If you are like most SharePoint users, you are eagerly awaiting the final word on several updates and are wondering if some of the buzz you hear has been true. Here are some updates for SharePoint in 2015 that have been announced officially, with more to come throughout the year!
Caldiatech
SharePoint Users Have New Choices in Communication
When it comes to communication, SharePoint has great ways to help businesses at both the institutional and the individual level. From Yammer to cross-platform communication for both small and large groups, SharePoint makes it easy for your employees and managers to quickly and effectively get information to the people who need it.
In 2014, Microsoft’s First Release Program unveiled several new features and products that work in connection with SharePoint to improve communication across your organization. Each of these new releases combines technology and features for complete solutions that work with all Microsoft tools. Here are a few examples:
What Does Your Audience Want?
http://moz.com/blog/know-what-your-audience-wants-before-creating-content-whiteboard-friday
Before you invest a great deal of time, money and energy in a content creation campaign, it pays to do a bit of research to see what your audience really wants. How can you find out? There are several quick and reliable ways to take a pulse on what your users are looking for and create content that meets those needs.
SharePoint Analytics App Launches
http://www.webtrends.com/blog/2015/01/whats-new-sharepoint/
The new product launch with updates for SharePoint 2013 contains an app called SharePoint Analytics. If you have not explored this app, do so immediately! It will boost your productivity and communication tremendously when you utilize it.
Located at https://pinpoint.microsoft.com/Applications/12884978740, this app allows for simple downloads and activation straight from the Microsoft site and will integrate with SharePoint Site Collection to deliver data within an hour. This makes reporting much easier than in previous editions and increases productivity for everyone using your SharePoint system.
What Is Sponsored Content and Do I Need It?
http://moz.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-sponsored-content
Readily-accepted channels for content, such as SEO and PPC, deliver the best results to users at the right time, so is it really necessary to change our game plan? Actually, if you are still using the same content delivery methods, you may be in for a disappointment, according to experts. In the next few years, expect traditional content delivery models to slowly move aside for newcomers such as sponsored content.
Using Facebook To Target Your Content Promotion
Getting content to “go viral” is not a simple process, no matter what advertising might lead you to believe. You do not just write content and sit back waiting for it to magically bring you great results. Often, you must push that content out to the public in order to ensure that people actually get to see it.
In this regard, Facebook advertising may be a great way to get your content out to viewers. One of the advantages of working with Facebook as opposed to other forms of advertising is that you can use this social media platform to fine-tune the details of your target audience. This allows you much greater flexibility in using your advertising budget to reach the people you really want to reach.
Focusing Away from SEO?
SEO is definitely important, but the habit of focusing all of our attention on SEO topics may cause us to lose sight of the goal, which is to get and retain customers. In fact, sometimes it is best to focus away from SEO per se and instead focus on the overall idea of marketing, including both online and offline strategies in the “big picture.”
By Shifting the Focus, SEO Fits the Landscape
Most brands tend to make one of two mistakes: either they ignore SEO or they focus completely on inbound marketing. This is easy to understand, since most marketing agencies push their own products. If they are SEO-centric, the marketing firm likely focuses on SEO. If not, they tend to ignore it or even downplay its importance.
SharePoint Features FAST Search
SharePoint has many wonderful features, but one of the greatest is its incredible FAST Search, incorporated in 2008 into the platform and improved continuously through SharePoint 2013. SharePoint makes it much simpler to use powerful search features across the platform, particularly when you consider the logical setup of your site and plan to use these features as an integral part of your workflow.
Here are some tips to integrate search features into your daily routine and make your SharePoint experience more productive.
Are You Ignoring a Giant SEO Ranking Factor?
Everyone has been scrambling to understand Google’s new algorithms, but it is quickly becoming clear that there is one ranking factor that many SEO experts are not utilizing: engagement.
What Is Engagement?
Most people immediately think of onsite engagement when they discuss the word, but overall web engagement is frequently ignored. In fact, many SEO experts focus exclusively on onsite engagement to the detriment of overall web engagement with sites and brands. For example, branded searches are often ignored in researching keywords, although they are frequently used by those searching for particular products. Overall engagement also includes time on site, browse rate, traffic referrals that you send out to the rest of the web, and non-link forms of amplification such as press releases and social media.