Great new changes are rolling out on social media that will have a positive impact for many business users. We’re excited because of the way it allows us to achieve even better visibility for our clients.
What Do These Changes Mean?
All of these changes are designed to make it easier for you to engage with, share to, and reach more people. These are positive changes that will allow us to better amplify and magnify your visibility and enhance your digital footprint.
Read more below for details on the individual changes being rolled out to LinkedIn and Twitter:
LinkedIn Pulse: The New Format
The new LinkedIn publishing format is rolling out, and it gives publishers a lot more control over their content. What we love:
Header images can now be the full page width.
You can toggle to the standard image if your image doesn’t work:
However, the wider image provides much more flexibility for branding and visual magnificence!
Other changes to the publishing experience on LinkedIn are just as great and possibly even more powerful in terms of increasing visibility. LinkedIn has made it easier to add images, video (supporting YouTube, Vimeo, and other platforms), and slideshows (supporting SlideShare, Prezi, and other platforms) right into the body of your articles. You can even embed a tweet easily, simply by adding the link:
Most importantly, LinkedIn is ending the requirement of using the three tags to categorize your article. The tag choices were often limited and narrowing, preventing the article from reaching its full audience. The tagging system is being replaced with a content- and hashtag-driven introduction:
This brings us to the next fabulous change on LinkedIn:
LinkedIn Now Supports Hashtags
Hint: We’ve anticipated this change for some time and have used hashtags in our client posts regularly.
LinkedIn has finally given in: After removing support for hashtags in 2013 because of “poor response,” they’ve finally realized that hashtags are the most practical tool for making content searchable. It’s already been rolled out on the mobile app, with desktop support coming soon.
Twitter Updates Character Count Rules
In a move that completely delights us, Twitter will no longer count links or images as part of the 140-character restriction for tweets. They will also stop counting the characters of the user in a reply. This means we can craft even more exceptional messages without losing a good chunk of the space to an image or link. Twitter is also removing the requirement to add a . before a mention to make sure it is seen by all. (In the past, if you wanted to complain, say, about poor service at the Courtyard Marriott, and you wanted to make sure the whole world saw it, you would have to write .@CourtyardHotels, or it would be treated like a direct message and go only to the user.
Further enhancing the platform, Twitter is now allowing users to retweet and quote themselves, providing an opportunity to be more engaging. Read more on the Twitter blog.