Linked. In Opens Blogging Platform to All: This Week in Social Media : Social Media Examiner. 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? FREE TEMPLATES: BLOG EDITORIAL CALENDAR Plan and optimize your blogging with these templates. How to Make More Money Blogging, Stop Worrying About Advertising, and Get Back to Writing What You Love. ![]() ![]() Linked. In Influencers Publishing Platform Opens to All Linked. In Members: Linked. In is slowly opening up its publishing feature to all members. On a page comment, the name of the person who commented will be listed below the comment next to. By publishing at these times, you’re more likely to share the right message at the right time with the right people.”Personalized scheduling makes it easier “to create and share great content that will strike a chord with your audience.”Pinterest Announces GIFs on Mobile: “With the latest mobile releases, GIFs are now available for your enjoyment across all platforms.”“GIFs are available to everyone on Android and i. You read the headline on this post and thought, “Cool!” Then a little voice in your head whispered something like, “Why do I need another post on. OS.”Klout Introduces Topic Filtering: “You can filter your stream by individual topics, making it even easier to find exactly what your audience is looking for.”Here are a few cool social media tools worth checking out: Zipline for Instagram: This tool! Join Chris Brogan (co- author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co- author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author of Platform), Jay Baer (author of Youtility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co- author of Facebook Marketing All- in- One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author of Launch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2. Please share your comments below.
What's With New Blogging Platforms Like Medium? Should I Use One? Dear Lifehacker,I keep seeing these new blogging platforms pop up like Medium and Svbtle. Why would I use one of these new platforms instead of more powerful classics like Wordpress? Sincerely,Blog to Live. Dear BL,Medium and Svbtle (not to mention our own platform, Kinja) are all pretty new to the world of blogging, and while they're all blogging platforms at their core, they do certain things a little differently. Let's take a look at how they work and try to figure out if they're right for you. What's Different About These Platforms. When you first head over to a place like Medium or Svbtle, they're barely recognizable as blogs. Instead, they're designed more like a magazine. On the home page you'll find different popular articles written by a wide variety of people. In general, these articles tend to lean toward topics like technology, design, programming, or creativity. Despite their outward appearances, both Medium and Svbtle are also blog- style platforms where you can write articles of your own. Once you create an account, you'll get your own page that looks a lot like a blog and you can start writing. For example, here's a Medium page and here's a Svbtle page. In either case, you're publishing into something more like a magazine than a standalone private corner of the internet. On Medium, posts are curated and picked up for the main page, and popular posts float to the top automatically. Likewise, Svbtle's magazine grabs popular posts and shows them off to a larger group. Basically, both platforms have a built- in audience that you don't really get elsewhere. The idea is similar to something like Wordpress. Otherwise, the differences are all in what it's like to write a post. Both Medium and Svbtle have very minimal, text- based blog editing pages. Unlike something like Wordpress, you don't have a bunch of options for changing themes, editing multimedia content, or anything like that. You get a text box, a handful of publishing options, and that's all. So What Should You Use? So, now it's time to pick which platform is right for you. The shiny and new services, or the tried and true ones? Let's take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of each. Medium and Svbtle Are Great for Discovery, but Less Customizable. The big benefit for these new platforms is that they're not just blogging platforms, but also discovery platforms. They're all about the writing, so they make it easier for people to find and read your writing, and for you to find and read others'. If you're trying to gain exposure, writing on a platform like Medium, Svbtle, and yes, even Kinja is a great way to do it (after all, when we hire writers here at Lifehacker, we'll be looking at Kinja going forward). The most obvious problem with sites like Medium and Svbtle is, like any startup, they might fail. If they do, all your content goes with them because you can't host them on your own server like you can with Wordpress. Sure, you can pull down your writing and move it elsewhere, but that's not a very reassuring thing when you're trying to build a repository of your writing. Although Medium and Svbtle are both great looking, easy to read, and easy to write in, they're also not customizable in any way. They're made to look a certain way and they stay that way no matter what kind of content you're creating. If you're sticking to their style and only writing, this is great, but you can't really expand on that much. Plus, if they ever do go through a redesign, you'll be stuck with that too, which could potentially prove disastrous if you don't like it. They're also made for single authors, so if you want to share a blog with a friend, that's not possible on either. Lastly, these platforms have one other big problem: With Medium, you give them royalty- free access to your content. You still own the copyright to your words, but they can do whatever they want with what you write (you can always delete your blogs, but that kind of defeats the point). That means they can sell a blog post, use it for an ad, or anything else, without paying you for your work. They don't seem to ever sell posts, but the the point is they could. Our own Kinja's Terms of Use also has monetization options, but it's more clear on the role advertising plays, and how Kinja users and editors can use your content. Conversely, if Svbtle has a Terms of Service, I can't find it anywhere, so it's not clear who owns your posts. Welcome to Kinja! By using Kinja (including by simply viewing content on Kinja. So it's really about deciding whether or not you care more about customization or ease of use. Svbtle and Medium are both stupidly simple to use and it's incredibly easy to start writing with them within seconds. You also get built- in access to a ton of readers, and if your posts are picked up for the front page on either Svbtle or Medium, you'll get a lot of eyes on it. From a traditional point of view, Svbtle looks and works a lot more like a blog than Medium, but both are a means to the same end: to put text on the internet. The tradeoff is besides a lack of customization, you're just giving away your words for free with no chance of getting paid. Wordpress and Squarespace Have a Learning Curve, but Offer You Complete Control. If you really want complete control of a blog, you'll want to go with one of the long- standing solutions like Wordpress or Squarespace. These take a bit of time to set up initially, but once you get over that first hump, you have complete control over every single aspect of them. You want to start your own blog but you don't want to look tacky by using an existing design. The classic blog powerhouses are made to power entire web sites, not just writing platforms, so they have a lot more going on than these newer services. That means that besides your writing blog, you could also have a whole separate page for videos, or art, or whatever else. If you're more interested in multimedia, Wordpress and Squarespace are the way to go. Dear Lifehacker, I want to start a new blog, but I'm not sure which platform is best for me. You can also copyright your blogs, sell advertising on them, or not. Squarespace doesn't have a self- hosting option, but they'll host your site for you. They're a bit more complicated to use, but that doesn't mean writers can't use them. Chances are you probably won't want to spend you time writing your blog posts in Wordpress or Squarespace, but you have a ton of desktop minimal text editors that offer the same benefits. Just write there, copy and paste into Wordpress, and you're all set. Heck, you can even install a Svbtle theme onto Wordpress if you like.
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