How to Promote Your Business With LinkedIn

Designed for professionals to network with other professionals, LinkedIn isn’t like other social networking sites. It’s ideal for finding service based companies to work with and if you’re a service company, it’s a great place to be represented. Like many social networking sites, users can invite, create and join groups and search for like minded individuals. However, LinkedIn offers much more.

LinkedIn allows business owners to:

• Receive Recommendations – Other business owners can boost your profile by recommending you and your business.

• Create Groups – Like Facebook, you can create a group for your target audience to join. This gives you the ability to connect with and market directly to them.

• Utilize Applications – LinkedIn offers applications like Blog Link, Polls, and Reading Lists to help you enhance your profile and connect with others.

• Advertise your business on LinkedIn for more awareness, traffic and exposure.

LinkedIn is a fantastic opportunity to build your professional network. Along with Facebook and Twitter, and any other social networking tools you choose to use, promoting and growing your business just got easier.

How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business

Facebook is a rapidly growing and boasts 175 million users with about five million new users a week. This makes it a ripe opportunity toboost your business. And when it comes to Facebook, while you cannot create a customized profile page like Twitter, you can create fan pages, send mass messages to your fans and join groups.

The first step to promote your business with Facebook is to create a business profile. Facebook offers you the ability to separate your personal and professional social networking activities and offers a number of settings, which you can adjust to meet your needs. To set your privacy settings, visit http://www.facebook.com/privacy/

Next, just like Twitter, you’ll be connecting with people and also like Twitter, you can import your email list and connect with those people first. You can also search for friends using the Friend Finder feature and Facebook also suggests friends based on people you’ve connected with, items in your profile and groups you’ve joined.

And make the necessary changes. For example, you may only want friends to view photos and videos tagged with you in them.

The next step, which again will feel similar to Twitter, and most other social networking tools is to begin interacting and promoting your business with the tips and strategies we’ve already mentioned. Upload videos, announce promotions, share links to interesting and relevant sites, share your experiences and get involved.

What is unique to Facebook are the applications, fan pages and groups.

Promoting with Facebook Applications

Facebook offers a number of applications including creating and joining groups. Adding and joining groups is another way to connect with a very specific target audience. If, for example, you are a dog trainer and your market are new dog owners, you could create a group for puppy owners and share helpful tips, links and information with them. The group function allows you to also see the groups your friends and associates are participating in so you can make the decision about whether or not it’s a group you too want to participate in.

There are a large number of applications and with Facebook continually growing new applications will be added every day. A few great applications to consider include:

• Twitter – Allows you to publish your Twitter posts on Facebook.

• BlogNetwork – This application is a great way to publicize your blog and gain new followers.

• Advertising – Facebook allows you to advertise on their site and to also sell ad space on your profile/fan pages.

• Facebook Pages – A Facebook Page is a public profile that makes it possible for you to essentially create a business profile page right on the site. You can share products, sell ad space and market to your audience. You can also invite people to become a “Fan” (through PPC ads). Each fan is now someone you can market to directly by sending them messages, promotions, information, downloads and so on – much like you would an opt-in list.

• Mobile Facebook – allows you to use Facebook from your mobile phone. Great for sending on the fly messages but also good to remember that many people use this feature on their mobile phone and you can market to them specifically.

Facebook is an active, thriving and growing community and it’s not just for teenagers anymore. In fact, middle-aged men and women are one of the largest growing communities online and they’re a lucrative audience.

How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business

Your first step to use Twitter effectively to promote your business is to register and create an appropriate profile. That will include potentially creating a custom Twitter background and learning about all of the tools, applications and gadgets you can use to optimize Twitter as a marketing tool.

Creating Your Twitter Background

Because your Twitter Profile is something that will help brand and differentiate you, it’s important to spend some time making it represent you and your company. Twitter offers templates you can customize, you can utilize secondary software to create your Twitter background, and you can outsource the task to a graphic designer. Many graphic designers who specialize in web content are now offering custom Twitter backgrounds.

Custom Twitter backgrounds give you the power to present a strong first impression. It sets you apart from your competition, gives people a good idea of who you are and what you’re about and if you provide links to your website(s) it’ll send you traffic.

Once your profile has been created, it’s time to find your audience. Rest assured once you begin posting relevant, valuable and beneficial information and are interacting with Twitter users, you will get more followers. However, in the beginning, you may want to connect with key influencers. How do you find these key influencers?  Search!

Finding Friends and Followers – Twitter Search

Once your profile has been created, it’s time to find friends and followers, people to connect with. Twitter search is a great way to get started, however you can also download your email contacts and search for friends that way.

The Twitter search tools provide essentially two ways to find information and potential followers.

Basic Search – Is a keyword driven tool. Enter your keywords, click the search icon and your results show up on the left hand side. Take a look at the various people posting frequently on this topic to determine if they’re a key influencer. For example, if you own a crafting website, you may want to follow Martha Stewart on Twitter because her followers are most certainly interested in crafting too.

Advanced Twitter Search – Click the Advanced Twitter search button at the bottom of the page where you can search by multiple words, person, or hashtag #. (The # is a tool to create groups, which people can search by. Using the crafting example from earlier, you could post something about crafting and then end it with the #crafting hashtag.)

