This week has been a busy one in social media. Google changed their profile layout with bigger cover style images and Facebook revealed a new newsfeed. I’ve been travelling all over the country and I’ve picked up some new tips and tricks that I’ll be showing you on this blog over the next few weeks. For now here’s my pick of this weeks social media reads.
Everything You Need To Know About The New Facebook News Feed
Every piece of social media news this week has been out-shadowed by the announcement of the new Facebook newsfeed. I’ve applied to be one of the first people to get it but I did that for Graph Search too and I’m still waiting. It looks clean and seems to make sense… even if it does seem to take a cue or two from Google+. It will be interesting to see what the reaction is to it. This mammoth post from Jon Loomer tells us everything we could possibly want to know about it, take some time out to read it.
Blogs Outrank Social Networks For Consumer Influence
Yet another reason why businesses should seriously consider blogging. A new report from Technorati shows that blogs are influencing buyers purchasing decisions more than social networks. This great analysis of the report from social media examiner is packed with figures and graphs. It’s also interesting to note that brands tend to rely on Facebook for customer influence. Will we see a swing back towards blogging and blogger outreach I wonder?
The World’s Worst Website
I gave a presentation on common website mistakes this week (more on that below). Whilst researching it I found this website, it’s absolutely awful, every single mistake or irritating thing you can think of is part of it, even hideous autoplay music. The good news is that it is deliberately bad, it has been designed to be the worlds worst website and it talks you through the major mistakes that can be made when putting a site together. It put a big smile on my face.
How To Set Up Google Authorship To Improve Your Google Rankings
Which ever way you look at it search is becoming more social. Facebook Graph Search will connect your search results with the people you are connected to on Facebook and Google search is already doing this. Google Authorship allows us to attach our Google profiles to the content we create giving it more prominence in search results. I set it up here on my blog at the end of last year, it’s simple enough and worth the effort. Here’s a step by step guide for getting registered via Ian Cleary on The Content Wrangler blog.
The New Facebook Edgerank – Brian Solis on Mark Cuban
I never fail to be impressed by Brian Solis, he’s not just a social media celebrity, he’s intellegent and forward thinking. That’s what makes this such an interesting read.
You might remember last year Mark Cuban kicked up a huge fuss about the change in the Facebook edgerank algorithm. He was devastated that the reach of his posts had declined and that Facebook wanted to charge him thousands to promote posts to his millions of page likers. This analysis of the situation from Brian Solis is very level headed and tells us how we should evolve as the social media tools we use do.
Twitter Best Practices – 9 Steps to A Better Strategy
Sometimes it’s worth taking a step back from our social media strategy to give it a spring clean. Twitter is a particularly good one to review from time to time. We can become so involved that we sometimes forget the basics. That’s what I like about this article. There’s nothing startling or new there but it’s a good reminder of what we should be doing.
The Complete Guide To Getting Started On Pinterest
My quest to conquor Pinterest continues. I am getting there slowly although it does still seem to drop to the bottom of my social media to do list. This is a mammoth post from Pro Blogger that takes you step by step through the basics. It’s worth taking the time out to read it, it will save you the time of having to discover it all to yourself and hopefully it will inspire you to better pinning.
And From Spiderworking.com This Week
Does Your Website Work On Mobile? – Cool Tool
With more and more people using mobile devices of all kinds to access the Internet it’s crucial that our websites are responsive, that they work well and are easy to navigate on all of them. This weeks cool tool Responsive.is will show you how your site fares on tablets and mobiles. Luckily I’m building my site on WordPress and the theme I am using is mobile compatible so it looks OK. That’s not to say that there aren’t improvements to be made.
It’s also interesting to put in some of the larger sites that you would expect to be ahead of the game and see that they haven’t invested in mobile yet.
10 Common Website Mistakes
As mentioned above I was speaking to a Woman In Business group this week about common website mistakes. Here’s the 10 points I covered but I know I’m probably missing a few. Go ahead and share any that you think I’ve missed.
And that’s it from me this week. Here’s wishing you a great weekend. I’m off to crack open a bottle of beer and grab a cat to cuddle.
If you enjoyed this blog post why not subscribe to my newsletter or my blog posts via email. Click here for more info.
