Smashing Daily: Brands, Business and UX

We have lots and lots of good stuff here for your weekend reading pleasure in the Smashing Daily, like some thoughts about the first transatlantic communication cable, and some thoughts about brands (and if you can actually care about them). We have a good article about expectations when doing business, and an idea to serve images that are acceptable to the retina. There’s news about jQuery, a post about browser update policies, and much more. Enjoy!

Are there any brands that you care about? If there are, you should probably read this article by Ben Werdmuller. And if you think the idea that people could care about a brand is ridiculous, you’ll probably enjoy reading this article too. I definitely did.

There are no real great distances anymore in our world. If we wanted to (and we had the money) we could be anywhere in the world by tomorrow—probably. Traveling still takes time, but communicating is instantaneous, from wherever you are. Communication is mostly done through cables, and a long time ago the very first transatlantic cable was realized. Jeremy Keith went to the landing site in North America and wrote down his thoughts about it, including lots of great links and movies.

Since Mike Monteiro wrote his excellent book Design Is A Job (yes, you should definitely read it), the business side of design seems to be getting more attention, and that’s good. For too long we’ve been playing the artist who doesn’t want to know about money. Here’s another great article by Greg Hoy about legal agreements you sign with your clients, and what they mean.

A while ago I was wondering if we really need to quadruple all images in size in order to keep our visitors with a retina display happy. I thought that maybe a smaller increase in size might actually be good enough, so I wrote a little draft about this idea (with a half-assed example… I didn’t really have the time to do proper research and to test it on various devices).

If we wait for people to update their ancient browsers, how long will it take before we can build the things we really want to build? Paul Irish takes a look at the new IE update policy and shows us some charts. I think the results don’t look too good, so maybe it’s time we lower the support for browsers that are not up to date. And by lowering them I mean something like removing all styles. Maybe people will upgrade if the Web looks broken?

If you just follow these 25 simple rules by Alex Morris then UX is simple. There are some excellent points made, well worth living by.

One of the problems many developers have with jQuery is that it’s enormous. One of the reasons why it is this big is because it supports some ancient browsers. The big news is that support for these old browsers will stop in version 2.0, and that jQuery will be available as a bunch of optional components (although this is not mentioned in the article). This will probably decrease the file-size dramatically. Good news for people with good browsers on flaky connections.

Do you need more to read? Here’s a great reading list by Bruce Lawson about Web standards, the Web industry and more.

If you like small facts, interesting numbers or quotes, then this small network of blogs by Kai Brach is for you. It looks absolutely beautiful and the small articles are an unobtrusive pleasure for our over-filled news feeds.

For previous Smashing Daily issues, check out the Smashing Daily Archive.

Smashing Editorial

Sven (sl), Vitaly (vf), Iris (il), Jan (jc) and Esther (ea) love high-quality content and care about little details. They also believe that good content and design are crafts worth sharpening.

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Following Brands on Twitter Increases Purchase Intent

People who follow brands on Twitter are more likely to both buy and recommend those brands’ products, according to a recent study of online consumer behavior.

The study, conducted by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, analyzed the behavior of 1,491 consumers ages 18 and older throughout the U.S., and revealed a number of details about how people interact with brands on the world’s beloved 140-character social network.

So, just how powerful is the Twitter connection between consumers and businesses? The study found that 60% of brand followers are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after following the brand on Twitter, and 50% of brand followers are more likely to buy from that brand.

These findings mirror those from a previous report, detailing how consumers interact with brands on Facebook. The study found that 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after “Liking” a brand on Facebook, and 51% of consumers said they are more likely to buy a product after doing so. The findings from both studies seem to show that customer loyalty is about the same across both social networks.

Any increase in customer loyalty is great news for brands, especially those lucky enough to make the coveted list of followed companies. According to the study, though, the chances of making that list are slim, as only 21% of Twitter users follow brands on Twitter, and of those, 79% follow fewer than 10 brands.

If your brand makes it to that highly sought-after status, you’re in for the long haul — a whopping 75% of respondents claimed that they had never unfollowed a brand on Twitter. This finding, though, contradicts a previous study, which claimed that 41% of consumers have unfollowed a company on Twitter. The trend seems to favor longevity in both studies, however. If a user opts to follow your brand on Twitter, it’s more likely they’ll continue following, rather than decide to unfollow.

When it comes to a consumer’s decision to follow brands on Twitter, exclusivity and access to promotions reign. Here are the top five reasons given by respondents:
64%: I am a customer of the company61%: To be the first to know information about the brand48%: To receive discounts and promotions36%: To gain access to exclusive content28%: To receive content/information to retweet and share with others
For the most part, brand interaction on Twitter is still largely a one-way process. While 84% of followers read tweets posted by the brands they follow, only 23% claim to tweet about the brands they follow.

The study also found that Twitter users are frequent Internet users overall — 50% of Twitter users in the study reported going online more than once per hour. Of Facebook users, only 34% of respondents reported going online multiple times per hour. Facebook and Twitter users both outpace the average Internet user, though, as only 29% of overall users that do not have Twitter and Facebook accounts reported logging on many times within an hour.

Twitter users even use Facebook more than users who stick solely to Facebook — 60% of Twitter users use Facebook more than three hours per week, compared with 49% of Facebook users overall.

The study offered one final nugget of wisdom that should inform how brands on Twitter approach their content strategies — 67% of brand followers expect unique content from the brands they follow. So get to it, social media strategists!

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Why Facebook Timeline Will Be Huge for Brands

Zeny Huang is an Emerging Media Strategist at JWT New York where she helps brands connect with fans in innovative and meaningful ways using social media. You can follow her on Twitter @Zenidala.

When Facebook unveiled Timeline last week, many users were struck by the idea of humanizing your profile by summarizing your life and connections.

But what if you’re not a human at all?

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