Social Media Marketing

Top Ten Things to Do to Optimize Your Linkedin

Sanna Mattson MacLeod — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:53:51 +0000

1) For SEO- Find 1 or 2 words that best describe you, or that you want to be known for and repeat it as much as you can throughout your profile (in your interests, job description, status updates, summary etc.) *Warning do not just repeat the word over and over for SEO, Google will pick up on this!

2) Ask for Recommendations from past and present employers or people you do business with. *Give them back as well!

3) Join and Participate in related Groups.

a. When participating in discussions within groups make sure to leave contact information and links to company homepage

4) Update your status AT LEAST once a week

5) Make sure that all of your information is complete- Education, Honors, Past Employment

6) Make connections- be proactive, search for past colleagues!

7) Add as many applications as you can! Link:

a. Twitter acct.

b. Blog

c. Share and slideshare presentations

d. Polls

e. Trips

8) Utilize your Network Statistics. Here you can see in what fields your contacts are in and where they live. (http://www.linkedin.com/network?trk=hb_side_net)

9) Increase your Google Rank by-

a. Creating a Public Profile (under account settings-profile view- select “full view”)

b. Use actual name as your url address so others can find you easily- (http://www.linkedin.com/myprofile)

10) Link your Linkedin account other places- to your Facebook, Blog, Twitter acct. etc.

“Return” on Investment from Social Media

Sanna Mattson MacLeod — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:21:34 +0000

Seeing direct return on your time and efforts in applying yourself or your company to the various social networks is, as companies across the world are seeing, difficult. You don’t see a lot of news stories of company’s reporting new customers who have physically knocked on their door, stating- “Hey! We really liked your Facebook page, and we’ve been following you on Twitter. We’ve really enjoyed what you’ve had to say, and would like to do business with you!”

Social Media advertising and promoting takes time and effort; plain and simple. Yes it doesn’t cost anything to be on Facebook, but how much time should you and do you feel like spending developing and nurturing it? Is it really worth it?

From the research I have done for my company, Sanna Mattson MacLeod, the answer is, Yes. Each situation and company is different, but they all want similar outcomes- increased clients, customers and a RETURN on their investment.

These are the goals you should try and aim for from your Social Networking Campaign:

1) To Establish or Maintain Your Brand

Social Networking is a great way to debunk rumors and create a positive spin on how your company is viewed. To even further support my claim, this article explains very well how in the near future, people (customers, clients, competition) will be looking at a company’s social networking site over their home web-page. People want to know the personality of a company, what makes them stand out. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow a company to do this and more accurately portray a personality of a company in a more familiar way to viewers than home web-page.

2) Get people or prospective clients interested in the company (clicks to your webpage)

If you can provide interesting advice, information or even something that just catches their eyes; you’re getting your name out there. You are increasing your visibility, and when it comes time for them to make a decision in your related field, they will remember you. Now of course, the more they see your name the better, so that means more effort on your end in relaying what you have to offer them (interesting advice, news posts, even jokes and random facts will get your name out there). This all can be done through posts to blogs, microblogging (Twitter), Social Networks (Facebook, Linkedin), Email Marketing etc.

3) Open the door for conversation

The hard part is over, you have a large following on Twitter, you’ve got a bunch of fans on your Facebook Fan Page, now what? You need to make sure you are getting those followers to your goal site, whether that be your company website, your event or a place where they can buy your product. Conversation can come through @ posts on Twitter (this is where you make direct contact with another Tweeter), sending messages to your Fan Page members about deals or new products, but most importantly it comes through publicizing your home-page. Make sure the url address is posted wherever it can be listed and in plain site for browsers to link to. Discussion Boards are also a great way to get people interested and talking and gives you a chance to show your knowledge on a subject.

4) Have people buy your product or service

Once you have people clicking on your links and becoming familiar with your company, they need to be presented with contact information or how or where they can buy your product or service. Flow and ease is the name of the game when dealing with attracting customers on social site. If there is no easy way for them to get what they want, they will quickly move on to the next thing: someone else who can.

Case studies are out there where monetary gains are being recorded from Social Media Campaigns. One anonymous packaged-good brand reported a $.28 million return on a $1.0 million Social-Media Campaign. The viral campaign included online couponing, a contest where members of MySpace submitted videos of themselves and had their friends and others in the network to vote on their favorite video. The results were compiled by Dunhummy, MySpace and ComScore at the Advertising Research Foundation. The VP of Dunhummy went on record to state: “We have done other studies and just about every one has seen positive results.”

Having yourself “fully” on Social Networking sites will increase your brand awareness, and allow you to open the door to a whole other portal of communication with people you could have never met before. These sites make it easier to add what you want to your brand and allows you to find others with similar interests. This kind of free targeting will increase your ROI bottom line, you know who they are, their specialties, their groups and interest and you can openly communicate with them in a non-intrusive way.

