Social Media Updates for YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn
In the past few months, there have been some noteworthy social media updates to the platforms that we use in our businesses. It’s easy enough to not even realized that they happened if you’re not monitoring social media news sites daily, or if you’re not a regular contributor to your social media profiles.
Here are some noteworthy social media updates that may impact the way you are socializing and creating content:
YouTube Partnered with Creative Commons – According to the YouTube blog, the Creative Commons library is now available through YouTube Video Editor. This means that you can now find videos to include in your YouTube videos without buying the rights through stock video sites. They’ve partnered with organizations like C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera and others, which means that news-related videos just got a whole lot easier to produce.
- Other recent news from YouTube:
- YouTube Introduces the +1 Button
- YouTube Answers Fair Use Questions
- YouTube Gives Easier Way to Migrate Google Video Content to YouTube
- YouTube Begins Lifting 15-Minute Time Limit for Users
Twitter Gets Integrated into iPhone Software – If you weren’t sure whether Twitter was mainstream enough yet, check out the new iOS software for every iPhone out there. Coming in the Fall, any iPhone user will be able to tweet directly from their basic iPhone apps, like the camera, photo album, YouTube app, Safari, etc.
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- Other recent news from Twitter
- Twitter Search Gets a Huge Update for Photos and Hashtags
- Twitter Releases Easy-to-Install “Follow” Button (good ideas for creative implementation in this article)
Google Pays Much More Attention to Facebook Shares & Comments – We’ve tested this ourselves with astounding results. I’m talking about bringing a page 6 article to page one in a single day. Here’s the gist: When you share an article on Facebook and get a bunch of comments on it, your rank on that article goes up. If other people share that article on their walls, your rank goes up even more.
What we did, was post an article on the walls of the businesses that we highlighted in the article, so in essence, it was shared multiple times on different FB walls. This boosted rank. Once people “liked” those shares and started commenting, it brought the article from page 6 to page 1. We then tried this on a landing page for a free report (with a highly competitive keyword), which brought the rank from page two to page one.
Facebook Rolls Out Updates to Groups – Groups are great for some businesses, as long as they can figure out how to create and use them in a user-friendly manner. For Mequoda, we’ll likely be rolling out a Mequoda Summit group, so that attendees can stay up to date on new speakers, agenda changes, hotel accommodations etc. It’ll also be useful for those of us who like to keep in touch with one another after the event has ended. For your publishing business, you can probably think of a similar idea for a specific user base who might appreciate the forum-type dialog that it’s used for.
Facebook Groups is only about 6 months old, but they’ve recently made updates, like allowing you to poll the people in your group and more importantly, share things only with members of the group. So for example, if we made an update to our Mequoda Summit page, we could now post a link to that page, and only have it sent to members of the Mequoda Summit group.
LinkedIn Today Launches (and Offers a Few Marketing Opps) – A few months ago, LinkedIn Today launched. It’s basically a new stream of news that you will see in your dashboard, but may also have emailed to you. The blog links in this stream come from the people who are connected to you. They are the articles and web pages that have been shared. The results that show up are based on how many people like the shared article. In many niche markets, you have a great ability to get into this feed and get seen by the majority of people in your network.
In a market like online marketing, Mequoda doesn’t stand much of a chance, however, a market like healthcare will often get articles featured in the feed with only two “likes” because many people in that industry don’t share many articles. With this new feature of LinkedIn, I’d highly recommend starting to share more content on that platform to see if it can become a new source of traffic.
