There may be some hidden LinkedIn gems that you’re overlooking when navigating your social message. Some examples are:

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers is a forum for people to ask and answer questions about virtually any topic. By answering questions in your industry, you build credibility and show your expertise and value. But that’s not all – it’s also a great opportunity to identify industry influencers with whom to network. In fact you can even search through experts in the Top Experts section.

If you’re looking for guest writers for your Blog, the top experts on LinkedIn Answers are the people to reach out to. Ask them to take some of the most common questions they answer, and write a post for your blog on that topic. Then whenever the question comes up again, they can refer people to the blog post they wrote for you on the subject. They get to build their reputation, and you get the SEO benefits.

Subgroups

You may belong to several LinkedIn groups, but did you know there were also subgroups of those groups? Click ‘More’ on the tab of your LinkedIn group, and you’ll find them.

Subgroups help maintain relevancy; as groups grow there are naturally some topics, industries, or side projects that develop that don’t pertain to everyone. Subgroups offer a chance to filter out any content that isn’t relevant for the entire group and keep your members engaged.

LinkedIn Apps

Enhance your profile and better collaborate with your network with the many available apps, like SlideShare Presentations, WordPress and Company Buzz.

News Module

Everyone with a LinkedIn Company Page should be using this feature. The News Module feeds mentions of your business to your LinkedIn company page, and also shows news to those who have your name listed in their profile. This helps your information be seen in multiple places. Go to your page’s ‘Overview’ tab while in edit mode, and check ‘Share news about my company’ to enable it.

LinkedIn Polls

Within your group you can now offer polls. Polling not only lets you perform your own market research and collect interesting data for content creation, but doing it on LinkedIn also means it can be extremely targeted based on group demographics.

Export Contacts

You can export all your LinkedIn connections to a .CSV or .VCF file. You even have the ability to filter out certain people — like friends and family — that aren’t relevant to your business. The only rule of thumb here is to make sure you do NOT include them in your email campaign list – being a LinkedIn connection is not synonymous with opting in to receive emails from you.

Are you using these to your advantage? What works better for your business? What tools did we leave out?

If you want your social media efforts to create an actual return on your time and money investment, it starts with the same solid strategy you would apply to traditional marketing, coupled with consistent, targeted implementation. Otherwise there are more consequences to bad social media than just the absence of “likers” and followers.

Why Google Hates Too Much Even More than Too Little

One of your goals for your social media campaign is of course getting your website or business noticed, chiefly through obtaining a higher search engine results ranking on Google.

But laissez-faire doesn’t mean tweeting too little; it is more comparable to doing too much. Google actually hates it when a site engages in an excess of aggressive, blatant self-promotion. So much, in fact, that such a practice can lead directly to your site being blacklisted by Google, resulting in a severe down ranking of your site and annihilating your traffic numbers.

Google wants to create the best possible experience for their users, which means helping them find the most authoritative, relevant sites as quickly as possible. If your social media campaign is solely broadcasting self-serving messages without offering valuable, relevant content to back it up Google will punish you via your search engine position.

What is the Right Balance?

This of course depends on the goals of your campaign, but here are some definite no-nos right up front:

• Creating multiple profiles and linking all of them to your site
• Having a severely out-of-balance ratio of following to followers
• Exclusively bookmarking pages that link to your site
• Using a software program to automate and steal followers
• Only talking about your company over social media

If you see your actions as clear self-promotion, odds are good that Google will too.

Second Biggest Mistake

The more common pitfall we see in a failed social media campaign watching a company dive into social networking with great enthusiasm, only to fizzle out shortly after. Whether they find they lack the resources, desire or motivation necessary to maintain the momentum, this is actually worse than not starting at all.

We know a customized social media campaign is very labor-intensive. Going for quantity instead of quality is how the big fizzle usually occurs.

Social networking site users expect interaction, and lots of it. If your company cannot answer comments and questions on all sites that you are engaging, users will not stick around. One-directional conversations are not tolerated.

If you are overwhelmed with your social media, let us help you create the right balance of content and keep the conversation going.

Why? How do regularly scheduled updates help your business?

SEO

The search engine bots love new content from blogs, but only if you are updating it regularly. Providing constant updates to your website is the quickest and easiest way to get noticed by Google. That is of course if your regular posts contain strategic keywords and appropriate links.

Audience

If you are updating your blog regularly with quality, helpful content, people will return to your blog for more. Some may even subscribe! Once they do, guess what – they expect you to publish more quality, helpful content. The worst thing you can do is start and then “fall off the map”. Decide on a schedule and stick to it.

Expertise

When you are consistently providing regular posts to your audience, you start to get noticed by not only your fans, but also other professionals in your field. In today’s market, people are playing in the sandbox together more and more, via joint ventures and guest blogging for each other’s communities. This can only increase your exposure and help to brand you as an expert.

If updating your blog regularly is too time-consuming for your business, contact us and we’ll help you get on track!

That is in essence what the search engines are seeing when you design a flash-only site. It is easy to be wowed by clever animations and beautiful photography, but today’s Web 2.0 standards call for functionality over design. In our current economy, with clients spending much less on traditional means to drive traffic to their site, it is even more important to capture and keep new customers with new technology marketing.
A well-designed, functioning site should contain social networking, blogs, RSS feeds, and backlinks to move it into the search engines’ view faster. How is this explained to yesterday’s client? In simplest terms, the squeaky wheel gets the most attention. The top search engines notice a site that has fresh content; a website that has myriad links tied to popular, well-known sites shows up frequently in searches.
So how do you marry functionality without losing the creative edge your company was founded on? It’s easier than you think. Step down from the “design only” role and step back into being a marketing strategist. Back links, blogs, and social networking are simply strategies – like plotting out a campaign of carefully placed billboards or choosing the right media vehicles. Think of links, blogs, and feeds as bait for the search engines and remember your primary goal. There are many other ways to wow your potential buyer once they are intrigued enough to take the bait.