This summer has been a busy one for the staff at LinkedIn, the business-focused social network. There has been a complete site redesign, lots of new features rolled out, and the whole thing now has a more modern feel. But how will these changes - and others on the horizon - affect how you promote your company on LinkedIn?
Social networks, especially ones like Twitter where update lengths are limited, have frequently been blamed for a decrease in the quality of our communication. Often when chatting with friends online, we tend to abbreviate words and take a looser approach to things like grammar and punctuation. While this may not make much of a difference when using social media on a personal level, when you are using social networks for the purpose of business marketing you may want to keep a few things in mind.
The early days of the web were mostly about exchanging text, but as computers and download speeds got faster, adding images and even video to web content gradually became more and more common. Over the past couple of years, there has been an explosion of image sharing as mobile apps have made it simple for anyone to take a photo wherever they are and send it all over the world with a single push of a button.
It's already abundantly clear that social media marketing is a huge factor in how businesses develop their online presence and connect with their audience. It can be frustrating, then, when despite your best efforts, your social network clout seems to go nowhere and you don't see the growth you were hoping for. If this is the situation you find yourself in, here are a few things you can do to help get things back on the right track.
Now that all Facebook Pages for brands have been moved over to the Timeline format, if you haven't optimized your Timeline you're missing out. Some business owners have stubbornly avoided making changes on the basis that they never wanted to be moved over to Timeline, but now that it's a done deal, you may as well make the most of all the features that are now available.
There are a lot of fun aspects to using Pinterest, and if you're using your account to promote your business, there are even more ways to reach your audience in an effective way. Sometimes even small tweaks to your social media use can yield major results - here are some Pinterest tricks that can help give your marketing efforts a boost.
As the name suggests, press releases used to have a much simpler and straightforward function than they do today, that being to release information to the press in a controlled manner. These days, however, with online media taking over, the press release has now become more of a broadcast, with content from press releases flooding online news aggregators daily.
When Pinterest marketing first become popular last year, people seemed to think that it was mostly for businesses who had something to sell that was primarily of a visual nature. In other words, if you had a catalog of images of products you had for sale, like shoes for example, Pinterest would work well as a marketing tool.
As with most success stories, tales of a meteoric social media campaign gone viral can make you believe that the same kind of success is right around the corner for you, too. You might imagine sitting back while the visitors roll in on your Twitter and Facebook pages, and while you wonder why you didn't get into social media marketing earlier.
Trying to keep up with the latest social networks and social media marketing opportunities is a never-ending battle. As soon as you get to grips with your Twitter and Facebook strategy, up pops Google+. Some businesses also found significant marketing milage on Tumblr. More recently, photo-curation site Pinterest has gotten the attention of businesses who have discovered how to leverage its features for marketing purposes.