WordPress fans, of which we are, that can’t make the WordCamp conference this weekend in San Francisco should visit the WordPress hub to see if they are coming to a city near you soon.

There seems to be a constant theme appearing in all the top tips for successful social networking - engagement with the audience. Communication must be both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ - two way. Ask by all means, but give too.
Leah Betancourt of Mashable has an straightfoward five point plan for making your twitter profile and facebook page work for you. Read it here.

You know it. We know it. Twitter is mainstream communication, so Openface have added Twitter to our charity benchmark criteria to ensure a meaningful, up to date and relevant report. We want to help Charities understand how to use Twitter, help those that don’t use it (yet), and help others use it better.

This research was conducted at the end of last year (Nov 2009). Despite our best intentions errors and omissions can/may occur.

The Findings

1. 76 of the 120 charity websites included in the 2007 Charity Benchmark study are on Twitter with an official twitter profile. This is 63% penetration of our sample group.

Average, minimums and maximums values for 4 parameters indicating the presence of charities on Twitter. Calculated for 76 charities.

	# followers	# following	# of updates	days since updates
Average	1402	764	430	6
Minimum	0	0	0	0
Max	9228	7475	6083	69

2. Dogs Trust has the highest ‘# followers’ and ‘# of updates’.
   
   
3. Oxfam has highest ‘# following’.
   

The Twitter accounts of most charities represent their unique personalities. Some charities need to catch up:


4. 15 Charities are yet to customise their background.
5. 7 Charities have yet to upload their logo or personalise their picture.
6. 20 Charities had a link, announcement or follow me message on their home page to their twitter account.
7. Charities that tweet use a wide variety of tools to do it. The tools used, in alphabetical order, are; act.ly, api, bit.ly, cotweet, echofon, facebook, hootsuite, mrtweet, ping.fm, seesmic, snaptu, tweetdeck, tweetie, twhirl, twitpic, twitterBerry, twitterfeed, twitttertools, txt, ubertwitter, and web.

The ‘take-aways’:

1. If you are going to tweet, participate in the conversation – regular, meaningful tweets.
2. Provide clear responsibility and communication guidelines for the tweetor/ers.
3. Brand your Twitter account.
4. Ease finding your Twitter profile. The search to reveal if a twitter account exists usually ended clicks away from the Charities home page in a subsection of contact us/social networks or ‘get involved’, instead of an instantly recognisable twitter logo on the home page.
5. Update your sites. Sites that did tweet linked often had a high profile link to their Facebook page but not Twitter.

To find out how you fared or commission an updated personalised charity report, please don’t hesitate to contact mcarmichael@openface.com.

P.S. Apologies for the delay in sharing the results.

Mark Zuckerberg bloged on 4th Feb that Facebook had reached 400 million users. Let’s put that in perspective by comparing it to country populations; US population is 308.6 million, Thailand’s population is 68 million, UK population is 61 million and Canada’s population is 34 million. Facebook is not yet India or China, but it may be hoping to get close to that size!

To celebrate the birthday Facebook released a site redesign with functional improvements -especially easier image uploading.

Happy Birthday Facebook.
Facebook users, don’t forget to maintain and update your privacy and security settings. They are there to help you.

All growth cycles are just that - they go up, up, up and then down - eventually. Twitter just keeps going up - for now. On the 12th of Jan 40 million tweets were made in 24 hours, helping the site reach it’s monumental announcement of 1.2 billion tweets this Jan. Did they round up or down to get to the nice round number? Who cares. Twitter stills seems to be growing strong.

Read more on pingdom

The Big Money’s Chad Matlin recently announced the Twitter 12 and explains his selection criteria for choosing 12 American corporations who are getting the most out of Twitter.

The process only considered US corporate Twitter profiles with over a million followers, their growth from September to November 09, the number and regularity of tweets and content - if the account is doing more than reprinting an existing feed. The Big Money indicate the results are influenced by whom Twitter recommends as a friend - so some companies are easier to find than others, and how much more meaningful and easier it is to have a tweeted two-way conversation with real people. How fed up are you phoning the bank listening to lists and lists of options when all you want to ask someone is how much an international bank transfer costs?

The top 12 are:
12. Amazon Mp3
11. Dell Outlet
10. Silicon Alley Insider
9. JetBlue
8. Health Magazine
7. Etsy
6. BNO News
5. Whole Foods
4. CNN Breaking News
3. NBA
2. E! Online
1. Find out who the finalist was by reading the original article.

‘njoy.

Openface is about to issue a 2009 update to the Chairty Benchmark Report, looking at the original 120 charities uptake and participation on Twitter….
How many UK charities do you think use Twitter?
Results coming in December.

Thank you Mashable for pointing out that following the Spanish version, Twitter is now available in French. Simply select your language preference in the settings menu.
Bon chance.

Have you heard all the buzz of the internet turning 40 just a moment ago? Seems a bit older than you think doesn’t it? Well technically they are right. And so are you.

On the 2nd of September in 1969 somewhere in a lab at the University of California there was an exchange of data over a cable. Then on the 29th of October 1969, UC exchanged data off site with Stanford University. Only part of the data was exchanged as the system promptlly crashed.

Several other US universities joined in and the first nodes in ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the computer network were formed - which in turn gave birth to the internet.

But for the likes of you and I… the internet as we know it; the world wide web (www) was released and announced on August 6, 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee announced the phenonemon publicly for the first time.

So that’s more like 18 years old, rather than 40! See not that old after all. If you’d like to read more I recommend this article in The Guardian.

A reminder to UK charities with an online presence that we still undertake the research for personalised charity benchmark reports.

The reports compare your site to five competitors from our benchmark against the established tried and tested set of criteria. The criteria get’s updated as the industry adapts to more tools, for instance we look at in particular a charities uptake to the popular micro-blogging site Twitter this year.

The process takes up to four weeks to provide you a report that will help you justify your marketing budget and provide valuable insights as to how your site performs, identifing areas of greatness and opportunity - which ever is applicable.

The personalised report is £1650.00.

Please contact us by email if you’d like more information; mcarmichael@openface.com.

P.S. returning customers get a ‘welcome back’ discount.