Podcast: Play in new window
In this video Mick talks about the upcoming free Redcliffe workshops that you can access to learn about social media and how to put it to use in your business. You can see the upcoming events at http://redcliffesocialmedia.com
00:09 New free social media workshops posted
01:00 YouTube ranking algorithm changes
01:34 Twitter profile cover images
01:50 Twitter adds email tweet option to web platform
02:04 Facebook Mobile app share function added
02:20 Facebook ‘Page only’ feed added
02:43 Upcoming changes to Facebook comments system – threaded comments
03:40 ‘Pinned Posts’ to be available in Facebook Groups
04:10 Facebook Ads to provide code that you can add to your website for better conversions
04:40 Instagram profiles now viewable on the web – more visibility
05:30 New training courses for 2013 – iPhone training, website in a day, Facebook, LinkedIn
For discounts on upcoming paid courses please make sure you are an email subscriber (visit home page and enter your details) so you get early notification and discount coupons.
Free workshops? – Join Redcliffe Social Media MeetUp
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Transcript:
G’day! It’s Mick. I just want to let you know, if you haven’t been onto RedcliffeSocialMedia.com for a while, I’ve just put up a whole heap of events for this coming year for 2013. So you can go check out that.
Workshops
There are other free workshops you can come along to and you just need to join the group. For example, there is one there for online reputation management, blogging for business, how to use Google+; we are looking at podcasting; we’re going to look at how to get your books published on the Kindle platform; we’re going to look at social media policies for your business; Instagram, it’s a large picture sharing service; we’ll look at how you can use that in your business. We are also going to cover outsourcing and online or cloud accounting software that you can use.
So head on over to RedcliffeSocialMedia.com. Join the group there and see the other kinds of members that get along and look at the past event reviews and start RSVP’ing for the events that are coming up so we can gauge numbers and book venues.
YouTube
Some other quick roundup tips of things that have been happening online. YouTube has made a big change to their ranking algorithm for how they rank and show different videos. They have now switched from looking at the number of views that the video has to how many people are watching the video all the way through.
The engagement and interest that your video is holding on YouTube will now feedback into how well a video performs within search results on YouTube. So it is quite a big change and it’s great because this will now force businesses and content producers to make better videos that are going to hold our attention and be more entertaining and more interesting.
Over on Twitter – don’t forget if you haven’t been to your Twitter profile for a while and updated your cover image, you can now do that. So very much like Facebook, you can have a cover image across the top of your Twitter profile. Check that out.
They[Twitter] have also just added to the web platform the ability to email tweets. So if you notice someone is not on Twitter and you see a tweet they may be interested in, you can actually click a button there and send an email of the tweet to them and get it to them that way.
Facebook’s been up to changes as well. The new mobile app that they’ve just released the update for, that includes the Share function. From the [Facebook] mobile app, you can now share posts just like you can on the web version. That wasn’t previously available before. Facebook has added a “Page only” feed. So you may be aware, there is quite a lot of commentary online about edgerank and the fact that a lot of the posts you are making on your Facebook Page for your business aren’t necessarily actually being seen by all your fans.
So now you can educate your fans to go across, and choose the “Pages only” feed and then they are more likely to see your updates and the updates of all the pages that they have actually ‘liked’ as opposed to having it filtered in their personal news stream.
Big change to the comment system on Facebook that they’re looking at rolling out is the ability to have a threaded conversations. So at the moment when you leave a reply underneath a Facebook status update, it just goes down one underneath the other.
The threaded ability means that if someone has made a comment halfway down the comment stream or above you, you can actually make a comment on their comment as opposed to just adding it to the bottom. You will actually be able to have some conversations backwards and forwards with people in the comment streams below Facebook updates rather than just putting it at the bottom of the list.
The other thing they[Facebook] are looking at doing is actually ranking the way that the comments appear based on how much engagement there is. So rather than ranking the listing as it currently does now, purely by time, what they are looking to move to is those comments which get a lot of likes or comments back will actually get shifted up towards the top of the status update post.
Facebook is looking at the ability to ‘pin’ posts like you do on your business page and adding that to groups. As a group owner or a group moderator on Facebook if you’re running a Facebook group, you are actually going to be able to pin notifications to the top of the group newsfeed so they let people know if there is an event coming up or something like that rather than have that pushed down as people comment. You can again pin that to the top of the group newsfeed and people will be able to likely see that update.
The other big one for marketers and for business owners is the ability to add Facebook tracking code from Facebook Ads to your website. And what that means is you can take that code and put it in your e-commerce website or in your email update on the success page and that is going to allow you to then track when you’re running the Facebook Ads how many people are actually converting from your Facebook Ads into a successful email subscription or into a successful shopping cart purchase. That is really good useful information you can tie back into your marketing to see what is working and what is not.
Instagram has added a web profiles to their platform. So previously, Instagram was pretty much just a purely mobile social media platform. They have now opened that up and you can access it by the web so you’re probably going to see, again, a growth in Instagram and the ability for those images to be picked up in the search engines. When you are using Instagram, normal social media type considerations apply. The photos that you do take do go out in the public domain. They can be seen and now that there is a web platform to go with it, there is a much greater chance that those photos will be visible to a wider audience.
On the flipside as a business, that’s great, because, of course, you’re going to have more chance of being seen, more traction and get a larger audience as well. So that is the benefit of Instagram moving to a web platform rather than just being solely on the mobile phones.
Wrap-up
We have got a heap of courses coming up next year. Looking at how to use your iPhone basic and advanced; websites, how to create a website in a day; how to shoot videos on your iPhone; the normal sort of LinkedIn, Facebook courses that we run. So if you want to be the first to know about those and get subscriber discounts on the courses, then make sure you opt in for our email updates over at RedcliffeMarketingLabs.com.au. But also if you get all the free training that is put on each month head over to RedcliffeSocialMedia.com; so two addresses there to check out..