Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – Social Media Nightmare, Where Should I Be?

Confused about how to effectively promote your business on the Web?
Confused about how to effectively promote your business on the Web?

You hate Facebook, but your customers are there. You just don’t get Twitter, isn’t that for teenagers? Too busy for LinkedIn? All these social media sites may seem like too much trouble for some business owners to get involved with, but did you know your competition is there and so are your future customers!

How do you demystify where you personally should spend your time and on what social media sites? It is easy, look at your demographics in Google Analytics.

If your customer/reader base is 18 to 29 to 30 years old or so, you’d better be on Twitter.

If your customer/reader base is 30 to 60 years old or so, you’d better be on Facebook.

If you are selling business to business, regardless of age, you’d better be on LinkedIn.

How do you find your own Google Analytics stats?

  1. Go to “Audience” in the left side navigation, then go to “Demographics” and then select “Age”.
  2. There you’ll be able to see your visitors from the last 30 days organized by age groups.
  3. Make sure that you check average session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate.
  4. Based on what you see for your own traffic then make a decision on where you should selectively be on social media.

Don’t feel that just because you may not be on social media that your business does not need to be there. Social media use is an excellent way to start building a community of readers loyal to your message.

Not sure where to start? At McCord Web Services, we make it easy for you. Check out our writing rates for social media with service options for frequency. You are sure to find something that fits your budget.

LinkedIn Business Pages Get a New Cover

Our LinkedIn Cover Image

For many businesses moving away from Facebook, LinkedIn is becoming the place to be. Not only can you have an personal executive profile at LinkedIn, but your business can have a LinkedIn page too.

Business pages just got upgraded to a new cover look and so if you have a Business Page, you’ll want to login to LinkedIn and add a large graphic as your cover shot. Here’s our page so you can see what the cover looks like.

It is important to know that the image you create for LinkedIn must be 646 pixels wide and 220 pixels tall or it won’t upload. The image can actually be larger and when loaded LinkedIn will allow you to crop it, but must meet these minimum requirements.

The finished cover look is very Twitter-ish/Facebook-ish. I took elements of our company website banner for branding purposes, but you can use just about any image you would like.

With businesses looking to be social but socially productive, LinkedIn and the activity you find there definitely warrants another look. We provide LinkedIn status updates to your personal executive page. Check with us for more information or visit our services page online.

LinkedIn and Twitter Broke Up But LinkedIn Moved On

Although the fact that Twitter cut LinkedIn loose, meaning that Twitter does not allow Twitter feeds to appear in a LinkedIn page widget anymore is not new news, but the fact that LinkedIn has leveraged this into its own success story is new news.

This article gives a very insightful view of the blunder that Twitter has made in breaking up with LinkedIn. By disavowing their relationship Twitter has encouraged LinkedIn to pursue its own course in direct competition with Twitter.

“Back in July Twitter announced that it was no longer going to allow users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. Twitter gave us the usual gumpf about wanting to “provide the core Twitter user experience through a consistent set of products and tools”. What Twitter really meant to say was, “We don’t want anyone reading tweets where we can’t put ads”.

What LinkedIn then did was to encourage use of their own newsfeed and nicely integrated it with HootSuite and easy sharing sites. Now for business people the LinkedIn newsfeed may actually be more meaningful for them than a Twitter feed.

This was a very foolish shortsighted decision on Twitter’s part. If they had stayed the course they could have expanded into the business market and created a very nice partnership with LinkedIn. My feeling is that in the long run, business people may leave Twitter totally to the spammers and ads and move full throttle over to LinkedIn now that they have a full social and interaction platform.

If you are not posting updates to LinkedIn, now’s the time to give that some consideration and review our LinkedIn update services.

LinkedIn Heat Map – What Are People Looking At in Your Profile

This interesting article was shared by Ken Lankin at Awesome Almonds. It is interesting reading about what readers look at in your LinkedIn profile. Thanks Ken!

Here’s what the article says in a nutshell:

  • Top priority and the most “looking” is done on your profile photo. Try to take the very best picture possible and even consider having a professional photo taken if you think that LinkedIn is the right place for your marketing endeavors. A great looking photo may get more people to check out your full profile. Here’s a great photo of one of my clients, Shawn Friesen. The photo is engaging and unusual.
  • The place that gets the second most views is your most recent Twitter update. Wow! Who knew? Make sure you are tweeting regularly and are using the app to connect your LinkedIn account to Twitter.
  • Comments on your status update. Wow, who knew how important on LinkedIn this was as well. Engagement is key. Taking time to interact with your updates and those of others is a great way to really get noticed on LinkedIn.

