5 Steps To Making LinkedIn Work For You

What’s the best social media platform for you? It depends on your business, and who you are trying to reach out to.

If your client is corporate, it may involve LinkedIn. While LinkedIn hasn’t zoomed to the top like Facebook in recent months, its still a platform used my millions of business people all over the world. Its set up exclusively to connect with other business owners, and provides you with everything you need to find connections, prospects and clients.

If you haven’t looked at LinkedIn in a while, head back over and give it a try using these five steps.

Step One: Build A Dynamic Profile

If you’ve ever created a resume, it’s easy to assume your LinkedIn profile should resemble your resume. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Take a moment and think about how people would search for you. Would they search for President of ABC Company? Or would they search for your type of business or niche: product photographer or retail marketing expert for instance? Keywords are important in the online world because people search by keyword, not by business name. You can also be found in a variety of ways, including on LinkedIn and on sites like Google.

Make sure you fill out a complete profile, and make it as detailed as possible. Put in a professional portrait of yourself – not your business logo or a photo of your dog. People want to connect with you as a person, and build a relationship before they take the next step. A professional photo gives you more credibility, and helps people visualize doing business with you. [Read more...]

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Common Sense Safety Tips For Social Sites With GeoLocation

Location based platforms are everywhere. With the rise in use in Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter, location based marketing offers promising alternatives for brick and mortar businesses.

For those of you that use it, you love it. But if you are still new to the concept, you may be asking yourself “why would anyone want to use this technology?” It opens up a variety of new problems to your already complicated life. GeoLocation sites have their purpose. And as many case studies have show, businesses can do quite well with this technology. But if you decide to use it, you should focus on security first.

1. Never use geolocation features at home. Logging in from home not only tells people when you are at home, it also tells people where your home is. With the huge impact of social over the past few years, if a person wants your home address, nothing can stand in the way of them finding it. But do you really want to broadcast it out to everyone?

[Read more...]

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How To Use SocialMention To Find Content For Your Social Sites and Blogs

TheSocialGhost.com shares tips and strategies for using SocialMention to find content for your social media sites and blogs.

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Social Media Is Just A Fad

Think Social Media is just a fad? Better think again. This video will share with you some amazing trends of how information flows -Social Media Revolution

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Which Social Site Should You Spend Your Time On?

As a business owner or professional, you only have so many hours in the day. While the promise of what social media can do for you is great, how do you really know where you should be spending your time? Which site is truly the best for you?direction

During this past July, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the U.S., up 14 percent from June. Compare that with Twitter, which saw 21.2 million unique visitors during July, up 6 percent from June. (full stats here)

In either case, the numbers look great. Where else can you head out and interact with millions of unique visitors all in one month?

So of course you should jump on to both Facebook and Twitter, and enjoy the ride.

While that’s a great strategy, you may be overlooking something that will work far better for your business. First ask yourself a series of questions.

  • Who is my ideal client?
  • Where can I connect with them?
  • Where are they most likely to hand out online?
  • Is there a way to restructure what I do to reach out to more people?
  • Can I niche my business, and reach out to individual groups in different ways?

The whole idea behind social is it allows you to connect with prospects and customers, and provide them with more information in your area of expertise. The more expertise you can provide, the more clients you’ll find by being in tune with them.

Start by listing out your ideal clients. Be specific, thinking of individual clients when you create your list. Then categorize them. As a massage therapist, your list may look like this:

1. people recovering from auto injuries
2. people referred by chiropractors
3. people who work out at a gym regularly

Now you have three distinct categories of people you can connect with. You can look for people that list this in their bios on places like Facebook and Twitter, and you can also look for specific social groups that target these specific areas.

Keep up your postings on the main sites, but spend more of your time connecting on the niche sites as well. With smaller sites, you may not have to post as option to have a big impact. And you can also pull out from the crowd as an expert quicker, giving your business an even bigger boost.

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How To Use LinkedIn To Prove Your Expertise

TheSocialGhost.com provides you a quick look at one of the features of LinkedIn and how you can use it to start building your expertise online.

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Creating A Social Strategy Within Your Business Plan

Do you have a business plan? What about a marketing plan? Do you have a social networking strategy somewhere within those plans?

Most people don’t. They have never put down on paper exactly why they are using Facebook, or how Twitter will help grow their businesses.

But just because it’s a free tool doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a plan of action for what you are doing. Like all other forms of marketing, you should give some thought to why you are doing it, and how you will implement it over a long period of time.

