How to Benefit from the LinkedIn Publishing Platform

Did you know you can publish your articles on the LinkedIn publishing platform?

Do you want to build more authority in your niche?

LinkedIn is opening up its publishing platform to all 277 million+ members!

In this article, I’ll show you how high-quality content creators and bloggers can use LinkedIn’s publishing platform to build their influence.

Why LinkedIn Publishing Platform?

 

I’ve always said you don’t have to be anointed as an influencer to build online influence. It’s up to you to contribute to your community, share valuable experience and create astute content that shows your thought leadership.

The LinkedIn publishing platform gives you the opportunity to expand your reach in a major way. Since all LinkedIn members have access to the platform, it’s critical for you to create high-quality content that differentiates you.

Your published posts show up at the top of your LinkedIn profile.

With the LinkedIn publishing platform, you can follow other publishers and build your own followers in the process. While your LinkedIn followers have the potential to see your LinkedIn posts, they aren’t official network connections. (It’s similar to LinkedIn’s current model for following LinkedIn-appointed influencers.)

Any posts you publish on LinkedIn are tied to your professional profile and show up near the top of your profile. This means your thought leadership insights are showcased when someone views your LinkedIn profile.

The first post I published to LinkedIn helped me attract over 200 new followers, and my profile views were up 38% week over week! These stats tell me that the LinkedIn publishing platform is going to be a great place to share longer-form, thought leadership content.

In the rest of this article I give you best practices for making the most of the LinkedIn publishing platform.

#1: Create Valuable, Attractive Content

 

Before you start posting, have a plan in place. What content is most useful for your audience? Is your post too salesy? Although there’s no formal editorial process, LinkedIn makes it clear that sales-oriented content won’t be tolerated (after all, that’s what the advertising platform is for).

LinkedIn has some helpful guidelines in their Help Center about what to publish. This is a good reference for understanding how to frame your content so it resonates with and adds value to both your established audience and your potential audience (which will now be even greater than your existing LinkedIn network).

Make sure your posts are scanable.

The general guidelines I’ve seen (including LinkedIn’s) recommend keeping posts between 400 and 600 words and publishing weekly. However, you could certainly experiment with these parameters and determine what works best for you.

Like other social networks, people want to consume information quickly. Make it easy for them by creating scannable, attractive content. A few best practices are using a compelling headline, placing an eye-catching image at the top of your posts, bolding important text and breaking up longer paragraphs.

Feel free to enhance your articles with YouTube videos or content from SlideShare to make them as interesting and useful as possible.

When you’re ready to write an article on the LinkedIn publishing platform, it’s pretty easy. Go to your LinkedIn home page and look for the pencil icon in the box at the top where you would typically share an update.

When you click the pencil icon, you’ll see the publishing editor. This is where you create your post.

LinkedIn’s publishing editor is very simple to use. It’s similar to the WordPress editor or Microsoft Word. You can type or paste your text into the editor and format it right there. Below is a snapshot of what my first post looks like within the editor:

What a post looks like within the editor.

Your LinkedIn post doesn’t have a bio section. You’ll need to create a bio at the end of each post. Your bio should include a sentence or two about who you are, what you do and who you help, a link to your website or blog or even a specific call to action.

It’s a good idea to make the most of all of your resources. In my bio below, I’ve linked my name to my Google+ profile, and on my Google+ profile I added LinkedIn to the list of sites I contribute to. This ensures that Google picks up my authorship profile for my LinkedIn posts.

Be sure to create a bio section at the end of every post you publish!

Before you hit Publish, please be sure to review your post and check it for grammar and spelling (the Preview option is helpful here). But if you don’t catch everything, you can go back and edit your post any time.

#2: Share Your Post Everywhere

 

To maximize your reach and engagement inside and outside of LinkedIn, share your post on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. If you have a LinkedIn company page, share it there as well (assuming your post is relevant to your company page’s followers).

This kind of aggregate social networking adds credibility and encourages more shares and engagement across the social web. In turn, all of that engagement sends social signals to Google’s search algorithm and can help increase your visibility in online searches!

#3: Manage Your Post Comments

 

You’ve written a useful post, you’ve promoted it far and wide and people are reading it. After all that effort and exposure, don’t forget to check your comments!

