Social media is nothing if not constantly changing, which on the surface can be quite discouraging. We may already feel as though it's next to impossible to keep up, but I would argue that most of the time, these changes are improvements, and meant to make things easier and more effective, and not simply change for change sake.

Whether it's a new way to publish content, publicize your wares, or network with your audience, social platforms change constantly, and often for the better.

To help with this, here are some of the latest social media changes to come down the pike in the last few months, what they are, and how they can help your small business!

5 New Social Media Updates that Can Benefit Your Small Business

Facebook Instant Articles – Facebook is debuting a new feature called Instant Articles, which is designed to allow information publishers to more effectively get their message out on mobile devices. Highly interactive and user friendly, this promises to help publishers with monetizing and spreading their content.

Twitter Loading up Characters in DMs – Starting in July 2015, Twitter has lifted the 140 character restriction on direct messages. (Not Tweets!) in an effort to allow better interaction and engagement on the platform. Your mind should be spinning at the possibilities this might afford!

Google Search to Show More Social Results – Look for Tweets to start showing up in Google mobile search results. All you need to do is to type your interest into the Google mobile app and the resulting page will have relevant and recent Tweets on the subject at hand. Right now this only works on mobile, desktop to come later.

Twitter's Killer New Search Page – Even more from Twitter, a new, full-featured search results page which boasts a far cleaner and useful interface. You can also filter your searches quite nicely, to further refine your search queries.

Better LinkedIn Reporting form Simply Measured – If you've been using the social analytics company Simply Measured you might have noticed a new report for LinkedIn publishers that gives a much deeper dive into their analytics. There is a ton of metrics to analyze, and also an updated cross channel social performance report feature that covers 8 of the most popular social networks, including LinkedIn.

Social media is in a constant state of change and up with some of the shifts will help keep your social efforts fruitful.

There are a LOT of factors that go into determining where your pages rank in the Google search results, at last count more than 200 and climbing. And this is only a guess, using the available empirical evidence SEO's and webmasters have been able to divine from looking intently behind the scenes.

While SEO is at least in part a crap shoot, we can make educated determinations as to what we ought to do and ought not to do to our pages in order to try and get them found highly in Google search results.

One is through the use of keywords. We've always known that keywords play a big part in ranking pages. Back in the day people could rank highly simply by stuffing their pages with the keywords they wanted to rank for, and presto, they were sitting high atop the rankings.

This is not to say you can't do well by strategically inserting keywords in all of the right places. Indeed, you should do this. You just have to do it naturally.

How keywords fit into your search rankings

Shaping your page content to focus on a particular keyword ranking is something of an art. Many times the domain name might have little to nothing related to the keyword in question, and that is one reason why keywords in domain names are no longer the signal they once were.

Today having the keyword in your URL, title tag, H1-5 headings and sprinkled judiciously throughout the content is the best way you can help your cause.

What keyword tactics can hurt you

Try to stuff keywords in this era, or use cloaked content, and you'll find yourself on the wrong end of a Google penalty.

One more way is through the improper use of anchor text in your site's backlinks. Having all the backlinks for a particular page show up with the same anchor text, and all be followed links, is a sure red flag in this current algorithm. Go for as natural a link profile as you can build, and vary your anchor text with natural phrases that would occur, such as a few “click here” and the like.