charities of your choice for each new follower.

Staples has also had success with their Facebook Page. They created an app that lets you digitally shred or edit Facebook photos of yourself, they highlight their weekly deals, have a download button for their iphone app, have fun facts about the company, and offer other creative engagement strategies.