There has been a lot of discussion about the new features that social networks introduced over the past year. While updates like Conversation Starters on LinkedIn and live 360 videos on Twitter are likely to influence B2B marketing in 2017, there are more significant changes that will undoubtedly affect traditional social marketing strategies.
Additionally, users are always changing and picking up new habits, sometimes influenced by social media but often due to larger trends like decreasing attention spans. Because of this, I decided to focus this article on important features and user behaviors that have shifted over the past year and to provide suggestions for updating current strategies.
Changes on Twitter
The recent most notable change on Twitter was the way characters are counted in Tweets. Starting from September, media content like photos, videos, GIFs as well as polls and Quote Tweets are no longer counted towards the 140-character limit. This removes many of the constraints that marketers experienced on Twitter all these years and adds flexibility for annotating Tweets.
Here is what it looks like when I attach an image in TweetDeck:
Among many positives, this change allows to get the most out of hashtags. Because there is more room in a Tweet, marketers can separate hashtags from the headline and group them together at the end of a Tweet (or wherever it makes most sense). Doing this makes your annotations cleaner (less spammy) which grows engagement. This also means that you can use more hashtags – reaching more people and getting more engagement.
Another interesting feature is the ability to retweet yourself. Users can boost a Tweet’s engagement if they feel it didn’t get the attention it deserves. As with any other Retweet, these can only be done once. It makes sense to retweet your content because it raises your overall engagement rates and ensures that your future posts have more visibility.
The last Twitter feature that should be mentioned is the ability to move a public conversation to a private Direct Message. By adding a specially formatted URL, you can add a link to a public Tweet that will take the conversation to a direct message. Here’s the URL to use:
Here’s how the link above gets formatted once it’s sent in a reply:
In case you don’t know your numeric ID, you can find it with this tool.
If you append “&text={default text}” to the end of the URL above, you can pre-populate the reply text for your client. This way they will open the message and already have the beginning of their reply to you. This can be useful if you need specific information such as an order number. For my private Twitter account, the final URL would look like this:
https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id=2371071644&text=My order number is
There are many situations where you might want to move a conversation to direct messaging, such as concern for a customer’s privacy or a potentially unpleasant conversation which you don’t want displayed publicly. The only catch is that you need to adjust your Twitter settings to accept Direct Messages from everyone.
Changes on Facebook
Facebook started supporting hashtags already in 2013 but it wasn’t broadly adopted by users until last year. In fact, according to Kevan Lee, posts without hashtags fared better than those with hashtags. However, this was a year ago and much has changed. Based on our analysis of 4 million B2B posts on Facebook from October 2016, we concluded that hashtags do contribute to engagement.
Besides, search results for the same term with and without a hashtag return different results, so it’s at the very least worth experimenting with. Here is the first result of a search for the Hashtag “#ContentMarketing”:
And here is the first result of a search for the keyword “Content Marketing”:
From the data we analyzed, we saw a good case to use between 1 and 3 hashtags per post. It’s important to note that hashtag search adoption strongly depends on geography so you’ll need to make sure that there is use of hashtags in your country if your business is targeting a local audience.
If you need to find good hashtags, you can type them into the search field on Facebook. This will show the search volume for the specific hashtag you typed as well as related hashtags.
Another noteworthy aspect is the way that Facebook analyzes and treats images with text. An Ad Image with more than 20% text gets increasingly less visibility as the percent of text increases. We found that the same holds true for unpromoted posts. This also applies to posts with thumbnails instead of images. If you nevertheless want to use images with text on them, you can verify their potential reach in Facebook’s Image Text Check tool.
Changes on LinkedIn
In my opinion, the most important changes on LinkedIn in 2016 were behavioral: The default filtering of updates in the home feed by “Top Updates” facilitated a shift towards more generic content. This content generates more engagement and takes away visibility from industry-specific updates.
Some people (me included) claim that the network is losing its quality and professional appeal because of this trend. Whether it’s true or not, LinkedIn remains the only large professional network and the new behavior needs to be taken into consideration. Most companies can no longer remain super-focused and get visibility in the same time. Broadening the scope of topics to post about is likely to help.
Another behavioral change is that there is less activity and engagement in many groups. This varies by industry but the overall trend indicates that people aren’t getting enough value from participation in groups and slowly losing interest. It makes sense to cut on groups with low engagement and concentrate on the active ones only.
Changes in Annotation Lengths
This is also a behavioral change rather than functional and equally applies to the three main social networks. As people’s attention spans get shorter, so do annotation lengths. From as many as 18 words in 2013 down to 6-9 words today. Longer annotations pick up on engagement again once you go above 50 words because with this length it’s possible to tell a story and appeal on an emotional level.
Summary
The changes above got little or partial coverage and might at first glance seem subtle. However, these are changes to some core functionality and are very likely to have significant impact on your reach and engagement numbers. So whether you are posting to Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, you can guarantee that your engagement doesn’t take a dip with just a few small adjustments as described in the article.