This week in social media…
Pinterest announced new Business Pages – meant to make it easier for businesses to share content from their website, and help consumers find more relevant content about your business in search results. Users have the option of creating a new Business Page, or converting an existing page. Part of the process (which literally takes one minute) encourages page managers to verify their business’s website by placing a small piece of code on their site. Business Pages is also an excuse for Pinterest to grow and profit – creating two sets of terms of use, pushing additional social sharing button designs, and enticing more people to sign up. From a business perspective, there is no change in design or usability, but Business Pages could help with SEO by signaling that you offer high-quality sources of content and recent online activity. Visit business.pinterest.com/ to get started.
Facebook finalized its new Job Board Service – an extension of the Social Jobs Partnership created with the US Department of Labor. The Social Jobs Partnership application will aggregate 1.7 million jobs from recruiting companies, including BranchOut, DirectEmployers, Jobvite, Work4Labs and Monster.com. I am both skeptical and impressed by this initiative. On the one hand, I have to give it to Facebook for proposing innovative solutions to jobs and the economy (and offering “veteran friendly” jobs.) The jobs selection and interface are a huge improvement from Facebook’s other job applications. Branch Out for example has a high sign-up rate, but users post a lot of unrelated content and the focus shifted away from hiring. (Visit the Facebook Application Directory and search using “job search” “career” or “jobs” as keywords to see the scope of job apps). But my big concern is that Job Board can not compete with LinkedIn, because, as one commenter puts it “Who would want their Facebook profile, riddled with information people don’t want employers to see, being the basis of interacting with future employers. Fail. I’ll stick with LinkedIn and Indeed.”
Twitter announced new features that highlight photo and video content in search results. For businesses, this may encourage being more selective with the images and videos you tweet. View photos and videos first: When you search for a person, an event or a hashtag (#), you can now see a grid of the most relevant media above the stream of Tweets.See headlines and photos: You can also see media instantly in your search results stream on iPhone and Android. Photos and article summaries automatically show previews to give you a bird’s eye view on what’s happening.Understand context: Now you can see context like who favorited or retweeted right there in the Tweet.
