LinkedIn Embraces Publishing: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news.

To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

LinkedIn Gives Thought Leaders a Publishing Platform: Thought leaders can now publish articles on LinkedIn and users can choose to follow content from their favorite authors. This new feature is currently limited to “150 of the most influential thought leaders on LinkedIn,” but will expand over the next few months. “Those interested in becoming an influencer on LinkedIn can submit their request here.”

LinkedIn provides thought leaders an opportunity to reach a wider audience.

LinkedIn Adds Featured Updates on New Company Pages Now Rolling Out for Everyone: The new LinkedIn Company Pages now also have a Featured Update functionality. This is “a new way for companies to highlight important content by promoting it to the top of their Company Updates stream.”

Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:

• Share your best blog post this week.
• What’s your best platform for generating online leads?
• Who’s coming to Social Media Marketing World?

Facebook Gifts Roll Out: This new feature allows you to “give real gifts to your friends on Facebook using Gifts.” Facebook Gifts are gradually rolling out in the U.S.

You can send gifts from birthday reminders, or from your friend's timeline.

Facebook Tests Promoted Posts for Personal Profiles: As part of a test, “people in the U.S. can promote personal posts to their friends on Facebook.” These Promoted Posts will cost $7 per post and “Facebook hopes it will be used for garage sales, parties, wedding photos and other important announcements.”

Facebook Profiles in the U.S. may have a Promote button now.

Twitter Partners With Nielsen to Offer Twitter Surveys:  Twitter’s newest tool for advertising partners is brand surveys. “Brand surveys will appear to users just like a Promoted Tweet—right within the user’s timeline on both mobile devices and desktop. Users may see a tweet by @TwitterSurveys, inviting them to fill out a survey directly within the tweet itself.”

Twitter Surveys give brands "better insights to determine purchase intent, overall awareness and other advertising metrics and analytics that can lead to greater engagement on Twitter."

Twitter Improves Discover Feature: “When you visit the Discover tab on twitter.com, you’ll see a continuous stream of tweets, which automatically expand to show you the most relevant stories and most engaging photos.”

"Discover what's happening now and find new people to follow in a rich stream of tweets."

Tumblr Upgrades Tag Search and Tracking: Tumblr now features “auto-complete, thumbnail previews, related tags and a very clean new interface. Get to them even faster by hitting the Tab key.”

Check out the improved tag search on Tumblr.

Klout Begins Scoring Facebook Pages: “Facebook Pages are integrated into the Klout Score.”

"Your most influential page content will begin appearing as moments on your Klout profile very soon."

YouTube Improves Content ID Feature: YouTube’s Content ID feature provides the following benefit: The “rights of both content owners and users are protected and everyone can control their original content and make money from it.”  There’s now a new appeals process, smarter detection of unintentional claims and improved matching quality.

Facebook Redesigns Help Center: The new Help Center is “designed to get you the information you need in just a few clicks.” The Support Dashboard  is also now available to all Facebook users. This is “a tool designed to help you track the progress of the reports you make about photos and timelines, which are the most commonly reported types of content.”

The Support Dashboard gives you more insight into the reports you file to enable Facebook to remove abusive content from Facebook.

One Billion People on Facebook: “There are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.”

Here’s an interesting social media tool worth noting:

Hoop.la:  a powerful, turnkey social community service offering a feature-rich blog, forums, chat events, private messages and calendar, as well as support for photo, video and audio uploads.

Check out Hoop.la to build your social community.

And don’t miss this:

Social Media Marketing World is Social Media Examiner’s latest mega-conference—taking place at the waterfront San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina in San Diego, California on April 7-9, 2013.

As you’d expect, Social Media Examiner recruited the biggest and best names in the world of social media marketing for this conference. Only the best for you! Be sure to check it out.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.