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LinkedIn Tips – Use Groups to Connect with Potential Clients

LinkdedIn Tips for Groups

Recently I started using LinkedIn with a lot more intention. Working through the LinkedInfluence course, I learned quite a few important LinkedIn tips. Rather than simply adding new connections and giving occassional recommendations, I decided to really use it. The most effective thing I did was start a LinkedIn group for people who wanted to boost their online visibilty. I also optimized my profile for sending new traffic and prospects back to my blog.

The Online Visibility Group is extremely active with nearly 700 members at the time of writing this post. It's a generous group, sharing tips, resources, and helping eaching other. Most importantly, though, we actively share each other's content to help boost visibility.

My co-faculty member at Social Media Biz School, Viveka Van Rosen is a LinkedIn expert. She travels all over the U.S. doing social media seminars with a particular emphasis on LInkedIn. Below, she shares one of her important LinkedIn tips…

LinkedIn Tips from Viveka von Rosen

Viveka recommends using LinkedIn Groups to connect to potential clients. Some of the groups to consider are:

  • Jobs (with 640000+ members)
  • Toplinked
  • LinkedStrategies (Top LinkedIn Strategies Group on LinkedIn)
  • LinkChat (LinkedIn group associated with the #LinkedInChat)
  • Groups related to your industry
  • Groups related to your client's industry
  • Alumni groups
  • Local groups

To find groups simply click on the groups tab in the middle of the page, then click on the "Groups Directory." Finally, start typing in the keywords, location, group name or company group you are looking for.  Then click on Join and start exploring!

Remember, you can only join 50 groups but you can always delete groups and join others.

Get more social media marketing tips from Social Media Biz School…join me and Viveka plus Lou Bortone, Andrea Vahl and Lori Gama as we share tips you can immediatly implement in a 27 minute free webinar on demand on How to Generate More Leads with Social Media. We share our tips on business blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Viveka Von Rosen, LinkedIn Tips

Viveka von Rosen is a nationally renowned LinkedIn speaker, trainer and consultant, working with business professionals sharing the secrets and strategies of using LinkedIn effectively.  She helps clients create a more powerful presence on LinkedIn, grow a truly useful network, and build connection and relationship strategies unique to their company culture. As an early adopter of social media, she learned through her own experience how to create powerful social presences and engaging networks! Host of the weekly #LinkedInChat on Twitter, and co-moderator of LinkedStrategies, the largest LinkedIn strategy group on LinkedIn, she is constantly learning, sharing and transferring social media skills and strategies to her tribe.

Got some hot LinkedIn tips? Share them in the comments below!

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , ,
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Pinterest Drives Traffic and Boosts Visibility for Your Blog

Pinterest

Pinterest is all the rage these days. No doubt you've seen articles, blog posts, and status updates on Facebook. You may be seeing "Pin It" buttons on blogs as well.  And for good reason. Pinterest as grown nearly as fast as the speed of light in the last few months. [Not sure what Pinterest is? Click here for info.]

Naturally my interest is in how to use it for business without being spamy. I joined Pinterest a few weeks ago and set up boards for Business Blogging Tips and Online Visibility Tips, in addition to personal boards for travel, running and books. My intention is to share not only my own posts on blogging and visibility but great content by others as well so there is a well rounded selection for visitors to choose from. 

Quickly I observed dozens of "likes" and "repins" of my posts. And, new traffic to those posts. Cool!

Next I set up a community board for Social Marketing Tips. I've invited people in my LinkedIn group to share content on this board too. [If you want to contribute your posts and other great content to the Social Marketing board, let me know in the comments below and I'll add you to the community. Be sure to include your Pinterest profile URL so I can follow you, too.]

I don't know how this will evolve for businesses, but from a visibility stand point, I'd recommend anyone who deals with visual arts in any way to get started, if you're not already. Restaurants, photographers, crafts people, builders, artists, architects, and designers of all types can benefit. If you demonstrate your product and services visually, get those images pinned and linked back to your site.

