If you have not upgraded your Twitter profile page yet, on May 28th you are getting the new look regardless according to Twitter.
So, what’s to like about the new profile?
1. Wow, it is much more interesting to view and moves Twitter from mainly being accessed through third party tools to now a venue of interest. With such visual appeal, I appear to be spending my time here over Facebook!
2. I love the new cover look and the new layout is much more stimulating visually.
3. I like the sidebar showing photos and video thumbnails on the left as well as the top level navigation sorting my updates tweets, replies, cool thumbnails of follower sites, and following sites.
4. I like the option to pin tweets, star favorites (the new way to say thank you for retweeting or mentioning you in a tweet).
5. But for me, mainly it is the navigation and new look of my account that actually makes me want to click into Twitter and not just post through HootSuite. That says a lot right there!
Twitter wants to become a venue just like Facebook where users login to interact, spend more time connecting and viewing updates, and not just send content there through third party apps. If Twitter can get you on the page, they can more effectively serve ads and build revenue.
The layout is slick, clean, uncluttered, and very eye appealing.
You can check out my Twitter site to get a feeling for what’s coming for you on the 28th by visiting me here: https://twitter.com/mccordweb.
In our new visual and video saturated world where images, pins, and cover photos are all the rage, Twitter has stagnated with their text-based layout until now. Coming soon to your Twitter profile is a “Facebook-like” look that has a much more interesting visual look and feel.
I hardly ever click into my Twitter profile as I almost exclusively use third part apps to build and send my content three times a day to my various Twitter accounts. With a new image-interesting profile coming to Twitter accounts, Twitter may soon become a platform-venue like Facebook. All the better for Twitter to promote ads on a page if they can attract users back in to view profiles of people they follow or for that matter to spend more time actually “on” their profile then sending things “to” their profile.
Here’s a great article to give you some visual previews of the Twitter’s new look. When you see the huge cover, ability to post more images and video, favorite posts, and to create more visual interest you’ll say just like me, “wow this sure looks like Facebook!”
I’ll be updating my Twitter profiles with the new look in the weeks ahead, as I do, I will create a tutorial so you can update yours too.
What’s the perfect sized blog post? How about a tweet, is 140 characters too much? Who says that a longer Facebook status update is better, is it really? In an article found online at Buffer, I’ve found what one author says is the perfect length for everything. But are those tips and suggestions right?
Below are personal recommendations on what works best for each platform based on what our own customers and readers seem to like best.
Twitter – what’s the perfect tweet length?
Although Twitter only let’s you enter in 140 characters including spaces do you ever wish you had more room? Sure but less room? Kevan Lee says the perfect tweet is 100 characters and that these short tweets get 17% more engagement. I have to say that from my experience tweets that are this short typically are teasers for videos, spam, or sharable quotes. Does that mean that you should start shortening your tweets? I say no, but make your tweets work harder by linking or pointing to something meaningful to your audience.
Facebook – what’s the perfect length for a status update?
Customers do think that more is better when it comes to paid writing on Facebook, but does more necessarily translate into more engagement? Buffer says the perfect Facebook status update is 40 characters long. Wow, that seems pretty short and hard to really even express what a link in your updates is all about. From my personal experience about 150 to 160 characters seems about best for Facebook. Facebook updates with an image or linking to a page with an image (so Facebook will show a thumbnail) seem to get the most response.
Blogging – what’s the perfect length for a blog post?
Buffer says the ideal blog post is 1,600 words. 1,600 words translates into more than three pages of a Word document. When was the last time you read this much content on one website? Unless the article was enriched with data, statistics and unique research from a highly authoritative writer and on a topic that was really important to me or about something I wanted to learn about, I have to say that the chance of having a real audience be engaged from introduction to conclusion would be pretty slim.
Recent studies have been done on how Internet and screen reading have cut the general publics attention span. Internet articles are not read like books or print articles but rather scanned. Have too much content, not enough white space, blocks of content that are more than two sentence long and you risk losing your reading audience.
My customers vote with their pocket books and our top selling blog writing levels are those at 200 to 250 words per blog post followed by 140 to 300 words per post long. I personally like blog posts that are 300 to 350 words long as this is just long enough to flesh out a topic and really have something interesting to say.
So what’s your perfect length? Just as a point of reference this post is a little over 500 words long. If it was the supposed “perfect blog post” it would be three times this long!
With recent changes Facebook has made, renegotiation of the Google-Twitter contract, and Google’s announcement that it does not include social signals in its ranking algorithm, business owners and SEO’s are struggling to find where social media fits into a strategy for web visibility.
Although I still feel that social media still has a place in a mature business’ overall marketing plan, how to go about using social media for visibility is now drastically changing.
It used to be that having social updates posted to Twitter and Facebook was a strategy that all businesses on the web needed to embrace, now our recommendations are different based on this changed landscape.
For new businesses the validity of starting a Facebook or Twitter account with no followers and paying a writer to post updates has lost value. It is by far better for this new business to invest in AdWords and blogging for a long range content and visibility plan than to be on social media platforms.
For established mature businesses whether to post to Facebook or Twitter really now depend on the business’ community. Some firms have a vital Facebook presence and to continue to post there makes perfect sense. Additionally for these businesses to use Facebook’s options to promote posts to a wider demographic is now becoming an attractive option. For right now Twitter continues to be a smart place to be, but this may change rapidly as Google and Twitter redefine their relationship in the months ahead.
What is becoming more and more attractive than a Twitter and Facebook as a marketing strategy is activity on a personal Google+ profile tied to a rel=”author” tag with high quality content pieces and Google+ Community creation and moderation.
This next year will be strategic for how businesses use social media. I am predicting that more activity will be in Facebook promoted updates than in regular content creation and that Twitter will need to continue to reinvent itself to stay relative in this new landscape.
