Every month, I spend 2 to 3 days updating myself about the latest changes in social media. I use this information when talking to clients, to help update our E-Learning courses and I create a document of updates to send to clients who belong to our social media professionals group. Clients in our social media professionals group also get the chance to talk to me about how the changes affect their business in our bi-monthly webinars. Let me know if you would like to join our group.
On the first Tuesday of each month, I will now share a selection of the social media updates with my blog visitors. Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog (on the right) if you would like to get these updates sent to your inbox.
Statistics
Every month, I share statistics that I find interesting. This month the Mckinsey research paper looked at how telecoms companies handled customer complaints and found that using digital gained higher levels of customer satisfaction. However, a study by Simply Measured revealed only 30% of brands have a dedicated customer service presence on Twitter and the average response time is 5.1 hours. As a small business, this gives us an interesting opportunity to make a difference from the big guys. What do you think?
Inactive Accounts
Have you seen your Facebook likes on your fan page reduce recently? This might be because Facebook has removed inactive accounts from page likes. It will mean that any advertising you target to your fans will be more accurate.
Multi-Product Ads
I like the look of the new multi-product ads that 
Facebook has introduced to all
advertisers and are now available from the Facebook Power editor. You can create one ad which shows up to 3 products. Viewers can scroll through the products and click on the one they are interested in.
To create a multi-product ad, you need to use the Power Editor and create a campaign and Ad Set. Then create an Ad with the objective of clicks to a website or website conversions. Choose multi-images and create images and links for each of your products. Note the images need to be 600 x 600 pixels in size. Let me know if you need more information.
What do you think of the LinkedIn new look which has been rolling out over the last couple of months? I must admit I’m not a big fan, but I guess our natural reaction is to dislike change! The only other main change this month is that the Outlook Connector link with LinkedIn has been discontinued in Outlook 2007 and 2010.
Google+
Big changes are coming to Google+. They have announced that they will be splitting the channel into 3 products – communication (including hangouts), photo and Google+ stream. No date has been announced as yet, but this sounds like a major rewrite – subscribe to our blog to make sure you know what the changes will mean for you.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the changes to Google search results. As from 21st April, Google will be using mobile-friendliness as a search ranking signal. In other words, if your website is not mobile friendly, you may be penalised in mobile search results. The Google announcement states that this change will have a “significant impact” on search results worldwide although it is important to note that this only affects searches from mobile devices; not desktop/PC.
You can check whether any website page is mobile friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
It looks like Twitter is getting ready for a change in advertising functionality. The Twitter policies have changed for using conversion tracking and remarketing advertising. If you use the Twitter website tag, you need to ensure you are providing your website users with “legally sufficient notice of the data usage associated with the Twitter Website Tag and instructions about how they can opt out of interest-based advertising.” You can find more here.
Did you hear that there were more than 1.5 million tweets about the UK leaders debate last week? An average of 8,657 tweets a minute. I must admit that I watched the Twitter stream while watching the debate – it added a comical element to the whole thing. Read some of the tweets on the BBC site.
Useful tools
Have you heard about Grammarly? It is a Chrome add-in that claims to find 10x more mistakes in writing than your Word processor. It checks status updates as well as blog posts. I’m using it to write this post and it has found a few additional errors as I type.
I hope you have found this round up useful. Do let me know in the comments below and, of course, do let us know if you would like to join our social media professionals group. This month our social media professionals group will be receiving a 12 page document of useful updates and our next webinar in May I will give practical personalised advice to all our members.