Here’s a very brief guide to social media platforms and how they are used for traffic generation and social branding. It’s based on my previous post, but has a more updated model. Let me know your thoughts, still a work in progress.

The social media landscape is vast, with different tools and platforms offering different services. Each of these platforms can be used in different ways by brands, so to simplify thing I’ve created this Venn diagram to show how the different platforms fit together. You can see a bigger version by clicking the image.

Ever wanted to be able to export all uses of a particular hashtag? Well, turns out you can, and very easily with a tool called The Archivist. And the company behind it? Twitter? Tweetdeck? No, Microsoft!

Tim Aidlin and Karsten Januszewski of Mix Online have produced a tool that allows you to pull in tweets from a specified hashtag and store them for later analysis. The great thing is that when you first run the tool it will pull in as many mentions as it can find, but if you then leave it running ti will auto refresh every ten minutes. Not only does it produce pretty graphs itself but it also allows you to export to Excel for more in depth analysis.

This tool is very useful to a great number of people for many different reasons. I manage a number of brands on a day to day basis, and being able to track certain hashtags is incredibly useful, especially when we run campaigns using a specific hashtag. And just a few days ago I attended a conference where the use of a hashtag was prolific, using this tool @Jas was able to pull in all the tweets and store them for later reference. Incredibly useful, something I expect to be on a fairly regular basis. Thanks go to @Jas for pointing me in the direction of this great tool!