Two New Social Media Platform Features You Should Know About

Social media moves quickly, so when two of the most popular platforms introduce new features it’s a good idea to get your head around them before they add more.

Last week Pinterest introduced Place Pins which gives the user the ability to map the location of items they share on their boards, as well as including information like the address and phone number of a place right on the Pin. For anyone in the travel or hospitality industry this could be huge.

Imagine a pizza shop’s mouth-watering pizzas are added to Pinterest complete with a map on how others can come and get one of these, or images of new season’s shoes with the phone number and address of the store selling them. Pinterest already drives more sales than any other social network and this new feature could well add to that. Here is an example of a New York real estate agency using Place Pins and giving local tips.

One current issue however is that the locations all come from FourSquare’s database; you can’t just drop your own Pin and make an address. For us in NZ where FourSquare isn’t super popular, this could be an issue. You can read more about the new Place Pins feature on their own business blog.

The other platform to introduce a new feature was LinkedIn with its Showcase Pages. These are used alongside LinkedIn Business Pages but can be around a specific product or offering of the company. The example I saw was on Microsoft’s LinkedIn Page – now they have a Showcase Page for Microsoft Office. According to LinkedIn,

“Showcase Pages are dedicated pages that allow companies to highlight different aspects of their business and build relationships with the right community. Whether it’s a brand, a business unit, or an initiative, following a Showcase Page will provide you the updates you are most interested in.”

These pages are all about content, so by visiting a Showcase Page you can quickly get up to speed on the latest updates. Why did they do it, and why should businesses care? Because Content Marketing is now so important and being able to segment audiences and use sponsored updates to aim content in a more focused way, will be incredibly powerful.

More on Showcase Pages can be found here on LinkedIn’s blog.

So there you go, two big changes last week. What’s going to happen next week? Will Facebook announce Pages for your pets? Will Twitter purchase Google+? We’ll see…

Jon