The week in content marketing: LinkedIn’s stealth move into instant messaging

Steven Perryman
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

From structuring your URLs the right way for SEO through to the latest on LinkedIn’s stealth move into messaging, here’s four articles you should read this week.

1. LinkedIn moves in on messaging

The rise of messaging knows no bounds — especially now LinkedIn is getting in on the act.

Yep, in a sleight of hand that would make David Blaine boss-eyed, the professional network has introduced a new feature it’s calling ‘active status’ — in short, a green circle that shows when a user is online and available to chat via its messaging platform:

An example of active status on LinkedIn

The new feature (which is switched on as a default, natch) is designed to make the platform more useful for candidates, colleagues and recruiters. “Ultimately, we want to make it easy for people to have productive conversations that can help them get ahead in their careers,” Sammy Shreibati, the company’s Senior Product Manager, told Forbes.

But are people really ready to have instant messaging on a professional network? Microsoft — who bought the company for $26.2bn last year — is certainly hoping so.

2. How to structure your URLs the right way

Making your content SEO friendly for organic search is a must-have for most content marketers. But if you’re like me, the failures outweigh the successes by at least 10 to one, maybe more.

But when you get a big hit, you win big. In a previous role I edited a piece about issues in financial services that still ranks very highly on a Google search. It is probably one of the most visited pages on the company’s website (I don’t know that for sure, of course, having rescinded my analytics rights when I left).

Sure, we’ve all heard about how keywords, social sharing and backlinks contribute to how highly a piece of content appears on Google, but what about URL structure? In this excellent post Neil Patel outlines how to ensure your URLs are letting off the right signals for search engines.

From keywords (yes, them again) to ‘stop words’ (you’ll have to read the post yourself to find out what they are), everything you ever wanted or needed to know on URLs is here. Worth a read.

3. Social quotes get skewered

We’ve all done it — created a quote image for social, that is. And it’s fair to say they have become ubiquitous across most social platforms.

But which are the biggest offenders? In this post, Jay Baer pinpoints three of the worst, including users who create quote images….of their own quotes!

One to bear in mind the next time an executive asks you to create a quote image of their wisdom so it can ‘go viral’.

From the archives: six content marketing tools you will love

There are some great evergreen posts out there on content marketing and social, and this section is an opportunity to throw a spotlight on the best ones.

This week it is Michael Brenner’s post from June that outlines six tools you should be using for your content marketing research. Tools range from the free (Google auto-fill) to paid (Buzzsumo). Definitely worth another read.

Picture: Flickr/sheilascarborough

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Steven Perryman

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Content marketer | Editorial strategist | Writer | Editor

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