5 recent social media changes that you might have missed
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A series on Content Marketing wouldn’t be complete without looking at social media, and I’m very excited to introduce today’s guest blogger, Nicky Kriel, author of How to Twitter for Business Success. I met her in a LinkedIn group several years ago, where we quickly discovered that we shared similar views about automation and other aspects of social media usage, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. Nicky is right on top of current trends, and I’m sure you’ll be interested in what she has to say.
Social Media changes constantly and it is hard to keep up, so I was thrilled when Janet gave me a chance to write a round-up. I have included some changes that aren’t brand new, but that might be useful for you to know about.
Twitter Analytics
Okay, Twitter Analytics is not brand new, it was launched in October, and it has just undergone a bit of facelift so I am going to use that as an excuse to talk about Twitter Analytics in case you’ve missed it.
Twitter Analytics shows the real impressions and engagement of your Tweets rather than an estimated impression based on the number of followers you have. Twitter Analytics used to only be available by visiting https://analytics.twitter.com, but now you can access it on Twitter.com by clicking on your profile picture and selecting it from the drop-down menu.
There are Tabs along the top which allow you to assess your individual Tweets, understand a bit more about your followers and see how effective your Twitter Cards have been. It is worth assessing the effectiveness of your tweeting so that you can do more of tweets that works for your business.
Group Messaging on Twitter
Direct messages now don’t have to be one-to-one anymore. You can now have a group discussion in private. You can add up to 20 people into the group via Twitter messages. I am not sure that it will take off because of the restriction in characters, but I think messaging will be very big news in 2015 and Twitter has to keep up with this growing trend.
Videos on Facebook
Facebook have decided to tackle YouTube’s dominance of the video sharing market and as a result, videos uploaded directly onto Facebook are getting more video views than videos that originate from YouTube at the moment. Facebook is giving these videos precedence on the Timeline so your friends and fans are more likely to see native video posts. What this means is that when you create a video, you want to make sure you upload it to both Facebook and YouTube to get more views. YouTube may be the world’s second largest search engine, but I’ve found that my videos hosted on Facebook are getting far more views at the moment.
You can now have a Featured video on your Facebook Business Page – You can upload a video directly onto your Facebook and set it up as a featured video. The video section will be in the left hand column. You can drag and move it up to give it greater prominence. You can boost video posts too.
New look to LinkedIn
If you don’t visit LinkedIn very often, you will notice that there have been a few changes this year. LinkedIn has recently updated its look of the homepage and profiles to encourage people to spend more time on LinkedIn. It has been rolling out the changes to its 347 million users since the beginning of the year. What you will now see on the homepage is a cleaner design. It shows profile analytics and content that connections share more prominently. It has introduced a “Keep in touch” slider on the right to encourage more engagement. It has also added a few new sections to the profile section and made editing your profile easier.
Instagram grew by 100 million users in nine months and has now reached 300 million monthly users (more than Twitter) so is worth looking at it if you are not using it already. It has only recently allowed you to edit your captions on your photographs and videos. This allows you to get rid of those pesky grammatical errata and typos now. I’m surprised how many Instagrammers still don’t know about this.
Hot off the Press: Facebook have just launched a free online course for Marketers which is called The Blueprint. I haven’t had a chance to have a good look at it yet, but it is worth having a look at it if you want to learn more about Facebook advertising and marketing campaigns.
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Thank Janet for this opportunity to write for you. I really appreciate your friendship.
And I yours! Following people who think the same way can be a hazard, because we don’t get exposed to other points of view, but I’m happy to say that I always learn something new from you. Thank you for being my guest here today.
Great tips! I didn’t know about Facebook videos. I will have to tell my admin clients about that one. Thanks for sharing Nicky and Janet.
It’s hard to keep up with all these changes, isn’t it? I’m grateful for people like Nicky who do, and graciously share their knowledge.
Glad you find you find it useful, Sabrina.
I didn’t know that Nicky, about the analytics on twitter. Very useful.
Thank you, Gill. I love Twitter Analytics.
Thanks for the “heads-up.” I had NO idea that Instagram had surpassed twitter. I’ve been ignoring it up till now. Time to change that and find out what it is all about and how to use it for book marketing!