In the Comments section of your post, you can respond to and interact with members who are leaving feedback or starting a discussion.

Don’t forget to respond to comments on your posts!

In most cases, those who commented on my posts were people I’m not currently connected to. That means the post is getting visibility beyond my first-degree network, and yours probably will too.

Unfortunately I did see one or two spam comments when I posted, but you have the ability to hide and/or flag these.

#4: Evaluate Content Performance

 

LinkedIn immediately starts to show you the number of views, social media shares and comments your post generates. I admit that it’s exciting to see those metrics changing right before your eyes in real time!

Use your LinkedIn post metrics to determine how well your content is resonating with your audience. As you build your professional content library, compare your posts to see which ones outperformed others.

When you have a feel for what’s working for you, take some time to review the posts of your favorite official LinkedIn influencers and your competitors. Evaluate their posting schedule and which posts got the most views and engagement. Consider how you can use similar tactics for your own success.

For example, a LinkedIn influencer I follow is Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of 85 Broads and former head of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. She publishes to LinkedIn about once a month.

Even though she’s a prominent thought leader in the financial services industry, she writes about universal topics that appeal to a larger audience. Below is a compilation of her most recent posts. Her article about productivity hacks clearly stands out in terms of the number of views and level of engagement.

Evaluate what your favorite influencers are writing about.

Seeing what’s working gives you an idea of what people are responding to and you may want to consider using similar topics or how-to’s that appeal to your own audience.

Learning from the LinkedIn influencers who have gone before you can help you craft a more successful content strategy of your own!

Keep Your Existing Blog!

 

It’s critical to remember that LinkedIn’s publishing platform shouldn’t serve as your content publishing hub. It’s a place to syndicate and further showcase your existing professional content from your blog.

Remember, you don’t own your LinkedIn presence or the content associated with it.
I recommend publishing the original post to your own blog first, then publishing it to your LinkedIn profile in its entirety.

You may want to vary the two posts a bit, however. Perhaps write your blog post to your specific audience or niche, and when you publish it to LinkedIn, change it to appeal to a broader audience.
I’m super-excited about this publishing opportunity on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn publishing platform is an important part of any marketer’s content strategy. I think it will be interesting to watch the network grow as an online content destination for professionals.

What do you think? Will the LinkedIn publishing platform be a game-changer? What kind of content are you publishing? Please share your thoughts with me in the comments below!

How to Build a LinkedIn Marketing Plan that Delivers Ongoing Results

Are you happy with how you are using LinkedIn?

LinkedIn offers companies multiple marketing opportunities, but which ones are right for your business?

In this article I’ll show you five different ways to use LinkedIn to market your business.
How do you do start?

You’ll want to develop a comprehensive and consistent LinkedIn marketing plan for your business to achieve long-term, sustainable success.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a large corporate brand or a small business, you can build a comprehensive LinkedIn marketing strategy on a scale that suits your needs and objectives.


Social Media Examiner strategy on LinkedIn includes updating the business page regularly.

In order to have success with LinkedIn, you’ll need to make a long-term commitment to your plan. A strategy that delivers results requires ongoing management, monitoring, analysis, and adjustments.

Remember to assess your resources first and determine what you’re willing to commit with regard to people, time and dollars. An ongoing commitment to your strategy ensures you stay on track toward achieving your company goals.

Here are 5 LinkedIn marketing ideas your business can integrate into your comprehensive marketing program.
#1: Build a Robust Company Page on LinkedIn

To create a business presence on LinkedIn and gain access to additional features that enhance your visibility, you must build a LinkedIn company page.

Think of your LinkedIn company page as an extension of your business website within LinkedIn and use it to display compelling graphics, add products and services, even include job opportunities.

Invite existing employees, clients or customers, vendors and partners to follow your page, and showcase it to relevant LinkedIn members and encourage them to follow by using LinkedIn’s paid targeted advertising.

If it’s appropriate and/or allowable, ask key clients or customers to recommend your products and services on your LinkedIn company page. These recommendations show up on your page for everyone to see, and serve as powerful testimonials for your business.

Filling your LinkedIn company page with compelling and interesting status updates about your industry or business requires ongoing management, but it’s the most effective way to grow followers for your page and increase your company’s visibility. As you grow your following, remember to segment your members and target them with more relevant updates.

