The Social Media Advantage. Holly Berkley

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СКАЧАТЬ of finance/business manager of Lancaster County Timber Frames of Lititz, Pennsylvania. She uses LinkedIn frequently in her company’s search for employees, partners or vendors.

      Making sure your personal LinkedIn profile is complete, up-to-date and you have quality reviews is a great way to help your profile show up in LinkedIn’s professional searches, which helps your target audiences find you.

      The primary benefit of LinkedIn is the ability to connect with other people in your industry and for the opportunity to get introduced to their connections, thereby expanding your network of quality business contacts very quickly. Once your profile is up-to-date, LinkedIn will help you easily find your connections by content pulled from your profile, such as past employers and the schools you attended.

      But adding a profile and connecting with others in your industry is only a minor part of LinkedIn. There is an extremely targeted, active question and answer community happening behind the scenes in the LinkedIn social network. Not engaging in these discussions is like showing up at a networking event and not talking to anyone, but just signing in at the registration table and maybe dropping a business card in the fish bowl in hopes someone might notice you and give you a call, but not attending any break-out sessions or social hours. You are a LinkedIn wallflower if you are passing up the opportunity to chime in on these discussions.

      Only 20% of our survey respondents are using LinkedIn to demonstrate thought leadership or advance the intellectual brand of their company. Depending on your profession, there are likely plenty of active LinkedIn groups dedicated to your specific industry, that could use more expert voices. There is a search function at the top of your LinkedIn page where you can input keywords relevant to your work or research which professional organizations, groups or magazines the other key players in your industry belong to. Join as many as you can realistically keep up with. You’ll quickly find that these resources can provide an excellent way to show off your expertise to the right potential client or partner who is looking for your skills.

      Most LinkedIn groups are created with a particular audience in mind. Often, the administrators will only approve new members that fit this demographic.

      Can’t find an existing LinkedIn group that meets your goals? Start a new one. In Chapter 8, we’ll provide tips on how to build and nurture a social media community.

      Reaching Your Goals With Twitter

      By 2013, nearly 28 million Americans will be tweeting. (emarketer.com, February 2011). Many business professionals say Twitter is a great way to monitor what competitors and thought leaders are doing, stay informed of recent articles and blog posts relating to a subject of interest and get the inside scoop on what stories the media is researching.

      Twitter users follow* people, organizations and companies of interest to receive real-time communications from these companies. Another way of using Twitter is to search for a keyword or phrase to sort all the tweets that mention the topic. Spend a little time reading the results and you can pick up on the topic-specific lingo and common hashtags. A hashtag is the # symbol followed by a key term, like #obama. Hashtags are used for more than just listening in on streams to identify influencers in a particular field. They allow conversations among fellow attendees at offline events and conferences to post messages. You may also see more TV News and radio programs mention a specific hash tag related to a topic of discussion. This provides an easy way for those interested in a specific topic to contribute, ask question or follow a conversation stream in real time.

      Balmori Associates, the N.Y.-based landscape architecture and urban design firm hosted an in-person discussion of public space in its New York office with 40 Dutch landscape architecture students and their professors. In an effort to open the conversation to participants worldwide, Balmori Associates combined streaming video and Twitter, using the hashtag #mpplaces. The discussion used a Balmori project, the redesign of the public spaces in Balmori’s own neighborhood (the Meatpacking District of New York’s Greenwich Village) as the focus. The Twitter forum, with internal and external participants, narrowed in on the topics of shared space, urban decorum, context and public spaces’ relationship between past and present.

      “What I found of greatest value in Twitter was that it allows non-hierarchical comments; it did not become a debate of stars,” wrote the firm’s Principal Diana Balmori. The confines of 140 characters limits intellectual intimidation and as a result generates more input, because everyone relies on simple language to drive home their point. Participants were able to react instantly to the speaker’s comments. Balmori continued, “Twitter diminishes the gulf between speaker and audience.” Because participants are able to react instantly to shifts in conversation, “it increases participation by making everyone a speaker.”

      “Originally, I used Twitter to research information on various topics using hashtags,” explained Kristin Worley, marketing facilitator of Woolpert, Inc. (http://www.woolpert.com/), a national design firm from Charlotte, N.C. “From that point on however, I realized how much value Twitter actually provided. I have used the articles and networking I gained through Twitter to guide internal corporate staff in their decision-making processes. Twitter also provides the opportunity for knowledge sharing among individuals, organizations and companies in the industry. Our marketing group has also used it to communicate with others regarding conference events, which is a great way to open more doors to conferences and tradeshows and further extend value to the attendees.”

      To help you get the most out of Twitter, try using TweetDeck, HootSuite or Sprout Social to organize those you follow into streaming lists. You can also use these sites to set up ongoing keyword and hashtag searches in an easy-to-see-it-all interface. The Twitter programs mentioned above can also help schedule future tweets, post updates to your other social platforms and monitor your influence and who your top influencers are.

      We’ll talk more about how you can increase Twitter followers and amplify your efforts in Chapter 3.

      Who’s On Facebook?

      First and foremost, if you are a business you need to operate under a Facebook page, not a personal Facebook profile. We realize this frustrates many business owners who have already built up significant following under their personal Facebook page.

      However, Facebook clearly states in its terms and conditions that profiles are meant for individuals and pages are meant for groups, businesses and organizations. In fact, if you have your business functioning under a profile rather than a fan page, Facebook can shut it down, and all of your “friends” will literally disappear. Trust us! This happened to a client who insisted on using a Facebook profile page rather than fan page.

      It’s understandable why people don’t want to switch over to a fan page from a profile page; it takes time to build up friends, for one. Fortunately, in April 2011, Facebook added the “Profile to Page Migration” tool that allows you to easily convert your existing profile to a business page and all of your friends to “likes.” We suggest you download a backup of your profile before making this transfer as there is no way to convert a page back to a user profile once you engage the tool, and since Facebook profiles function differently than Facebook pages, not all content and information gets carried over. We suggest that you visit http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=214139221935487 to learn more about backing up your profile page and how to use the page migration tool.

      Once you start operating under a Facebook page, you’ll notice gathering friends, or “Likes” is a bit more difficult than when you are operating under a personal profile. In the beginning, you may have to make posts on your personal profile to encourage people to switch over and start “liking” and interacting on your new business page. With a Facebook Page, you can not directly invite people to “like” you anymore. Posting the Facebook “like*” СКАЧАТЬ