Interacting on Twitter and Promoting Your Business

Your next step is to begin interacting with your fellow Twitterers. Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?”  The trick is to make it relevant to your business and interesting and you have 140 characters to get it done.

Your tweets or posts are designed to accomplish two things, promote your business and connect with users. Sometimes you can accomplish both however other times you’ll want to focus on just connecting or just promoting. Yesterday, we mentioned several ways you can promote your business using social networking. We mentioned posting attention grabbing headlines and linking to your site, we also mentioned announcing promotions. You can even give away free content on Twitter. Here are a few tools to help you use Twitter to promote your business.

• Twitter Groups gives you the ability to join and create groups to motivate a following. It’s a great tool for creating sub-niches within your audience.

• Social Too is a site that automates following those who follow you.  It also filters spammers and has a survey function. Additionally, you can automate a custom message to thank all those who follow you along with a link to your website or a giveaway.

• Magpie is an advertising tool, which helps identify key influencers for your product or service, and then use them to spread the word about what it is you have to offer. You create your own ad campaign with your choice of message and keywords.

•  Twitter mobile. There are also a large number of widgets and plug-ins, which make Twitter accessible from just about anywhere including your Blackberry, iPhone, Gmail, post them on your blog for cross promotion and so on. You can find a number of these applications by clicking on the apps button at the bottom of each page.

Twitter can also be linked to Facebook so all of your Tweets show up as Facebook posts, thus helping you optimize your efforts.

How Social Networking Grows Your Business

There’s no doubt, social networking gives you access to your audience but what else can you accomplish with this tool?

Social gives business owners the ability to:

• Build an online presence
• Increase website traffic
• Boost SEO
• Establish credibility
• Connect with your audience
• Glean valuable information to grow your business

Whether your online business is just starting out, or you’re a large corporation, adding social networking to your marketing strategy will help you promote and grow your business.

Options to Use Social Networking to Promote Your Business

There are a number of ways you can use social networking to promote your business. Let’s take a look at the most popular and powerful.

• Drive Traffic to Your Blog or Website - Post a curiosity generating or attention grabbing headline and include a link to your website.
• Promote – Launching a new product? Announce it via social networking sites. Offering a huge holiday discount? Let people know.
• Share Lessons and Experiences – Social networking is about connecting. If you have something relevant to your industry to share, share it. Start conversations and partake in them.
• Share Pictures, Audio and Video – Many social networking sites embrace visual forms of posting as well. YouTube of course is a video social networking site but even Facebook lets you link to and post audio and video messages. And Twitter developers have created picture and video sharing applications.
• Share Information – Post interesting and relevant statistics, quotes, or headlines and start a conversation. When appropriate, link to your company website.
• Advertise – Many social networking sites also sell advertising space.

5 Minute Social Media Tactics for Businesses

This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh. Stacey is from Manchester, UK and works in Online Marketing at Tecmark: SEO Liverpool and Manchester.

Building up an online presence is an ongoing process, one that requires consistent maintenance and patience. However, just because it does take some time to achieve your presence doesn’t mean to say that every single tactic and strategy you employ will take up your entire day. In fact, here are a number of social media tactics that take no more than 5 minutes each!

Tweet

Twitter has a 140 character limit, so there’s no space for essays. Of course, condensing your message down into 140 characters might take a few minutes to do, but a regular Tweet relating to your niche area, wider industry or some of your own specific business/website news can keep people informed. Make use of hash tags (for example #blogging) so that people seeking Twitter users who regularly update on a particular topic area can easily locate and follow you. Follow people in your niche and respond to their Tweets. It’s a quick thing to do but is essentially a micro-networking strategy.

Blog Comment

Find websites and blogs in a similar niche to your business. Read and comment on posts. Again, this is quick but is a great means of networking and getting your voice heard within your niche. Becoming familiar with other people operating in a similar area to you could lead to contacts and exposure opportunities.

Update your Profiles

If you don’t already have Facebook/LinkedIn profiles (or other social media website profiles) you should. Spending a few minutes each week making sure it’s up to date is time well spent. Bear in mind that anyone seeking more information about you or your business may well start with a search around Facebook or similar sites.

Check your Online Reputation

Google yourself or your brand name (or both)! Keep an eye on what’s in the top twenty or so results. If anyone mentions you on a forum or a blog and this comes up, get in on the conversation, whether positive or negative. If it’s negative, you can respond and handle the situation. If it’s positive you have the opportunity to thank people for mentioning your name and accomplishments.

Forums

A less spoken form of social media these days, the forum, has been somewhat overshadowed by Facebook and Twitter. But they’re still well used and very convenient discussion platforms from which to voice your opinion on an area you are knowledgeable in. If you come across forums relating to you niche, why not register and start taking part? A comment here or there takes just few minutes but gives you the opportunity to prove yourself an authority on your niche area.

There’s no such thing as overnight results where social media is concerned. It’s a long term process of building up a profile for yourself. But once you have done so, it really is an invaluable asset which will undoubtedly lead to some incredibly useful contacts and potentially to sales too.