HubSpot, a marketing software company for medium-sized businesses, has amassed a company page following of over 40,000 people on LinkedIn as well as 272 product recommendations from members. Those are some powerful stats.

Each time HubSpot shares an update on its LinkedIn company page, it has the potential to engage over 40,000 people who further amplify the company’s visibility on LinkedIn!


HubSpot has built a powerful and active LinkedIn company page.

For further reading on LinkedIn company pages, check out these articles:
A step-by-step guide on how to optimize your LinkedIn company page
Learn about 5 creative ways companies are using LinkedIn pages

As you launch and grow your visibility, LinkedIn company page stats provide you with valuable insights about your followers, engagement, clicks and more!


An example of LinkedIn company page engagement insights.

It doesn’t matter if you have a small business or you represent a large corporate brand, a LinkedIn company page is a critical digital asset for your business and serves as the anchor of your LinkedIn foundation.
#2: Launch a LinkedIn Group Based on Your Company or Industry

LinkedIn groups are still going strong and are another component of a comprehensive strategy that helps position your company as an industry thought leader.

The most successful groups focus on gaining relevant members with common goals, and they are managed very well. To implement a successful LinkedIn group strategy, assign the role of primary group manager/moderator to someone who pre-approves discussion posts, asks great questions and determines which members get accepted into the group.


Social Media Examiner created a dynamic community on LinkedIn with the Social Media Marketing Networking Club.

When you launch your LinkedIn group, be sure to get the word out organically to employees, clients and customers, vendors, partners and influencers in your industry. Identify top influencers and have them serve as group ambassadors to help recruit members and to lead interesting discussions to keep your group active.

Self-service ads are also available from LinkedIn as a paid strategy for increasing visibility of your group and growing your membership numbers.

With a LinkedIn group, you have the ability to message your members once a week. These messages go directly to their email inboxes and are a great way todeliver special promotions or campaigns to them.

To position yourself as an industry thought leader to your members, foster a healthy community within your LinkedIn group through engaging discussions and add value by offering up compelling content your company creates.

A company that has done a fantastic job with their LinkedIn group (launched in partnership with LinkedIn) is Citi. They’ve successfully launched a Professional Women’s Network Group on LinkedIn. Although they do have a marketing partnership with LinkedIn, it doesn’t mean you’ll need to play at this level, but you can certainly model your group after Citi’s or any of the other LinkedIn corporate-sponsored groups.

Watch this video to learn more about Citi’s experience with LinkedIn groups and how the community is thriving.



Examples of other corporate LinkedIn groups include: Intuit (small business group),Staples (small business network) and Capital One (business traveler network).

To help you keep track of member demographics, growth and activity, stats are available for all public LinkedIn groups.


An example of the LinkedIn group stats overview.
#3: Create an “All Hands on Deck” Ongoing Thought Leadership Program

Although you’ll need to designate specific company employees or partners to help implement and maintain your comprehensive LinkedIn marketing strategy, getting all employees involved and on the same page is critical to success.

Your company’s position on LinkedIn starts at the top and when the business owner(s) or executives buy into the strategy, it sets the example for the entire company.


The success of your LinkedIn page also depends on how well your employees use LinkedIn's features. Image source: iStockPhoto.

When everyone from your company is involved on LinkedIn, it creates an extended network that amplifies your company’s presence and industry thought leadership.

Get your employees and stakeholders excited about LinkedIn and make the experience meaningful for them by attaching it to their professional goals.

Provide them with training on how to build a robust LinkedIn profile, how to represent your firm on the network and how to utilize LinkedIn to achieve their business goals. Teach them the benefits of expanding their own professional networks.

Then help your employees and stakeholders become active on LinkedIn. Provide them with an ongoing supply of interesting, compelling thought leadership content from your company. Consider allowing your team members to edit the content to suit their personal style when they share it with their respective networks.

Imagine…100 or even 1000 of your employees sharing content produced by your company 2-3 times per week! Talk about massive impact on growing the reach of your business!
#4: Leverage Paid LinkedIn Content Ads and Sponsored Updates

While LinkedIn social ads grow company page followers and group membership, there are additional ads run on LinkedIn that drive clicks to your website, or preferably to a specified landing page.


