Tag: Social Networking

Benefitting from LinkedIn Company Pages

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For those of you who may not be familiar with Company Pages on the professional networking site LinkedIn, they are a great tool to share information about your brand and the individuals who represent it. If you’re researching companies, these pages also provide you with a way to familiarize yourself with others with whom you may want to work or even those that represent your competition.

The process for setting up your Company Page is pretty straightforward and you can begin here.

The best strategy when creating your Company Profile is to remain consistent with the keywords and phrases you have used in your print collateral and online marketing efforts. If you are using terms you uncovered via comprehensive keyword research (please don’t take keyword research lightly), that  accurately represent phrasing used by your target audience when searching for what you offer, then you should stick with them.

Consistency is always important for best results.

The Products & Services tab offers some powerful features that not only allow you to list your Products and Services but also to associate links, relevant information, and even promotional offers. For example, you can associate links to videos on your YouTube.com channel. You can also specify your product/service related web page address. If your employees are listed in LinkedIn, you can add the relevant one(s) to the Contact section. You can also create a Promotional offer to entice new users. And remember to continue using your keywords as you fill out the Profile title, description, image text, and disclaimer.

Additional marketing tools are available to upgraded account holders only. The first is a simple admin tool that enables you to upload up to three static banners (JPEG, GIF or PNG), 640×220 pixels in size, that link to the url (web page address) you specify. This powerful internet advertising feature can be used to sell, promote, and inform, or even to generate donations, registrants, attendees, or fulfill any number of targeted objectives.

For best conversion results, make sure your landing page (where the respondent will arrive after clicking the banner link) is focused exclusively on the message communicated in the banner.

Another great feature is the Recommendations tool. You’ve seen this in the personal LinkedIn accounts. Soliciting comments and recommendations from customers and colleagues is of tremendous value. People are influenced by what others say. And in this case, the user has the opportunity to learn something about the person making the statement so the recommendation or comment carries more weight.

This next tool takes a little strategic planning because it has to do with how you want to target your various Audience groups. Developing unique content for each of your targeted audience groups will always produce the best results because it is not diluted in any way that detracts from what is engaging to them. Before you create an audience segment, identify and plan how you want to approach each one. Then select the criteria and edit your company profile to ensure the strongest response.

If you are interested in paid advertising on LinkedIn you can do that here as well. The Campaign tool is pretty straightforward and allows you to advertise any web page you like, which may or may not be your Company Profile.

Lastly, I want to mention the Analytics tool. It is to your advantage to spend some time to learn and understand your performance in terms of page views, visitors, and clicks on content by industry and followers so you can make informed ‘next step’ decisions. The tool also offers you a benchmark comparison with companies similar to yours.

Once again, you can click here to set up your Company Page on LinkedIn. Click on the Upgrade My Account link at the bottom of the page for additional marketing tools and features.

Social Media is Important to Your Business Development

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Many small and medium sized businesses are starting to understand the business development effectiveness of social media or social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Buzz and others. According  to Globalspec’s latest report, Trends in Industrial Marketing 2010: How Manufacturer’s Are Marketing Today, 68% of industrial respondents “plan to increase spending on social media in 2010” and indicate that “Facebook and LinkedIn are the most popular social media applications being used.”

As stated in an article appearing at Mashable.com by Jennifer Van Grove Why Small Businesses Shouldn’t Take Social Media for Granted, the 2010 Business Monitor United States report — commissioned by UPS – indicated that among the general business population only “24% of respondents said they’ve received sales leads from social media, with just 1% citing it as a factor for business growth.”

The biggest fear among the “uninitiated” is a lack of understanding about how to get started, what to do exactly, and how to manage it over the long run. There is no doubt that managing social media is a time-consuming venture but one well-worth engaging in. If it’s within your budget, hire a professional to help you. If you are a maverick and ready to tackle it on your own then here are a few things to help you.

Start off slowly and discover ways to use all the available tools effectively. I recommend starting with LinkedIn and Twitter. Recently the companies joined forces (see my article Twitter and LinkedIn Forge New Partnership) to allow account owners to integrate their Twitter posts with their LinkedIn account so that either all of their posts, or just the ones they add the #in hash tag at the end of, would be visible to visitors who were interacting with their LinkedIn account profile.

