New Changes to the Social Media Landscape
If you’re still ignoring social media as part of your marketing and PR strategy, it’s time to make a change. On the trail of an exponentially growing marketplace, top social media platforms are adjusting styles and adding special features to meet the needs of businesses. With the goal of greater connections to consumers in mind, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest recently introduced new features to appeal to marketing tactics across industries.
If you are still ignoring social media as part of your marketing and PR strategy, it’s time to make a change.
Facebook took the lead with the launch of its new “featured events” application. A team of “curators” from Facebook will compile a list of local events with a focus on location, capacity, and appeal to a wide audience. Previous lists were formed based upon computer-generated algorithms, but the new feature is unique in being formed by actual people. Following the backlash against Facebook’s “Trending Topics,” featured events will avoid gatherings with political or religious affiliation and will not be influenced by paid ads. The app launched in ten major cities in late June, but is expected to spread if successful.
Twitter is targeting small and mid-sized businesses that have yet to come on board with the fast paced social site. The new “Twitter Dashboard” is a free online tool available to all Twitter users, both on desktop and iOS platforms. According to a post from the Twitter company blog, this feature is designed to connect businesses more easily with their customers and community, while also improving efficiency through scheduled tweets. Businesses can also track mentions of their organization, view suggested posts or topics for target audiences, and collect analytics from the site. Similar to larger partners such as Hootsuite, Twitter Dashboard is intended to encourage smaller businesses to stay active on the site in a more straightforward manner.
LinkedIn is trying a new system for an old market by changing their sales method for display ads. Businesses will now have the opportunity to bid on display ads in an online auction, similar to how one would buy an item off of eBay. This decision follows a 30 percent drop in display ad revenue over the past year. Consistently outperformed by content marketing efforts, display ads now represent only 10 percent of LinkedIn’s ad revenue, while sponsored content bring in 56 percent. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions’ head of products, Russ Glass, told Marketing Land the change was less about revenue and more about giving advertisers easier access to the space they want, while also saving the company time and money.
Pinterest is focused on more direct marketing by expanding opportunities for e-commerce within the site and app. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, who have backed off their in-app purchasing efforts, Pinterest has long term goals of making shopping a regular occurrence for users. In the coming months, the app expects to debut a camera feature where users can take a picture of any item and receive a Pinterest board of similar items and ideas in response. These plans will follow the recently updated “automatic detection tool,” which allows users to click on items in a picture to generate similar objects on the site. A recent Forbes report shows that consumers are on board with Pinterest’s long-term goals, suggesting users to be twice as likely to make a purchase through a pin than in a store.
How do these updates impact you and your business? Will you be using the new Twitter dashboard to stay organized? Or maybe watching the LinkedIn banner ad auctions, in hopes of getting a deal? However these changes will impact you, stay on top of your game by staying up to date with these changes in the marketplace.
