Buying, Selling and Sharing on Social Media

After Twitter launched a new dashboard to help businesses manage their account, we decided to look at the latest developments in social media that are directed at businesses.

Twitter's dashboard is a compilation of everything your business is connected to – you can schedule your tweets and get analytics information about your account.

However, it's still in its early stages and only available to the US-market for now.

Until that comes online for us to test and review, let's take a look at some other aspects of social media that are affecting businesses.

Let's Start with Buying

LinkedIn has brought in some new features to those who would like to buy display ads on the social media platform – Programmatic Buying!

For those who do not understand the difference between regular ad-space buying and programmatic buying – it is automation of the advertisement buying process.

You can choose to run campaigns on the basis of data you receive from LinkedIn – and get your brand in front of the right people, at the right place and time.

It is a lot more flexible and assured in its targeting capabilities – or so LinkedIn say.

A major improvement on their current advertisement-buying system or just a small bump up the ladder – we'll just have to wait and see.

Then Comes the Selling

Pinterest just made selling stuff on their platform much simpler!

In June, last year, the photo-sharing social media platform had rolled out ‘Buyable Pins'.

If the pin had a blue price, you could buy it!

Pinterest spent over 12-months learning about their customers and now, have taken that knowledge to expand that feature onto their website.

There's also a new shopping bag available now and it allows people to add "different products from different merchants" in one sale.

Sounds cool?

Amazon, eBay and all other online retail websites have been doing it for decades so we don't know why anyone would put emphasis on it.

What's more important though is that you can create a merchant profile for you business – allowing potential customers to search for your "Pinterest store".

Also, you can click/tap on the visual search icon at the top of a pin to see similar pins.

Worried about how to get about setting all that up?

Don't worry – Pinterest is bringing out a whole set of videos that will help you understand the platform, all these updates and get the most out of the time you spend pining for pins!

Finally, it's about Sharing

Twitter made a bit of a bang here by introducing #Stickers – a Snapchat-like way of making your pictures more fun.

Basically, you take your picture, add your stickers on it and publish it to your timeline.

There are emojis and other little things (like sunglasses or party hats) that you can add to your picture and make them more interesting.

More importantly, you can search for images by these #Stickers!

If you use a sticker or see an image that has this sticker, all you need to do is click/tap on it and you will see – on a new timeline of course – how others have used that sticker.

It's not out yet but it is coming!

Facebook has also said that it is working on ways to make your feed more you-centric.

Soon, you will see updates from your family and friends more often than others.

That might be good for your personal page but it could mean lower traffic for your official page.

People liking and sharing your business page will make your presence more visible.

If your website traffic comes mostly through page-posts, then you will see a drop in numbers as your page will not be seen as much on people's news feeds.

What does that mean for your page content strategy?

Create more and more content that people are likely to share!

Haven't we been telling you that for ages???

For more ways to help your brand grow and develop in the digital world, check this out!