Be sure to check out the options LinkedIn has to offer you.

LinkedIn does partner with larger brands on sponsored programs, but for most businesses, these programs are beyond the typical marketing budget. If you’d like torun social ad campaigns to increase your company page followers, group members or even drive offsite traffic and lead conversions, you’re most likely better off using the self-service tools LinkedIn makes available to companies on the network.

As you develop and run ad campaigns or sponsored updates on LinkedIn, make sure you test to see which ads are most efficient and effective for your business.

Link to a LinkedIn Ads Post?

You’ve probably noticed numerous banner ads on LinkedIn that are designed to have members click through to company websites. Unfortunately, many times there’s no specific call to action on the landing page the ad leads to, which is a waste of ad dollars!

Make sure the landing page attached to your banner or text ad includes a relevant offer with clear instructions on what people should do to access your offer.

Janus Investments did a great job with this in one of their recent LinkedIn ads. The ad was clear on the benefit they were offering, and upon clicking through and landing on the page, the offer was simple to access.


Janus Investments LinkedIn banner ad.


Janus Investments LinkedIn ad landing page.

Paid Company-Sponsored Updates

Company-sponsored updates are only run by company pages, and are designed to boost visibility with your company page followers and others on the network.

Sponsored updates appear in LinkedIn member homepage news feeds and look like any other native update, except they’re marked as “Sponsored.” Although they’re fairly new, they’re showing some promising results.


Example of a company-sponsored update in the LinkedIn homepage news feed.

Learn more about how to take advantage of LinkedIn sponsored updates for your own company page.
#5: Monitor, Track, Adjust

Before you begin to build out your comprehensive LinkedIn marketing strategy,decide what your business goals are. The success of your comprehensive LinkedIn marketing strategy is measured by whether you achieve your goals.

By implementing the above strategies together, you’ll be able to:
Increase your company’s position as a strategic thought leader in your industry
Grow company awareness, engagement and reach
Generate qualified leads for your business

Beyond these benefits, it’s important to define specific metrics for measurement of your strategy that are consistent with your company goals.

Are you looking to achieve greater brand visibility (impressions) with your target markets, engage with existing and potential customers (likes, comments, shares), increase external website traffic (clicks), convert new leads (opt-ins) or all of the above? Once you get clear on your goals, define and measure the metrics that are consistent with those goals.

While LinkedIn provides insights and statistics for company pages, groups and paid advertising, tracking your efforts through your own website analytics program is essential. The traffic referred to your site from LinkedIn, new leads generated and new clients or customers are the ultimate measure of the impact to your bottom line.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a very powerful platform for growing the reach of your business and attracting new clients or customers. It also presents a terrific opportunity to stay top of mind with employees, customers, vendors, partners and industry influencers.

The time to launch your LinkedIn company marketing strategy is now, and a comprehensive approach helps you maximize the business benefits. If you’re unable tolaunch the fully comprehensive approach outlined above, make a plan toimplement each strategy in phases.

What do you think? Do you have a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy?Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Use Social Media To Drive Massive Traffic To Your Website

Social Media is now taking control of the internet world. Nearly anybody that has some type of computer or smartphone has some kind of social media profile. No matter if it is Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Skype or Instagram or any of the other innumerable social media sites, billions of individuals use most of them and they are mostly all 100 % free.

How Do You Take Advantage Of These Social Media Websites For Your Business venture?
Just sit back and think of just how much you are putting in on marketing and advertising for new buyers or investors. Now all that investing for advertising and marketing was the best successful way of getting your business name on the market and producing leads to exchange sales. Now, it's a complete new picture. The web is a part of hundreds of millions of daily lifestyles and now you can get through to them all around the world without leaving your own home. Social Media, if used correctly is much more affordable and could be free in most circumstances for establishing relationships with potential partners or consumers. The perk to this is that it is equally as powerful as paid advertising if used the right way. With social media you can create a worldwide following like you have never seen before!

