Highlights, Pinned Posts, and Playlists: Your New Homepage

Overview

To a large crowd, your social profile will be the first and (occasionally) the only place they will consider your brand. They scroll your profile before going to a site, before clicking on a link. Your highlights, pinned posts, and playlists are even more significant to most brands than they think. Collectively they also serve as your new home page.

This is not like a conventional homepage, but rather dynamic, visual and takes only a few seconds to consume. Visitors will not explore further in case it is unstructured or outdated. They’ll leave. In case it is willed, it silently leads people to trust, clarity, and action.

Think Like a First-Time Visitor

The greatest blunder that brands commit is that they stock these sections with their own products rather than with products that are new in the market. As an insider, everything is logical. Externally, it often doesn’t.

Almost as soon as a first-time visitor is asked, he or she is posing three questions:

Who is this for?

What do they do or talk about?

Why should I care right now?

These questions should not have to be answered without making much effort through your highlights, pinned posts, and playlists. When one has to search the text to find out where to get, you have lost him already.

Pinned Posts: Set the Narrative

There is no quicker method of managing first impressions than pinned posts. They inform visitors about things that are most important before they scroll.

Powerful pinned posts tend to accomplish one of the three things: describe what you have pinned, provide evidence or authority, or provide people with directions to begin with. The weak pinned posts are usually simply good content with no strategic explanation of their presence.

Not trophies are pinned posts. They’re signposts.

When you pick them, they set standards of everything that you post on your profile. They also help in lessening confusion as they anchor your message though your normal posts might be in different format or subject matter.

Highlights: Build Context Without Overload

It is at highlights that you blow the story up. They enable you to attach layers of insights without filling up your general feed.

The efficient highlights are structured in a visitor-driven manner as opposed to internal groupings. Rather than categories such as Updates or Misc, the strong highlights are on the outcomes and relevance -how you help, what to expect, what others experience or how to be involved more.

Every highlight must be meaningful. Unless it will assist some one in making a decision as to whether to trust or follow you, it does not fit in.

The aspect of highlights is particularly effective since it is optional. Individuals desiring deeper information will tap in. Individuals who do not will not feel oppressed.

Playlists: Create Guided Experiences

Social platforms resemble structured navigation the least by having playlists (or collections of content). They enable you to plan content based on subject, topic or purpose.

Playlists can be used to take visitors through a logical journey rather than making them scroll indefinitely. A new person can begin with a basic content. A person of a higher degree can do more. An evaluator can be interested in process or proof.

This makes your profile a story.

Playlists can be great when they are properly utilized: they raise the watch time, understanding, and even trust – as individuals feel guided rather than confused

Consistency Across Sections Builds Trust

Alignment is one of the least considered factors of profile optimization. The playlists and highlights, as well as your pinned posts should serve the same basic message, not to contradict each other.

When pinned posts claim one thing, lights outline something, and collections concentrate on a third aspect, the visitors get cognitive dissonance. Although each one of them is good on its own, they do not work together, they feel incoherent.

That is where the importance of a clear social strategy document is. Once you know your position, your audience and what matters to you, it is much simpler to curate these sections, and a lot more productive.

Don’t Optimize for Completeness—Optimize for Clarity

Most of the profiles fail because they attempt to cover everything. All offers, all subjects, all victories. The result is noise.

Your social home page need not be detailed. It needs to be clear. It features definite beats each time.

It is preferable to help someone get to one good idea of what your value is as opposed to letting them have a plethora of choices. The in-depth can also be developed later–when trust is established.

Update These Sections More Often Than You Think

Highlights, pinned posts and playlists are not something that can be set aside and forgotten. These parts must change as your interest changes.

Old stapled posts or out of date highlights just kill credibility. They are an indicator of neglect, even in the event of your solid regular content.

The brief quarterly assessment can be sufficient. Question: and does this still reflect on what we do now? Does it also serve new visitors?

Little changes can cause a tremendous boost in the number of conversions without altering your content output.

Final Thoughts

The playlists, your pinned posts, and highlights are no longer considered ornamental elements, they are infrastructure. Combined, they determine the way in which individuals perceive your brand even before they give it a second look or devotion. Individually treated as a homepage and not an afterthought, they will make casual visitors well-informed followers and potentially interested prospects. At this moment, in the congested social world, it is the clearness–and here is its commencement.