Social Media Digest: Pinterest Copyright, Twitter’s 6th & Facebook’s Patents

Welcome back to our run-down of all that’s hot in the world of social media. We’ve been busy scouring the web over the past week to bring you some of the most thought-provoking and informative stories, so sit back, relax and enjoy:

1. Google has announced the launch of a new tool called ‘Social Reports’ which aims to give users of its Analytics a “social value” report to see how social media contributes to conversions on their e-retail sites. Google says the tool will provide marketers with return-on-investment metrics that matter most to executives—conversions and bottom line revenue—rather than data points whose impact aren’t so clear, like the number of Likes retailers have on Facebook. Time will tell as to whether this will produce the ‘holy grail’ of ‘Social Media ROI’ or whether it will continue to be too hard to quantify.

2. Twitter celebrated its 6th birthday this week, with news that the platform now handles 340 million messages per day. Quite an increase from the initial few messages, which were mostly ‘Just setting up my twttr’.  Twitter generates one billion tweets every three days, but things haven’t always been that busy. It took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion tweets, and around 18 months to sign up its first 500,000 accounts. Now, the microblogging platform allegedly signs up half a million new accounts per day. That’s the equivalent of the entire population of London signing up every fortnight.

3. Facebook has reportedly acquired 750 patents from IBM in the run-up to its IPO, presumably to protect itself from future patent-infringment litigation. The claims come from someone with insider knowledge at Bloomberg. The acquisition would vastly increase Facebook’s patent cache, which currently stands at “at least” 56, according to Bloomberg, with another 503 patent applications filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

4. Latest research from Adobe states that the impact of social media is undervalued by nearly 100 per cent. It’s a great stat, fresh from their latest digital index report, but it remains to be seen how accurately they arrived at the final figure. You can read the report here and make your minds up as to whether you feel this is a realistic sum. As with ROI, it can be hard to attribute value to social media activity.

5. Pinterest, the world’s fittest/strongest/most productive/best traffic referer site in the world is drawing every closer to a copyright showdown. The sharing platform, which is still growing faster than we could comprehend is caught it a difficult situation with regards potential revenue generation. The issue stems from whether or not Pinterest launches a business model in the hunt to generate more money. At that point, certain stock photo agencies, particularly Getty, would be very keen to make sure Pinterest used some sort of license for the images shared on its site. You can read more about the issues here, courtesy of Tech Crunch but only time will tell how long Pinterest can sustain growth without wanting to cash in and incur the wrath of image holders.