Tips for Getting Started on Pinterest

  1. Take the time to fill out your profile completely, including your bio. I've clicked through to a lot of profiles that have no bio info. This is a an opportunity to tell your visitors about you and your business. Include your picture. Set up a few boards and pin a couple of things right away.
  2. Add links to your blog, Facebook page and Twitter account
  3. A recommended tactic is to post your images on your blog FIRST, then pin to a board. This is an opportunity to attract people back to your site where they can go deeper into your content.
  4. If you create your own images and photographs, take the time to add a watermark with your URL. Courtesy of Elizabeth Cottrell, here's an article reviewing several watermark plugins for WordPress.
  5. Connect your Facebook profile to your Pinterest account with the Pinterest app, if you want to share your activity with your friends. I'm getting more activity on Facebook since I added the app.
  6. Add the Pin It button to your blog and make it easy for your readers to share your images and posts. The Pin It button is included in the Digg Digg social sharing plugin and there are stand alone Pin It plug ins as well.
  7. Encourage your readers, friends and followers to pin your content.

I saw this post (image above) in my Facebook newsfeed. This is an excellent way to enage your friends. I clicked through to the article and then pinned the image to my Running board. The only thing missing was the Pin It button on the actual post (a missed opportunity). I had added a Pin It button to my bookmarks tool bar so it's easy for me to pin anything on any site.

Another cool feature is that people can embed your Pins on their blogs. This one is from Tom Treanor's board about Pinterest tips…

 

So much has been written about Pinterest for business in the last few weeks. I've curated a list of posts for you that I've found helpful if you're ready to dig deeper.

Top Tips for Brands on Pinterest from SimplyZesty.com – there are some great tips for all businesses in this article.

How an Alaskan Mom Brings Millions to Her Carpentry Blog - a great case study on Social Media Examiner

To Pin or Not to Pin: An Indepth Look at Pinterest – detailed article by Kathryn Rose

10 Tips on Using Pinterest for your Business

thenextweb.com1/20/12

The most obvious use for Pinterest from a business perspective is to market and sell your products. By adding a price to your pinned item, you can direct users to your online shop, and your post will be automatically listed …

Pinterest Drives Enormous Blog and Business Success | Business 2 …

www.business2community.com1/30/12

This is Kate. She's a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog (thesmallthingsblog.com)

10 Pinterest Ideas With SEO Benefits | Business 2 Community

www.business2community.com1/27/12

If you haven't heard of Pinterest, it does what it says on the tin – a virtual pinboard of interesting things. You find something you like, you Pin it to.

How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business [Infographic ...

How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business [Infographic]. One of the “new kids” on the block…..Pinterest is doing very well in 6 months…….read 11 million visits in a week in December 2011 obviously you need to have a …

At the time of writing this post, Pinterest is still invite only. If you would like an invite, post your request in the comments and I'll send one to you. If you'd like to contribute to the Social Marketing  Tips Board, post your Pinterest URL in the comments and I'll add you. If you'd like to connect with me on Pinterest, click here.

Feel free to share your tips and thoughts about Pinterest below…

Filed Under: Online Visibility, Social Media Marketing Tagged With:
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3 Essential Tips for Measuring Social Media ROI

This is a guest post by Lior Levin at Producteev.

3 Essential Tips for Measuring Social Media ROI

Measure social media ROI

When a business invests staff time and cash into a social media campaign, the expectation is that an increase in revenue will result. However, every business has a limit to its resources, and efforts without a clear ROI will be scrapped sooner or later.

How can a social media manager or marketing manager determine which social media efforts are working and which are ineffective? Here are three tips for measuring social media ROI.

Potential Is Impossible to Measure

Hal Thomas of CFG Communications suggests that it’s nearly impossible to measure a clear ROI for social media since it functions more as a vehicle for opportunity, much like handing out a business card. He recently shared , “Like a Facebook fan or Twitter follower, a business card merely represents potential — so, you can’t accurately measure the ROI of a business card, just as you can’t measure the value of a Facebook fan.”

Conversion rates for particular activities on social media may provide the most helpful metrics for marketing departments looking to track their social media efforts. In other words, if you’re linking to a particular promotion on your website, track the sales and page activities linked to that promotion. However, there are benefits that come from social media that you can’t always track and quantify.

Measure the Right Things

Links, shares, and likes are just a starting point for a return on social media campaigns. While earning the good will and attention of your customers is great, you need to convert that attention into reaching your business goals. Dexter Bustarde shares on Mashable, “When you earn yourself a Facebook Like, you’ve successfully opened up a line of communication with a potential customer and his or her friends. What you communicate after that is where we should look for real lasting success.”