After Today, You Should Understand Ways to Utilize This Social Media To Your Benefit.
Listed here Are 5 Of The Best Social Media sites To Make use of For Your Business venture:

1. Facebook.
Having 1.06 BILLION regular monthly members on Facebook, this must be among your major social network tools to employ for your business promotion. Members can easily generate groups, pages, personal profiles, and may actually browse for individuals according to their profession. Presently are infinite options using Facebook which could require a complete book in order to describe completely. To get ideal payoffs when it comes to your business, you are going to most likely must develop a following to begin with on a relatively personalised degree along with your business venture, as opposed to just simply positioning an advertisement on there instructing individuals to explore your business as well as pay for regardless of what it is you are actually marketing. You should moderately reveal exactly how awesome your service or product is and also have a webpage committed to your work which many people can easily like and also track day-to-day to generate a ton of involvement, to convert in to future clients. Never simply just make use of Facebook in order to get consumers either regarding your business. Try to keep an open mind with all types of opportunities and you could also discover your future worker of the year or even dependable company companion on there. Be sure and make use of images, video clips, along with almost anything else that could possibly grab interest much more than only words.

2. YouTube.
Including about 1 BILLION people and also 4 billion views a day, YouTube must be high on your checklist of social media internet sites to benefit from with respect to your business. YouTube is actually particularly pertaining to video clips. The entire idea regarding YouTube is simply to possess one of the most highly utilized resource on the planet when it comes to online videos of every style for the general public to see. Regardless if it is "how to" clips, corporation persuasion web videos, or perhaps maybe even merely recreation web videos, they are certainly entirely on there. Virtually just about anything you could wonder about will certainly be on YouTube due to various individuals make use of it daily. A bit of helpful strategies can be to create a few fair quality online videos concerning your market that might intrigue your target niche and place all of them on there. Before long should you possess an ideal, your domain WILL CERTAINLY become discovered and become sought-after with using web videos with YouTube. Create a channel within there for your business venture video clips and curious users that view your business venture will likely subscribe with you and also check out each of your video clips. Thus produce excellent online videos which individuals will likely desire to view throughout and make every one of them count simply because that might be the big difference when it comes to a load of possible sales.

3. Twitter.
Offering 500 million overall members, Twitter is really simply one more type of social network which must be checked out with regard to your business venture. Supposing that you actually desire to generate a fan base, this is definitely the internet-site to utilize. Twitter is simply about whom you follow as well as whom is following you. The more supporters you acquire, the more prominent you are with Twitter. The more famous you are regarding Twitter, the extra visibility you can obtain when it comes to your business venture on the web with everyone. You may more or less employ it like a kind of progress report with regards to precisely how famous your business organization is becoming plus whenever you publish anything on Twitter, all your fans will likely see it. How awesome is that? When it is really a very impressive post, your fans could also retweet it in order for their supporters to check out, gaining you a lot more visibility to web traffic! Most prominent individuals and establishments may possess upwards of millions of fans. Perhaps even a fragment of that may be all you require to boost sales regarding your business because of admirers becoming future purchasers.

4. Google+.
Having 343 million involved members, Google+ should be explored for your business venture publicity efforts with social media. Google+, to a great deal of individuals, isn't really the favored social media website for individual factors, but much more for business. Google+ possesses a bit of many things on it. A awesome aspect of it is you possess several circles that you could form. You may create an acquaintance circle, a fan base circle, and a loved ones circle. You may considerably sort the circles of individuals in your daily life through Google+ and also have hangouts along with competitions alongside several additional features. You could utilize your following circle similar to twitter and attempt to create a fan base for your market so you could get a lot of them become buyers of the things your company features. It is equally beneficial to own a Google+ profile due to the fact that it will link to YouTube as well as be extremely beneficial to your Search Engine Optimization within the Google online search engine. As a matter of fact, it is ticket to getting your unique or company photograph alongside your posts in the Google search engine results, and that strengthens the chance of a person clicking on it by 100-150 %! Google+ is simply just a really effective well-rounded social media resource to get web publicity.