Even in today’s faced paced digital world that ability to connect with others in essence hinges on what you post on social media sites and the attention to detail you put in on creating personal profiles. Find out more about how we can help you with social media updates with our affordable services.

Have You Checked Out LinkedIn Business Pages?

If you think that all the action is still only happening at Facebook, think again. LinkedIn has been quietly forging ahead with new innovations that you should be considering for your own business.

If you sell business to consumer you may not be interested in LinkedIn Pages, but if you also sell or only sell Business to Business, LinkedIn pages are certainly worth a look-see. As an example here is our LinkedIn business page. I have not invested a lot of time in set up, but you can see that you can add a logo, link your blog, and when you have time even add in products or services to your business page. For a full in-depth article showcasing eight new LinkedIn page features, I recommend you read this article.

I like the ability to link in your tweets and blog posts to your LinkedIn Business page, and it was easy to do. I have not added any products or services to my profile yet, but plan on doing so in the next several weeks.

If you haven’t noticed, LinkedIn is now even allowing you to promote your business with pay per click advertising as well. This may be a better marketplace for some businesses then advertising on Facebook as you will be having your ads shown to business decision makers not the receptionist who is killing time playing Farmville or Unicorn Attack on Facebook.

Getting Started on LinkedIn

Use social networking for business. Find out how!Okay, I admit it, I have dabbled half heartedly with social networking for the last year. Yes, I do have the cursory MySpace site, a Facebook page, and a LinkedIn profile, but I have not embraced social networking; it seems like too much trouble.

It wasn’t until this last month that I decided I really should carefully evaluate social networking to see how the typical business owner could use social networking for successfully growing their business and connecting with customers.

I selected LinkedIn as the social networking service I would really focus on. One reason is that this is where many professionals in my business arena have migrated. MySpace is still owned by the high school set, Facebook by the college and young professional set (although I do use and like Facebook too), and LinkedIn has become the social networking platform of choice for most business professionals such as myself.

What I found out in my testing was, well, shocking. So much so, that it has dramatically changed my viewpoint of social media and social networking. Here’s my candid experience and story.

In mid August, I had 10 contacts on LinkedIn. I had simply connected to anyone who had sent me an invitation. I had not aggressively tried to grow my own network. My point of view was I was incredibly busy and spending time on a social enterprise was “fluff” and consumed time that I simply did not have.

So, one afternoon, I decided I would give it a “real go” as research for an article for this e-newsletter. I loaded my Outlook address book to LinkedIn and clicked “send invitations”. I didn’t even do a custom message, as I was so half hearted on embracing this new “time pit” called social networking. What happened in less than 30 minutes staggered me. I had clients, contacts, and prospects send responses, some with an immediate link to connect with me, others with personal notes. I earned nearly 20 new connections in a very short period of time. Wow, what a response and nearly immediate! What I found was that people are hungry, no, starving to connect.

I then went a step further and sent a request for recommendations to a number of clients. In no less than another 30 minutes I had five excellent reviews of my services that were posted on my LinkedIn profile. As I staggered away from my computer, I was shaken with how quickly all this had all happened. Word of mouth testimonials are “worth their weight in gold” for a business such as mine.

I was able to get an approval from each client to use the recommendation on my website for marketing purposes. (If you post testimonials on your own website, you know and understand how truly important great comments can be toward establishing your authority and winning new clients.) The people who did my recommendations were warm and eager to help me. Wow, the power of social networking at play right in front of my own eyes.

Use social networking effectively.The next thing I did was to post a question in the “Question and Answer” section on LinkedIn. I asked what type of social media people were using, was it generating sales, and did they consider social networking a “time pit”. (Oh, I was woefully ignorant then!). In less than 30 minutes again, I had 12 excellent responses; thoughtful in nature and addressed to me personally. Many of the responses to my question were from top executives at companies like Boeing or from film makers or professional social networking consultants. I really benefited from the group insight and comments returned from my “loaded question”.

After that I decided that maybe I should interact too in the “Question and Answer” section and went on to review and then answer 9 questions. All comments and results were posted to my LinkedIn profile as well. My responses allow others to review my insight, candor, and point of view, kind of like a snap shot of my personality and expertise.