ROI is a business metric, not a social media metric according to Olivier Blanchard, author of Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. In other words, if you can measure links and website hits, you’re not actually demonstrating a return on investment for the time you spend on social media. 

Blanchard, who also blogs at The Brand Builder, suggests starting with a baseline of revenue, new customers, and transactions, tracking social media efforts on a timeline, and then overlaying the three over a period time.

How to Track Your Social Media Activity

As you organize social media campaigns, a key to determining your ROI is determining which posts and tweets are driving traffic to your site so you can make these trends to your sales numbers. In fact, very few companies have successfully managed to transition into optimizing their social media data based on their reports from services such as Atlas or Dart. Here are some options for effectively tracking your social media activity as you match it up with your sales goals and income results:

Social Too tracks your activity on Facebook and Twitter. The premium service provides additional stats and tracking tools, though the free tool is still quite useful. Users create a Social Too vanity URL that visitors to your Facebook page are routed through. This will help you know how many people have clicked on your links, where they came from, and more.

Hootsuite is another great social media tool that can manage Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all in one place, while also providing reports on the responses to your status updates and which ones were clicked. At the end of each day, use Hootsuite to create a customized report on your social media activity for a specified period of time.

ThinkUp is a powerful and completely free tool that enables you to analyze your social media data. While you’ll need to host ThinkUp on your own server, the data it provides is quite comprehensive and easy to customize with maps, graphs, and spreadsheets. It comes highly recommended for Facebook especially.

Before your CEO hands you a pink slip for poor social media ROI, invest in tracking your social media activities, performance, and correlation to sales and customer activities. You’ll not only demonstrate the value of your work, you’ll also learn what works so that you can improve your overall effectiveness on social media.

Lior Levin

About the Author:  Lior Levin is a marketing consultant for an inspection company that offers preshipment inspection services and who also consults for a company that provides a task management tool for businesses and individuals.

How do you measure social media success and ROI?

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , ,
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Facebook Continues to Dominate as Social Network of Choice

In a recent poll I asked you to vote on the primary social network you use for your business, where you spend most of your time for business (not personal). I limited it to the top five: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. As you can see in the results below, Facebook beat the others by two to one.

Interesting to me was that Twitter and LinkedIn were tied. Google+ got only 2 votes which isn't too surprising since it's a very young network and no one voted for YouTube. That tells me most people use YouTube either 1) not at all or 2) as a secondary site for boosting visibiltiy and traffic. When I asked a similar question in 2010, Twitter came in second with LinkedIn well behind. So it appears LinkedIn is gaining ground as an important site for businesses to be using for their networking.

Of course there is nothing scientific about this poll. Asking one question doesn't provide a full picture of who and how businesses in my network are using these sites. The next questioni is: does your business cater primarily to other businesses (B to B) or to consumers (B to C)?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Online Visibility, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , ,
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What’s the Primary Social Networking Site You Use for Your Business? [poll]

Every now and then I like to take your pulse and find out where you stand with using social networking sites for your business. It's been awhile since I asked so I figured it's time for another poll.

The last time I asked (in 2008!), I included blogs, Flickr and MySpace. At the time, blogs edged out Facebook by a few percent. In May 2010, I posed the hypothetical question: if you could only use one social networking site, which one would it be….Facebook beat Twitter and LinkedIn.

This time, I'm most interested in social networking sites, not blogs. The landscape has changed a bit and now includes Google+. While there are hundreds of niche social networking sites, I'm interested in knowing which of the "big 5" you're using to promote and build your business.

Please select the PRIMARY social networking site you use for your business. I realize you most likely use multiple sites, however, I'm curious where you spend most of your energy to attract and connect with clients and prospects, as well as promote your business.

I would love to hear your thoughts on why you use one site over another or if you have changed your focus from one site to another and why. Please post your comments below.

Me? I find myself gravitating from Facebook to LinkedIn more and more. I've found the level of business-related conversation and traffic back to my blog, better since starting a group on LinkedIn. Many of my colleagues feel the depth of connection is better on Google+, though the jury is still out for me since very few people in my community have migrated over there yet. 

I look forward to your response!

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