5. LinkedIn.
Having around 200 million members, LinkedIn is definitely a social media site which must be taken very seriously, notably with its tie-ins to business. LinkedIn is a far more professional social media website that is primarily for businessmen as well as business women. You could seek individuals within a specific occupation and also connect to all of them in order to possibly establish a working collaboration that might be good for the two of you. You are going to even discover several possible prospects on LinkedIn by limiting results to who could be a bit more probable to take advantage of what the company provides. You can also conduct paid promotions and job promotions that appear considerably professional and also are modified to your preference. You can personalize them to a particular level to get additional interest too. How ever sizable your budget plan is concerning the paid LinkedIn advertisements, will decide just how you design it and the level of publicity the advertisement will get based upon just how much as well as when you prefer the advertisement to be presented. The promotions even go to a specific kind of individuals depending on the narrowing of the niche with provided variables such as age or line of work. Thanks to tons of market possibilities and possible leads you could receive from LinkedIn, it is the fitting location to promote your business organization and ought to be a must-have social media source.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7648204

Social Media Tools That Can Transform Your Business

Monitor and Manage your Brand
The web and its various social networks are packed full of information and so many different brands and businesses trying to be recognised. Consumers have easy access to all this information and they use it to make buying decisions. Social media tools designed for monitoring your brand can help to track wherever your brand is mentioned online. By tracking these mentions you can encourage positive feedback and quickly respond professionally to anything negative that might be out there. Here are two main tools you could consider:

Crowbooster - this is a tool for managing your social networks and has been specifically built for business use. It can auto-post content, manage new fans and provides statistics about your content and how it is being shared. It also shows you which of your fans are most interested in your posts and tells you when is the best time to send out content to engage with the largest number of your fans. It can also remind you to send out posts.

Google Alerts - this is an indispensable tool for checking your online business reputation and monitoring your presence across search engine results. It's a completely free tool and allows you to monitor your brand across the web. Every time a mention is made of your brand on a website you'll be sent an email. You can also monitor competitors this way.

Build and Maintain your Presence
Content is king in presenting your business professionally and developing its followers and interested parties. Your website and attached blog form the central base for all your content production and are the place you want to drive your followers too via social networks. You can use networks to reel in customers whilst your website is the prize they receive when they reach the destination. Blogging is a brilliant way of consistently providing up to date, relevant content about your business.

There are many products designed for making blogging easy and straightforward but by far the best is WordPress. It's an ideal tool for producing great blogs easily and it's a great way of small businesses creating their first website. WordPress blogs are well optimised for search engines and they're really easily to integrate with social networks and many of the sites you see online will be powered by WordPress.

Connect on Social Networks
The most powerful social media tools of all are the networks themselves. You can find your customers based on their interests, locations and also make interesting and profitable business connections.

LinkedIn - this network is perfect for business connections. It's the best social network online for getting new business leads and networking professionally. It has millions of users worldwide and your success is based upon a completed profile presenting a positive professional image for your brand. You can also create a company page at the site to further your influence and customer engagement.

Facebook - you can use the world's most popular network to create a brand page for your business and then you can keep all your Facebook fans up to date on any business advancements or developments. You can also use Facebook as a sounding board for new ideas and set up discussion groups all talking about and engaging with your company.

Twitter - this is the perfect network for sharing your content. You can track discussions about your brand or related products or services and each tweet is like a short sound bite representing your company. It's great for publishing links to your blog posts and other interesting content.

Google+ - Google+ Hangouts are becoming extremely popular for business use. It's a video chat service which allows up to 10 people to get involved and network, discuss business and share potentially beneficial info. Others can also tune in and watch the discussion so it's great for engaging with your wider audience.

Reach out to Customers
Of course the most basic and popular way of connecting with your customer base is email but you can make it even more effective by using social media tools designed for email campaigns such as:

MailChimp - nearly two million people user MailChimp for their email campaigns and have been getting increasingly effective results. It gives you an easy way of putting together effective and creative email marketing campaigns and you can design the newsletter yourself using templates before sending it out to your subscribers. MailChimp ensures your newsletter will never land in the recipient's Spam folder.

There are many different ways of ensuring you're doing the best for your business and when it comes to the web utilising a combination of these products will make a huge difference.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7537900

Four Great Tactics to Make Social Media Work for You

Social media pages form one of the foundations of inbound marketing -- they're where you can post your valuable content, using a call-to-action to drive visitors to your landing page, where they may become qualified leads.

The challenge, of course, is making your social media pages stand out in the crowd.
You can find plenty of social media tips to boost your visibility on the web, but these four give you a range of options that suit your goals and resources.

