Oct 25 2011

10 More Ways to Cash in On LinkedIn

Author: Dan Sherman

You’ve probably already heard the fact that LinkedIn has over 120 million members, making it the largest professional networking site.

With an average household income over $100K, the users of LinkedIn are the movers and shakers you want to get to know and who have the money to buy what you are selling.

Here are the next 10 tips in this series:

1. Easily find email contacts on LinkedIn. Speaking of connections, the LinkedIn Companion for Firefox is a great plug-in that helps you identify the LinkedIn profiles of people who are emailing you. It also enables you to easily access other LinkedIn features via your browser.

2. Leverage the power of LinkedIn Groups. Did you know that if you’re a member of the same group as another user, you can bypass the need to be a first degree connection in order to message them? In addition, group members are also able to view the profiles of other members of the same group without being connected. You can be a member of 50 groups, so join more groups to enable more messaging and profile viewership capabilities.

3. Take advantage of advanced search options. LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature provides a much richer search experience. For example, say you want to find out if you’re connected to anyone that works at a specific company. Type the company name in the company field in Advanced Search, then sort the results by “Relationship” to see if you have any first or second degree connections to any employees.

4. Link your Twitter account to LinkedIn. Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter, and vice versa. Just go to Profile > Edit Profile and look for the Twitter account section to add your personal Twitter handle.

5. Quickly turn your LinkedIn profile into a resume. LinkedIn enables you to turn your profile into a resume-friendly format in seconds with its Resume Builder tool. Just choose a resume template, edit it, and export it as a PDF that you can print, email, and share.

6. Add a video to your Company Page. Make your Company Page more interactive by adding video. To do so, visit your Company Page as a page admin, click your Products tab and, under the “Admin Tools” drop-down menu, click “Add a product or service.”

This enables you to create a new entry that features your video. You can also add a video to any existing product/service pages you’ve set up previously. Currently, LinkedIn only supports videos that have been uploaded to YouTube.

7. Rearrange your profile. LinkedIn enables you to reorder the sections of your profile in any way you prefer. Go to Profile > Edit Profile and hover your mouse over the title of each section. Your mouse will turn into a four-arrowed icon, at which point you can click then drag and drop to another position on your profile.

8. Extend the life of your questions. After a week, the opportunity closes for your network to answer questions that are posed in the Answers feature of LinkedIn. To extend the life of the questions you ask and enable more time for users to provide answers, go to More > Answers > My Q&A. Click on the question you’d like to revive, and click “re-open this question to answers,” which will open it up again for 7 more days.

9. Share questions or your answers to others’ questions. Besides the ability to ask questions, LinkedIn Answers also offers a great opportunity for users to share their expertise and thought leadership as well as link to content they’ve created that helps to answer others’ questions. Have you provided a helpful answer to another’s question lately? When you’re on the question’s page, click “Share This” beneath the question. You then have the option to share the question via LinkedIn message with up to 200 of your connections, bookmark it on Delicious, or grab the permalink to share in other ways. I use this to update my status when I want to share a great question.

10. Use LinkedIn Today to keep track of industry news. LinkedIn Today is an awesome feature that provides you with the most popular stories that are shared on LinkedIn. Use it to stay on top of news occurring about marketing, the internet, computer software, etc. You can also sign up for email summary notifications of LinkedIn Today news. from Marketing For Success Blog

Oct 25 2011

Search Optimization Is Still Part of Social Media Marketing

There’s a panel at SES that usually ends up drawing a packed house. “SEO is Dead! Long Live SEO” never fails to impress the audience, especially with all the cries that “Social media is now ‘king.'” As I am primarily a social media marketer, but have deep roots in search engine optimization, I raise my eyebrow with skepticism at those marketers who proclaim that with social media, you no longer need to worry about SEO. Apparently they missed the memo that people also search in social media communities.

It could be that these marketers don’t have the background to understand how Google’s algorithm works, or that they had some kind of success with just launching videos on YouTube and now think that’s how all companies should launch their social media marketing plans, that they are proclaiming you don’t need SEO, or measurement for that matter. If you hear a marketing company tell you this, I’d advise you to drop the marketing slick and run in the opposite direction, fast.

The keys to understanding search optimization in social media communities are twofold:

People search differently than they converse. Over the years since Google’s inceptions, the global community has been taught to search in very finite ways. When Google first appeared, searching for “shoes” didn’t bring you back the millions of pages it does now. With time, Google trained us to get very specific with our searches, as evidenced by Google reporting that 54.5 percent of queries done on its search engine are three or more words in length.
In social media communities, we don’t have a need to be so specific; our networks inherently know, most of the time, what we are talking about. That’s even more so when the social media community is centered on a very specific topic. We also use slang, jargon, and abbreviations much more in the casual conversations that take place in social communities than we do when we search. This is why you can’t just rely on your PPC or SEO keyword list to help you find conversations in social media communities; you have to expand a bit and understand how the community “talks” about you as opposed to searching for you.
Social media communities aren’t search engines. Contrary to popular belief, saying “Find us on Facebook,” doesn’t work the same way as saying “Find us on Google.” Facebook isn’t a search engine, Google is. Facebook is a social network community that relies on different “points” or “triggers” in an algorithm than a search engine does. If your company is new to me, and you say “Find us on Facebook” without giving the vanity URL and I’ve never been to your fan page, nor have any of my friends, I’m not likely to find you, unless I know to click on “more results.” Not a lot of Facebook users know to do that.
Search engines tend to look at an entire picture, meaning, content on a page, title tags, links into the content, how much has it been shared, and so forth. Social media communities only look at the data within their own site to “rank” something in a search. That’s because their main focus is connecting people within their own community’s walls, not reaching beyond it like a search engine does.

Taking these two points into your strategy creation will help you immensely down the road, because you still need to be found in social media communities as much as you need to be found in the search engine listings. Understanding how they differ will help your optimization team balance the right kind of optimization efforts. Also, understanding what your key goals are at the end of the day is imperative too.

Is it more important to gain search engine ranking for your content or to gain massive sharing within the community you’ve chosen to engage? These are two very different goals, where it seems that optimizing for one would automatically help the other…but a lot of times it doesn’t. When you are optimizing your content for maximum sharing in social communities, your content needs to be optimized to speak to the community. When you’re optimizing your content for the search engines, your content needs to be relevant for specific keywords or keyword phrases.

Still, the search optimization principals are the same:

Optimize your titles, subtitles, and headers
Optimize your content
Optimize your links’ anchor text (if you can control them)
Optimize your sharing (get the right verbiage and people will share it the way you want them to)
Optimize your digital assets

SEO isn’t dead. Honestly, it’s not. You just have to realize how to work its key principles into your efforts in social media marketing for success in both areas of online marketing.

by Liana Evans

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