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Use Google Profiles To Boost Online Networking Opportunities

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Another great product from Google is Google profiles. If you haven’t signed up for your free Google Account you really should. A Google profile gives you the opportunity to manage how you appear on Google to other Google users (and there are A LOT of them). The profile actually provides you with a centralized location from which to share your web content, such as links to your blog, online photos, websites, and other social networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn.

On your Google Profile, you control exactly what you want people to see. An effective way to take advantage of all it has to offer is to include your professional profile, or that of your company, and links to any online assets you have such as your personal/company website, blogs, LinkedIn account, YouTube videos and so forth. To give you an example of how this can work well for you professionally, I will share with you what happened to me. Another Google user with whom I am connected professionally was searching for website design and discovered I also have a marketing and website design company dedicated to helping small to medium sized industrial and commercial businesses, just what she was looking for!

Google users can find you in any number of ways – by your name, your business(es), your reviews on Google Maps, sharing Google Reader items, articles you’ve written, adding ebooks to your Google Book Search library, to name a few. The best way to take advantage of all the online networking opportunities it offers you is to compose your Google profile to suit your professional/personal objectives and be sure to include links to all your online assets.  Give it a whirl.

How Local Businesses Can Benefit from Facebook’s “Like It”

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With the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, word-of-mouth-advertising has received a whole new set of legs! The latest plug-in from Facebook allows site owners to place a “Like It” button on their webpage to allow users to attach the specific web page or blog entry, for example, to their Facebook Wall to share with their network of friends and colleagues. Although a potential benefit to a variety of businesses, I think this little plug-in may be of significant value to local brick-and-mortar and other types of small businesses.

We all understand the power and value of a referral. Think of the “Like It” button as a type of referral. It provides you with an opportunity to reach the people within an established trust network. Facebook “Friends” (it’s kind of safe to say) are those who know, like and trust each other. So if one tells the others they should “check this out” they most probably will, particularly if it is convenient or nearby.

The numbers of people you could potentially reach are staggering considering that each person within a single network is in fact attached to others across multiple networks. Attach the Facebook “Like It” button to your blog, newsletter, home page of your website, or anywhere else online you think it may reach your local audience.

If you have a brick-and-mortar business, don’t forget to promote it in-store by encouraging visitors to your establishment to visit you online for ‘weekly specials,’ for example, and to click the “Like It” button so their friends can have the experience too.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the number of sites using the Facebook “like it” plug has rapidly grow to over 100,000 sites already since its launch a couple of weeks ago.

You like DeMicco.com :)

Free to Low Cost Business and Communication Tools: Part 7: Google Buzz

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Google Buzz is a social networking application that allows you to share not only updates but a variety of media such as links, photos and videos. It works much the same as Twitter but does not have any character limitations that I could tell.

Buzz is accessible from your Gmail Account. Responses to your posts are delivered to your Gmail inbox, from where you may also make additional posts. If you use your Gmail account often then this is very convenient.

You are able to control who sees your posts by changing the setting to either Private or Public. The Public setting means you are sharing your post with the world. The Private setting allows you to share posts with the Group you select from those you have established in your Contacts. Say you want to make a post to your team that is working on a particular client project. Set up the Group in your Contacts. Then select Private, select the Group, write your post, add links, photos or video and Post. Each member of that group will receive the posts with all the links and attachments in their Gmail inbox. And you will have a record of it in your sent file.

The communication benefits are far-reaching if you get creative with how you use Google Buzz. You can use it to:

  • Broadcast announcements to the greater Public about product or service updates, expansion, new offices, new staff, promotions, contracts, etc. – don’t forget to attach links, photos, or video
  • Communicate internally with Groups you establish for client projects or internal projects
  • Communicate privately with someone

Buzz also offers you branding as well as Public Relations value. Posts that are made Public on Buzz are organized by topic and fed to others who have demonstrated similar interests, allowing them to read or participate in the ongoing conversation. Carefully select a topic that you want to reach your target audience groups. Then start an informative discussion and see what kind of response you get.

Follow the link to watch a short video and read more about Google Buzz and its features.