Make it easy -- then, fun. No visitor should have to search around to find your social media pages. Use naming standards for your home pages that make it immediately clear who you are.
Then, have some fun. Categorize your Twitter content -- blogs, tweets and videos -- with hashtags that engage, inform and contain relevant keywords - like these examples, which actually won "best hashtag" awards! (Note: hashtags are for Twitter or any other platform that allows for "click through." They do not work on Facebook.)

Look beyond Facebook. While there's no denying its paradigm-shifting impact on social media and personal relationships, Facebook is highly saturated -- to the point where some analysts reported decreases in overall usage and app downloads in 2012.

That doesn't mean you should shun Facebook, of course -- it's often the first choice for social searches. But you can also consider outlets that may provide a better fit for your services via a smaller, but more influential, audience.

• For example, LinkedIn is the world's largest business network for a reason -- it's highly credible, deep platform for making connections. If you are targeting B2B (business to business), some relevant connections from LinkedIn could put you in touch with influential people who may not otherwise pay attention to Facebook pages.
• If you have B2C (business to consumer) goals and a product or service that is highly image-driven, Pinterest (which recently transitioned from invitation-only to all-access) draws millions of hits daily -- particularly from women, who make up nearly 60 percent of its audience.

Find advocates. Most advocates of social media tips would agree: few marketing tactics enhance credibility like kudos from impartial third-party source. Satisfied customers, industry awards and good reviews boost your profile and are easy to link from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social sites.
You can go the extra mile by finding brand advocate -- people who promote your products or services, but who are not on your payroll. Your best customer, for example, can star in a blog interview or host a how-to on YouTube. Such tactics would not only boost your credibility, they practically guarantee that the customer will be sharing the content on his networks.

Be a mensch. Not every message on your social site needs to be tied to sales. A company that reaches out to its community or the world at large is often seen as credible and trustworthy. Use your media to publicize worthy causes; then put your money where your tweets are by donating products, services or money and encouraging others to do the same.

Want to get more personal? "Like" and share great posts from your customers' pages, or those from your community.

Social Media Tips Can Work for You to Drive Links and Traffic
Yesterday's marketing tactics have been largely eclipsed by inbound marketing, which reflects the way consumers behave today. Getting the most from social media will help you make your mark in this wide-open environment.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7495113

LinkedIn Presents “The Biggest Ideas Of 2013”

A selection of influential “thought leaders” have published essays on LinkedIn predicting the most significant developments to occur in 2013.

In October, LinkedIn began a feature allowing users to follow “influencers”: leading figures from the business and political world. The feature proved to be a great success, with Virgin founder Richard Branson passing the 1 million followers mark earlier this month.
In the run up to new year, LinkedIn has published articles written by some of these “thought leaders”, “chosen”, wrote Francesca Levy on the LinkedIn blog, “for their experience and smart perspectives.”

“We decided to harness that wisdom by polling the thought leaders, and the results were impressive. Industry heavyweights in finance, medicine, education, nonprofit, media and more replied enthusiastically to this challenge: What one issue, innovation or event will change the world in 2013? What’s the “big idea” you’ll be betting on?”

Among those chosen was the aforementioned Richard Branson, who wrote a controversial piece about the 40 year war on drugs. Branson described the work of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a movement that he is part of, in pushing for lighter sentences for drug-related offences and a focus on compassion for those addicted.



Inevitably, one essay was about the future of 3D printing, written by Inge Geerdens, a Belgian entrepeneur. She described the numerous opportunities that 3D printing could provide, but also hinted at a possible negative consequence: the speed and ease of 3D printing could make it very difficult to regulate, for example, the Wiki Weapons Project have already succeeded in partially printing a working assault rifle.

Other highlights included an informative essay about the importance of stress reduction by Adrianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, as well as ex-dragon James Khan’s “Why Young People Will Save The Economy”, a positive outlook on the future of finance.

Which is your favourite essay from the “Thought Leaders”? Who do you most disagree with?”
Leave your comments below.

52 Social Media Facts - Blow Your Mind

Today I came across 52 up to date social media facts. Some of these I found truly mind boggling. It just goes to show how huge social media is these days! It's so impressive how these social platforms have grown in stature.


