Weekly Social Media Round-Up!
LinkedIn will discontinue LinkedIn Answers on January 31, 2013. This free-for-all forum allows users to post questions spanning any and all areas of interest, outside the context of a LinkedIn Group or Page. LinkedIn Answers had an immediacy similar to Twitter, and you could guarantee that someone would answer your question in close to real time. This made it a great trouble-shooting tool for professionals in search of fast, to-the-point answers, often of a technical nature.
But understandably, the feature does not exactly match the “professional” aesthetic of the rest of the platform. Both in content and display, it operates more as a chat room, especially compared to LinkedIn Groups where restrictions on posting and membership are tightening. These include (and you may have noticed) prohibiting posting content that is in any way promotional; shutting down “introduce yourself” discussion threads that allow members to dump links and trade ‘likes’ for their social media profiles; and some groups have even banned including link attachments entirely– which makes sharing blog posts, articles and other related web content challenging.
LinkedIn did however release a new feature that does add significant value to the site for corporate marketing: multimedia status updates for Company Pages. This has been a feature of Personal Pages for a few weeks, but it’s implication for business, particularly B2B’s, is exciting. Company Pages can now distribute whitepapers, brochures, SlideShare presentations and other branded multimedia content as attachments to status updates in their Company Page feed. This feature also ties in nicely with LinkedIn’s Targeted Audience feature, delivering said multimedia content to the appropriated audience, ie. shareholder, consumer, marketer, and other.
Facebook’s new Facebook Conversion Tracking looks to be a critical toolfor social media managers and CMO’s. The feature tracks conversion from any paying Facebook Ad campaign to your business website – and it’s not just for ecommerce. Virtually any action can be considered a conversion, for example, requesting a consultation, registering for an event, or viewing a particular page.
Conversion tracking helps businesses measure the return on investment (Social ROI) of their Facebook Ads by reporting on the actions people take after viewing those ads. Conversion tracking also helps businesses leverage optimized cost per impressions (CPI) to show ads to people who are more likely to convert. Conversion tracking is set up in Facebook’s Ad Manager by creating a tracking pixel and corresponding code snippet to place on your website page(s).
