Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 18 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
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ICYMI Tuesday: Why You Should Follow Instagram Hashtags
Contents
I. PIN POSTS ON YOUR INSTAGRAM PROFILE
II. TWITTER BEGINS ROLLING OUT ‘PRODUCT DROPS’
III. NEW CREATOR TOOLS ON LINKEDIN
IV. GOOGLE’S CORE SEARCH UPDATE IS COMPLETE; DO THIS CHECKUP
V. LINKEDIN ANNOUNCES BUSINESS MANAGER
VI. A SEARCH ENGINE THAT WANTS TO PAY CONTENT CREATORS
VII. AVATARS COME TO TIKTOK
I. PIN POSTS ON YOUR INSTAGRAM PROFILE
“Starting today, you can now pin up to 3 posts to your profile!”
There are two ways to do it:
1. On your profile page, press and hold any of your posts and select the “Pin to profile” option
2. Enter a post, click the three-dots menu and pin it. As you’ll see, you’ll be notified if you have already reached your three-pin limit:
Voilà. Three pinned posts on my profile:
🛠 Why does this matter? This is chance to put your best content on display at the top of your profile. It would also be wise to pin a Reel or two with high view counts. It looks good to someone who’s visiting your account for the first time.
It is also a direct copy (surprise!) of a feature TikTok has had for a while.
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II. TWITTER BEGINS ROLLING OUT ‘PRODUCT DROPS’
Twitter is rolling out a feature that allows you to sign up for alerts about product releases.
So if a company tweets about an upcoming product, you can click a “Remind me” button to receive two reminders the day the product drops: 15 minutes before and at the time of release “so you can be among the first to shop on the merchant’s website and (hopefully) beat out other shoppers. When you click on the notification, you’ll see a ‘Shop on website’ button to purchase the item on the merchant’s website.”
Before signing up for an alert, you can check out a product details page that includes “price, pictures, a description of the product, and a clickable hashtag that will show you what other shoppers on Twitter are saying about the product.”
The feature is only available for English U.S. users at the moment.
🛠 Why does this matter? With such fierce competition for our ever-shortening attention spans, Twitter is providing merchants with an opportunity to access the most valuable parts of our phones – push alerts.
It’s not as if brands couldn’t already publish tweets about their products, but the ability to send users directly to a product page via push alerts – for free – is a big win for them.
Based on the above screenshot provided by Twitter, this kind of tweet will occupy a significant portion of the screen. It will be interesting to see how much prominence the algorithm gives them in the feed.
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III. NEW CREATOR TOOLS ON LINKEDIN
“Creator mode is a profile setting on your dashboard that can help you grow your reach and influence on LinkedIn. You can turn on creator mode to get access to additional tools and features that help you create content and grow your audience base on LinkedIn.”
This week, LinkedIn announced even more tools to that end. Some highlights:
Add a link to the top of your profile
A primary existing feature of creator mode is allowing others to “follow” you without having to connect with them. (Facebook has a similar feature.) Soon, you’ll be able to share link/button outside LinkedIn to gain even more followers
A “follow” button is also being added within the LinkedIn feed so that users don’t have to visit your profile. In other words, one-click follows.
A similar feature is being added to search results
🛠 Why does this matter? If you want to have more reach/influence on LinkedIn, but you don’t want to have thousands of connections, Creator Mode is for you.
Not only does it give you access to additional tools, but other users can get your content in their feed.
If you mostly use LinkedIn for job-hunting purposes, you probably don’t need these tools. But if you use it more like a social network – and you should – this is a great way to be heard, and see whether other users think your posts are worth “following.”
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IV. GOOGLE’S CORE SEARCH UPDATE IS COMPLETE; DO THIS CHECKUP
The Search Central Twitter account made the announcement at 3:44 a.m. ET Thursday.
A couple weeks ago, I outlined some steps you can take to make sure your site is free of both penalties and errors in Google Search Console. Now I’m going to show how you can check whether your site may have been affected by this latest update.
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