Facebook
1. 85% of women are annoyed by their friends (note – I don’t think this is just limited to Facebook!!).
2. Links about sex are shared 90% more than any other link.
3. More than 350 million users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome.
4. 25% of users don’t bother with any kind of privacy control.
5. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.

Statistics from Economist, Social Times, CNN.

Twitter
6. 750 tweets per second are shared on Twitter.
7. The original Twitter beta was launched on the birthday of CEO Evan Williams.
8. If Twitter was a country, it’d be the 12th largest in the world.
9. 30% of Twitter users have an income of more than $100,000.
10. Twitter handles more search queries per month than Bing and Yahoo combined (24 billion versus 4.1 billion and 9.4 billion respectively).

Statistics from Compete, Twitter Press Centre and BNN News.

LinkedIn
11. Two new members sign up to LinkedIn every second.
12. LinkedIn has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and communities.
13. Members are on track to make more than 5.3 billion searches on the platform in 2012.
14. LinkedIn’s revenue has doubled every quarter for the last two years.
15. There are more than one million LinkedIn groups.

Statistics from LinkedIn Press Centre.

YouTube
16. YouTube was founded to share dinner clips of a party due to the files being too large for email.
17. The most watched video is Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, with 470 million views.
18. The most watched non-commercial video is Charlie Bit My Finger Again, with over 458 million views.
19. The average visitor spends 15 minutes per day on YouTube.
20. It originally started life as a dating site and was influenced by the Hot Or Not website.

Statistics: Techzine and YouTube Archives.

Blogging
21. 3 million new blogs come online every month.
22. 60% of bloggers are aged between 25-44.
23. 20% of bloggers have been blogging for more than 6 years.
24. Professional bloggers upkeep an average of four blogs.
25. 35% of corporate bloggers worked in a journalism, media or professional writing role.

Statistics: Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2011.

Pinterest
26. Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.
27. Users spend an average of just under 16 minutes on the site.
28. The most popular age group is 25-34 year olds, accounting for 27.4% of the user base.
29. Pinterest receives 1.3 million visitors per day.
30. 97% of the fans of Pinterest’s Facebook page are women.

Statistics: Modea

Instagram
31. 25% of Instagram users upload more than three pictures.
32. Over 5 million images are uploaded every day.
33. President Obama is on Instagram, having joined in January 2012.
34. Earlybird is the most popular filter, with 12.5% users preferring it (zero filters is the most popular way to use Instagram, with more than 47% of users going au naturel).
35. There are 575 Likes per second.

Statistics: Instagram Press Centre, ReadWriteWeb, Social Media Delivered.

Google+
36. “Student” is the number one occupation of Google+ users.
37. More than 2/3 of its users are male.
38. The Google +1 button is used more than 5 billion times per day.
39. Google+ is adding 625,000 new users every day.
40. More than 42% of Google+ users are single.

Statistics: Google Blog, Techcrunch, Google Investor Reports.

Social Media Influence Platforms
41. Klout has 50 times more traffic than PeerIndex, its closest competitor.
42. Kred tries to measure offline influence by allowing you to add achievements away from your online activities.
43. Klout changed its privacy model to allow opt-out from its service after a negative backlash in 2011.
44. Empire Avenue has users in more than 150 countries.
45. Justin Bieber is the only person with a perfect Klout score of 100 (says it all, then).
Statistics: Social Media Today, The Next Web.
The Mobile Web
46. 42% of phones in the U.S. are smartphones, with 44% of European users on a smartphone.
47. More than 110 million smartphone users in the U.S and Europe access social networks and blogs on their phones.
48. Tablets took just two years to reach 40 million users in the U.S. – it took smartphones 7 years to reach this figure.
49. China is the number one country in the world for smartphone use, with approximately 1 billion users.
50. In the U.K., there are twice as many smartphone users than cigarette smokers.

Statistics: ComScore and SoMobile.

Bonus Facts
51. Social gamers are expected to buy $6 billion in virtual goods in 2012.
52. One in 5 couples meet online; 3 in 5 gay couples meet online.

Statistics: eMarketer and Stanford University.

Are there any there that you are truly surprised at? Let me know in the comments!