For examples of my company’s work on Social Networking Sites try-

Tips and Tricks in Measuring the Activity on Your Website

Sanna Mattson MacLeod — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:35:15 +0000

How to measure your success:

So you have a website, now what do you do? How do you know if people are really going to it, reading the articles and clicking on your posted links?

There are many website services that you can give you this information. Logically, the more extensive ones cost more money, but there are free sites out there that give you a look at valuable statistics about your webpage. A quick caution, the majority of the free traffic measuring services may not work for your specific website or may have a catch to them (ex: you need to put a site meter at the bottom of your webpage). I mainly use two services to track links and clicks- GoogleAnalytics and Bit.ly. If you want a more extensive list of websites that that track traffic to your website I would check out this article- http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/track-online-traffic/

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service (can be upgraded) that gives you extensive information about the traffic to and from your website. (http://tinyurl.com/dnxg83)

I signed up my company’s homepage and got to see these statistics and more on a weekly basis:

- Page visits
- Page Views
- % of new visits
- Bounce rate
- Avg. time on site
- Top ten sites is your website referred*
- And much more

These stats are given to the user in numeric form as well as pie and line graphs.

*I found this to be a very helpful tool. This list will tell you which of your social networking sites is working the best or has the most interested followers. Are more people being referred to your home website through Twitter or Facebook? Google Analytics will give you these statistics on a weekly period.

Other useful facts from G.A. are you can see at what day and time you got the most visitors. A useful trick is finding the time of day when you see the most visitors to your site and post articles on your Twitter or Facebook account. For me, I found Thursday evenings receive a high volume, so I try and post then to catch the highest audience volume.

Bit.ly

This is a free url shortener, like Tinyurl.com, that counts how many people (and from what country they are from) have clicked on this link once you post it. (http://bit.ly/)

It is a great tool to see how many people are interested in a link you posted to your blog or Twitter account.

Another website I found to be interesting was:

Crazy Egg

(Not free) This service provides a Heat Map, along with information on who is clicking what links and shows spots on the website where people leave their mouse the longest.

Website Grader (http://twitter.grader.com/)

This website, by HubSpot allows you to plug in your Twitter and Facebook account and your companies website and gives it a grade. It basically compares you against your competitors/friends/followers. Take Twitter for example, it will compare how many people are following you, how many updates you post etc. and you”l receive a grade out of a 100. 80′s are normal, 90′s you are doing pretty well and if you are lucky enough to receive a 100 you’ll be only one of 70 in the entire world with this grade.

Having these stastics are vital when monitoring your website and social network pages. You could find yourself spending a lot of time working on and posting to a certain blog or website to find that no one is clicking on your links or staying very long on it, proving you are doing something wrong or are wasting your time on that site. If you find yourself getting a lot of positive response from one website you should continue devoting time and efforts into that website and try to cultivate new relationships out of it. Start conversing with people you find are clicking on your links, or even send them links directly via@ posts on Twitter. You could even host a discussion board about topics that have worked well in the past, like how You Measure the Activity on Their Website!

Creating an event/promoting for it on Social Networks

Sanna Mattson MacLeod — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:44:17 +0000

There is no exact science when it comes to publicizing events, and in theory, you can never really be done promoting it! You can only do so much with the time and money you have available.

Social Networking is a great, cheap (*all sites here are free!) and easy way to effectively target your audience and promote your event.

Here are some steps worth looking into when promoting your event:

1) Create the logo and description for the event.

2) Define who you want knowing about, and potentially attending your event.

3) Create event on Upcoming

This is a site that promotes events based on user interest and location.

4) Create a Eventful profile

5) Create Twitter account

a. Friend relevant people who you think would be interested (using the search tool on the top right hand side of the screen, friend “@Mr.Tweet”, or use www.search.twitter.com)

b. Tweet progress (Ex: only 10 more days to go, 50 more tickets left etc.)

c. Have related people (in the office or friends) post about the event as well, this will double the events visibility

d. Start up conversations with your Twitter followers.

e. Use Tweetlater to automatically send direct messages to your new followers with links to the event home website.

6) Create a Facebook AdPage

a. Upload pictures, write notes, put up information about it and ask people to become fans to get updates!

7) Create a Flickr account (Picture sharing social network)

a. Search for pictures of the convention center (or the location of the event) and invited those photos to join the group, so you do not have to upload your own pictures to the event.

Create a Twitzu event-

a. Twitzu helps simplify promoting your event by creating a listing, sends out a twitter update with the link, and your followers can RSVP on the Twitzu website link

If you apply to the majority of these sites and start networking, I guarantee you will get your event out there and create buzz.

Just remember you want to establish yourself, create a brand for the event to get people interested and more comfortable and familiar with the event. Therefore getting them to come!