The next day, after now having doubled my connections to over 30 or so, I decided that I should really “get serious”. I loaded my e-newsletter subscriber list of over 1,000 names and sent a custom greeting and explanation of who I was, how I had their email address, and sent out the invitation to connect with me on LinkedIn using email within the LinkedIn control panel.

In under 12 hours from my large list invitation my LinkedIn network contained over 90 connections. Less than one week later I am at 140 connections and still growing. In the first 24 hours, I also picked up a possibility for a new speaking engagement in front of 60 local area public relations professionals and a potential new subcontracting partner project for search optimization, ghost blogging, and Google AdWords management. All this with a wee bit of time investment.

This is the bottom line of what I have found from my own personal experience with social networking and LinkedIn. People crave, no, they thirst for personal interaction. People want to connect with you and want to share their knowledge and themselves!

Here Are Some of My Tips and the Lessons I Have Learned

One – You should not be focused on selling all the time in using LinkedIn. The value of your expertise and open sharing of resources and ideas is well worth the time investment alone. Being able to tap others for references or to recommend someone you know to a connection has incredible value and is super easy to do. Reviewing new connections’ profiles and then their network can give you opportunities to join new conversation groups and to connect with people with common interests in your industry. To do this, you can either introduce yourself to a new connection directly (if they have that option enabled) or ask your common connection to introduce you. You get five free introductions with your LinkedIn account set up. After that, you can buy more.

Two – Responding to “Questions and Answers” can help to educate you and to share your knowledge with others. Each time you answer a question the information is posted to your profile allowing others to see your insight and style.

Three – Asking for a recommendation is easy and painless. You can even ask for a revision gracefully, if you do not like what someone has said and you have the option to post the recommendation or not in your profile. If you decide to use the recommendation off the LinkedIn site best business practices recommend that you ask the author for approval. What a great way to build your authority for your services and products in an easy, unthreatening, and painless way.

Try our suggestions for successful social networking.Four – Have fun and invest 15 minutes each day to add new connections either from new prospects you have had the previous business day or by reviewing connections of your connections and looking for common ground to connect with new people.

Five – When a prospect contacts you by email through your website, make sure to not only add their email to your e-newsletter subscriber list, but invite them to connect with you online with LinkedIn or Facebook. Make sure you have noted in your privacy policy on your website what you will do before you do this to prevent a problem. Although you may not create a sale, by adding the individual to your network, you retain a way to easily share information back and forth and keep connections up-to-date with new services offerings, promotions, new white papers, and other things that bring value to your relationship that may lead to a possible future sale or recommendation.

My Conclusion

What has surprised me from all of this was the friendliness, speed of response, and overall positive attitude from others eager to connect with me. Truly people are starving to connect and share with others. It just takes you to make the first step to reach out to them. By doing so, you build your network, your credibility, and enhance your LinkedIn profile allowing connections to view your “resume” and interact with you and even approach you for a business.

On my end, I have already recommended one previous client to a connection who was looking for a branding expert, and written one recommendation for another. So referrals and recommendations work both ways benefiting your connections from your relationships with others.

You can also send out notes to your connections and post news updates. In fact, I notified my connections that I was publishing this newsletter to share my experience and to encourage connections to subscribe to my monthly e-newsletter list.

There Are Options to LinkedIn – Facebook Is an Excellent Application!

Now one note about Facebook, although I am speaking solely about LinkedIn in this article, I do use and like Facebook. One of the big differences between LinkedIn and Facebook is the ability to add applications like Google Lively, YouTube videos, Grow a Plant, and Flairs to your profile. These are very cool interactive widgets that are easy to add, and add color to your profile, and interest to your profile page, and allow you to interact with “friends” in a fun way.

Additionally, I like that you can instant message other connections directly from Facebook by clicking the icon in the bottom right of the page. There are more cool interactive features on Facebook from my point of view than for LinkedIn, but I find LinkedIn simpler to use on a daily basis.

Which social networking system you use is really best based on where your colleagues and clients have migrated. Which ever one you choose, make a small time investment to reap big benefits. I think that you will find out just like I did your relationships with clients, prospects, and other people will be richer for their use.

Ready to Try Out Some of These Social Networking Sites Yourself?

If you are ready to try out social networking, it is easy. Just visit LinkedIn or Facebook to set up a free account and get rolling. You can send me an email invitation as I would be glad to be your first connection for Facebook at nmccord56@msn.com or to nancy@mccordweb.com for LinkedIn. I’ll look forward to meeting and sharing with you online at either LinkedIn or Facebook.