Twitter Update Makes it Easier for Users to Discover Your Marketing Content

The savviest of inbound marketers know that content creation is at the heart of a successful inbound marketing strategy. But if marketers are consistently pumping out tons and tons of content, what you end up with is a cluttered web that will only get more cluttered, right?

These days, content discovery is a big problem, both as a user and as a marketer. Your audience is constantly struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff, and as a marketer, you're always looking for ways to make sure your content gets in front of the eyes of that audience.

The good news is, search engines and social networks have been trying to make content discovery and delivery a little bit easier lately. For example, we've witnessed LinkedIn's launch of more robust content targeting tools; Google's pushes to reward high quality content and penalize low-quality, spammy content in search; and various other efforts by Google and social networks to provide more relevant, personalized content to its users.

Well, here's one more for ya! Yesterday, Twitter announced an update to its Discover tab, which aims to provide users with content that is even more personalized and relevant to them.

The Twitter Discover tab was originally created to make it easier for users to discover meaningful information without needing to follow other accounts. With Twitter's new update, the tab will now take into consideration additional personalization signals to surface stories and tweets that are popular among the people you follow -- and the people they follow.

How Twitter Decides Which Content to Highlight on the Updated Discover Tab

The Twitter Engineering Blog had a bit more to say about how Twitter determines which content is relevant to a particular user via the Discover tab. Here's how it works:

• Twitter uses a 'graph processing library' called Cassovary to identify a user's connections.
• It then ranks those connections based on how strong and important they are to the user.
• Once it identifies that strong network of users, Twitter uses its search function to find URLs that have been shared by that group of people.
• Twitter then converts the links it finds into stories to display in the Discover tab.
• Before it displays the stories, Twitter does a final ranking of the stories based on how many people have tweeted about them and how important those people are in relation to the user.

Twitter states that this all happens in near-real time so they can surface breaking, relevant stories to users in the Discover tab soon after people start talking about them.

New Discover Tab Design

The update of the Discover tab also comes with a new design, which features avatars of the users who have tweeted about particular stories. You can also view popular tweets about that story from people in your network as well as recent and relevant tweets by clicking 'View Tweets' on any given story, giving you the social context to understand why particular stories are relevant to you. Furthermore, you have the option to easily share your perspective on the story with your followers by clicking 'Tweet this story,' or to retweet, favorite, or reply to tweets about the story.

Content Discovery and Marketing

Twitter has indicated it will be rolling out this new design and functionality to users on Twitter.com as well as for iPhone and Android devices over the coming weeks. Twitter also mentioned that this is just the first of an ongoing effort for Twitter to bring users closer to the content and tweets they care about, so you can bet there is going to be more from Twitter in the future to make content discovery even easier.

As a marketer, think of Twitter's update as yet another way for your audience to discover your content -- and another reason why using social media as a vehicle for content promotion is so important. To optimize your marketing content for social sharing so it's easier for your audience to share the content they love, add share links/buttons to all your content -- every blog article, every landing page, every case study, within every ebook -- you name it! Putting your content out there and making it easy for others to do so will make it more likely that it will pop up in content discovery engines like Twitter's Discover tab for your target audience, especially if it's getting shared by likeminded people!

What do you think of Twitter and other platforms' attempts to improve content discovery? What other implications does it have for marketers?
















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New Gmail Image Feature Makes Email Marketing More Social

Last week, Gmail introduced a new feature allowing users to share inline images from emails with their Google+ networks. Since the 2011 announcement of the integration between Google+ and Gmail, Google has now taken yet another step toward integrating email and real-time social networking. And this topic should concern you, my fellow marketer.

Email to Catch up With Social; Google to Catch up With Facebook 

In early 2012, it was announced that Gmail had 350 million active users. While this is an impressive number, Gmail still has a lot of catching up to do to reach Facebook’s 800 million users. In fact, not only is Gmail behind Facebook on overall user adoption, but it also seems to be behind in terms of engagement. A 2010 Nielsen study shows email as the third online channel on which Americans spend most of their time, ranking behind social networks/blogs and games.

In attempt to reverse these numbers and become a leader in both user adoption and engagement, Google is intently working on making its email platform more social. In other words, all focus seems to be placed on integration between Gmail and Google+.

Taking Email Sharing to the Next Level

With the rollout of Google+, we instantly spotted some user interface elements that allowed for email messages to be spread outside the inbox. The upper right-hand corner of your Gmail account allows you to share a piece of content straight from your email inbox.

Last week, Gmail made it even easier to share email content with an outside network. If you have rich formatting enabled and receive an email with an inline image in it, you can hover around the visual and click on the “Share” link.

Then, by simply clicking on that green "Share" button, you will be prompted to enter a custom message and target your Google+ circles (as well as email connections who are still not on Google+). Don't forget to add a link to your message so that people can visit your website and learn more about your company or offer; sharing links in social media updates is the backbone of social media lead generation!

When you visit your Google+ profile, you will see that the image was shared through "Google Mail." Now your connections can +1 and comment on the post:

 You, Too, Should Integrate Email & Social Media

So what does this all mean for businesses? The most important marketing lesson here is that you need to stop putting email and social media in silos. These channels are being increasingly connected and you need to make your email content shareable. For instance:

Ensure that you have social media sharing links within your emails.Add social media following links to your email signatures.Start incorporating behavior-based communication that spans across email and social media, and is mobile-friendly.

Use Compelling Visual Content

Gmail's new feature makes a direct statement about the importance of visual content. Visual storytelling has already penetrated many marketing efforts. With the evolution of Facebook and the emergence of Pinterest, we see the web move steadily in a photo-sharing direction. Online users enjoy making discoveries by flipping through images, so make sure your email messages contain compelling visual content that can be easily shared with the recipient's friends and coworkers. In fact, start watching and learning from new trends and memes on social media sites. That will surely help you stay ahead of the competition and up-to-date with the lastest developments in email marketing technologies.

Did you notice the new inline image sharing Gmail feature? What do you think about it?

















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