The year 2013 is almost over and as per usual, a lot has happened in the internet marketing world. Google's been cracking down again on spammy marketers with its latest search engine algorithm updates. Content marketing has become even more important for online marketing than it already was, with marketers seeing better results from even longer, and more in-depth content than before. And many social media networks have been pushing a number of improvements to their service.
In this article we want to mainly focus on social media. What's been going on with your favorite social networks in 2013 that you should know about?
Facebook has rolled out its new social search function, called Graph Search throughout 2013. Graph Search offers a lot of potential for internet marketers. You can now find terms used in Facebook posts, updates, pages, groups, apps, check-ins and comments from Facebook friends and people who post publicly. Ways in which internet marketers can utilize Graph Search include using it as a discovery/research tool for content topics, for content curation and to research competitors. These are just a few of the many opportunities that the new Graph Search provides.
Facebook also launched clickable hashtags this year. Like on Twitter, hashtags help group content on similar topics. You can now just click on a hashtag on Facebook and see all the content that's available on the social network for that hashtag. This makes it easier for marketers to research a certain topic on Facebook and helps them add context to their own Facebook content.
Twitter is now showing images in people's feed. Including images in your tweets has been shown to improve user engagement drastically, so make sure you are using visual content in your tweets and upload them to Twitter. Don't just include an Instagram link, because they won't be shown in a person's feed anymore, nor be indexed by Twitter.
Twitter also introduced "Lead Generation Cards" this year, which makes it really simple for marketers to gather leads directly from within tweets. Twitter users just need to make one click to become a lead from a Lead Generation Card.
Google+
Google's been hard at work making Google+ look better this year. They updated Google+'s entire look and feel. One of many updates in the redesign involves the addition of the "related hashtags" feature, which automatically adds hashtags related to a post. This provides marketers a new way of researching topics via hashtags on Google+ and through this improve their context marketing efforts.
Google also updated the Google+ dashboard this year. With this update, Google wants to make it easier for people and business to manage their online presence across all Google's properties.
Conslusion
As you can tell, this year's been pretty exciting for social media, and we haven't even covered social networks such as Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram yet that also have been pretty busy with improving their service for both regular users and marketers. Make sure to keep up with everything that's going on in social media so you can take advantage of new features as soon as they're released. This can give a you a significant edge on competitors who aren't actively following social media news.
Read more: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/125-social-updates-2013.html#ixzz2pZKbXmKP
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