1. Don’t use social networking for marketing your business unless you understand how it will impact your overall business.

Too many business owners start using Twitter or Facebook without having a plan and understanding how it will impact their business models. Sure they are free tools. Yes you can reach out to a ton of people. But statistics show almost 95% of all people on Twitter have 100 or less followers, and rarely post more than a few times.marketing small business

That’s not a strategy. There are no checks and balances to make sure you are on target. And you probably won’t have any results because there is little effort in a strategy like this.

2. There’s a cost to everything.

Whenever I meet with people and they find out I help people develop social networking strategies, the questions pour in.

How often should I post on Twitter?
Can you really build business relationships with Facebook?
Is LinkedIn a successful tool?

Sure, all of these are free resources for you. But the trouble with each of them is they take time to fully put to use, and to see the results.

I’ve been on Twitter for 1 ½ years, and have only had measurable results since January. Is it a significant part of my business? No. I have different streams coming in from all over. But Twitter is bringing me in income every single week.

My goal is to make it a stream of income, and to use it effectively. Which I’m doing fairly well.

The cost to me is my time. It takes time every day to build up the relationships, and to understand how and when to promote each piece of my business.

When you are developing your own strategy, its important to understand that just because its free, doesn’t mean you will see instant results and have it work for you with your limited knowledge on the subject matter.

You have to be willing to learn how to use it better, not just use it knowing what you know.

Start developing your own strategy and find out what’s truly possible with social marketing.

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Big Promises For Followers – Are They Really Beneficial To Your Business?

Twitter. It seems you can’t read an article, visit a website, or even watch television without someone mentioning their Twitter account. 

So if you run a business, you have to be on Twitter, right? 

And if you’re on Twitter, the best thing you can do is get a ton of followers, right?big promises for twitter followers

So when you get an email promising you 5,000 Twitter followers in 5 hours for $50 is a great deal, right?

Think again.

As with anything in the business world, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

First, if anyone is promising a ton of followers for a low fee, your first question should be “How valuable would these followers be to my business?”

Just like everything, the best way to get followers is the good old fashioned way. Go out and find people who you have something in common with.

  • If you are a mommy blogger, find moms.
  • If you are an accountant for small businesses, find small business owners.
  • If you are a realtor, find people who are interested in buying property within your area. (A Colorado realtor can find a ton of people to follow in Colorado very easily.)

And honestly, it’s not difficult to get a large following if you spend some time at it. So let’s say your goal is to add 50 new followers every day. That’s 350 a week. If you add 50 a day for three weeks, that’s more than 1,000 people you’re connecting with every time you Tweet.

And if you’re adding new followers at that rate, and contributing by writing a few times every day, you won’t just grow at 50 per day. Eventually it takes on a life of its own because you’re active and communicating. It works.

So in one month, you can easily have over 1,000 people in your network.

It may not be the 5,000 in 5 hour guarantee. But wouldn’t you rather chat with 1,000 people that you have a strong potential of building a relationship with?

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Why Social Is Changing Our World

Do you remember the simple life? For most of us it wasn’t that long ago.

When you did something crazy in high school, people talked about you for a week at school and then it disappeared. Now it makes for great high school reunion conversations.

Ah, the good ol’ days. creating a lifetime buzz

Thanks to blogging and social media, your business is everyone else’s business forever. If you do something crazy, it will circulate online forever. If you do something embarrassing, the photos will be around forever to prove it.

A recent report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling says that one fourth of colleges surveyed indicated they use web searches or social networking technology to dive deeper into prospective students backgrounds.

More than half monitor the online social buzz for their school.

And one third maintain a blog for their college.

In short, they know how to use social media and they aren’t afraid to use it.

And it’s not just colleges. Employers are taking the same action. Want to find a date? Find a wealth of information on a person before you ever meet face to face.

I’ve been speaking to a lot of PTCO groups at local schools, and have been amazed at the questions and concerns.

Is it important to protect our kids? Definitely. But more important is to teach them to use these new tools the right way.

What you say CAN have an impact on you for the rest of your life.

The best way to do that is to take an active voice and learn the technology yourself.

You’re not a Twitter expert if you just signed up and have 20 followers. But using Twitter and finding out how to grow your business with it is a step in the right direction.

You’re not a blogging expert by having a few posts on a blog. But building your own blog, posting regularly, and finding out how it can change your business is the action you need.

We’ll never take a step backwards. The tools we have today will only be modified and improved in the future.

Take action now, and be ready for what the future brings. 

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