LinkedIn is a social networking platform designed to connect people on a business level. Job seekers can connect with company contacts. Businesses can publicize their job openings and recruit qualified candidates. Professionals can connect with others in their field.
There are many ways that LinkedIn can be used to establish yourself in your industry.
As with any social networking platform, one component is status updates and connecting with your contacts.
In another tutorial, I share how to automatically publish a blog post or article from your site onto LinkedIn. However, you may want to publish a link to the post again later on or publish other status updates. While you can do this directly from your account on LinkedIn, most of us have other things to occupy our day rather than sitting on a social site.
It was previously possible to link your Twitter and LinkedIn profile. Any Twitter status updates would automatically display on your Twitter profile as well.
However, this did not solve the problem of posting updates to your company profile.
Regardless, this integration was recently discontinued and is no longer possible.
So what is the solution?
Whenever possible, I try to create a situation where I can publish once and promote on as many networks as possible with a single click.
I like integrated solutions.
My business social network accounts are part of my content schedule.
The service that I use to manage this schedule is .
Fortunately, Hootsuite announced their addition of LinkedIn Company page updates just prior to the announcement that the Twitter and LinkedIn integration was discontinued.
Updating LinkedIn with Hootsuite
LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn Company Page
Hootsuite Account
Add LinkedIn Profile/Company Page to Hootsuite
Click on the Getting Started Tab
Click on Add another Social Network
Select LinkedIn
Click Connect with LinkedIn
Once you have imported your profile and company pages, you can then post or schedule updates.
Posting an Update to a LinkedIn Company Page
Click in the Compose Message box
Select the profile/page you would like to post to.
Either click “Send Now” or click the calendar icon to schedule posts in the future.
To include a link, paste it into the “Add a Link” box and click “Shrink Link.” Any clicks on the link will then be tracked in the Hootsuite reports and analytics.
By using Hootsuite, you can integrate your LinkedIn profile and company pages with your business content schedule easily.
Network with prospective customers and local businesses and ask for referrals.
Run ads in the local papers occasionally.
This has dramatically changed in the past decade and social media networks are frequently used as the main conduit of connecting with customers online.
One of the most frequently used social networks for businesses is Facebook. The ability to create a page for your business and the potential and ease for your customers to spread the word about your company and services is hard to beat.
The problem arises when that Fan page, on a platform and space paid for by another for-profit business, is made to be the main online funnel for your business. Last week I talked about stewarding your assets and building and nurturing your customer list. The goal should be directing those fans and Facebook audience into a medium that you control such as a newsletter subscription, signing up for an account on your web site, subscribing by SMS, etc.
The Impact of Facebook Fan Page Changes
So what happened with Facebook?
Obviously if you use Facebook at all, you’ve seen the new Timeline. As a user I hate it, but the layout itself isn’t the biggest issue for company or brand pages. The three biggest Facebook page changes that affect businesses are:
No More Welcome Pages
Before the change, if someone who wasn’t already a fan went to the Legacy Marketing Facebook page, they would have landed on this page. The option for directing new visitors to specific information was very cool. In addition, you could create menu links for your page that appeared in the left column. Those are now also gone that have been replaced with . . .
Horizontal Info Icons
Instead of having the ability to direct new visitors and create items in the Page menu, now there are customizable icons that are display in the information bar. Customizable to a point. While you can add icon links to custom pages for your Fan page, only three will display in the information bar (there are four total, but the photo icon cannot be moved.) A visitor would have to click the “more” arrow to see any of the additional icon links.
So you have to choose which three you want to spotlight at a time. This is an example of the custom icons we created for the recent March of Remembrance.
Fan Page Update Throttling
The most serious change, the one that will have the most impact, is that Facebook has begun to throttle the number of fans that see your status updates. If a fan hasn’t interacted much with your page, the odds are your page update won’t show up on their newsfeed.
Kind of defeats the whole purpose doesn’t it?
Your purpose anyway. It’s great for Facebook’s business model because then they can sell you more exposure through their Reach Generator.
So the question is, is your online marketing and Facebook campaign building a customer base for your business, or are you creating a distribution channel that Facebook controls access to and will charge you for the privilege of reaching?
Update 6/14/2012:
As I was writing this post yesterday, apparently George Takei was also venting his frustration on the changes to the visibility of fan page status updates. Mashable has a story on his comments as well as Facebook’s response.
Update 7/10/2016
Over the past four years, this trend of limiting free exposure on Facebook has only increased. Why Facebook has implemented other business promotional tools during that time, the latest change to the page and timeline layout has limited exposure to anything other than recent posts. While Facebook continues to rise in useage, actual engagement rates have plummeted.
Let me preface this by saying that this post is a little bit of a rant.
Let me also say that I know if you are a small business owner, that there is a lot of “stuff” that you probably never thought you’d have to deal with when it comes to marketing your business on the internet.
I know when I went to business school, this wasn’t part of the curriculum.
Then add social media into the mix and it can be overwhelming, I get it.
But this is one of my pet peeves:
Profiles are for People
As in, a Facebook profile is for a person, not a business. If you have a business or web site you want to promote, you need to create a page, not another Facebook profile.
This is a pretty simple concept. I get Facebook “friend” requests all the time from businesses. I am not a “friend” with the the business, I am a friend of the business owner.
Do I accept them? Actually, if they are local, I usually do. It irritates me, but at least they are out there trying. I’m not going to get snippy about it. One example of this is the Humble ISD Education Foundation. I’m not going to give the school foundation a Facebook snub just because the person setting it up didn’t know what they were doing.
So I usually just mumble a little under my breath and make a note to have a talk with the sender the next time I run into them.
What makes it especially odd on LinkedIn is that the whole purpose of the platform is to connect with other people that are maybe a little further out of your immediate sphere. Do you need to make a contact with someone at a particular company and need an introduction? If you have a friend of a friend of a friend that has a connection, LinkedIn will identify it.
The whole point is that LinkedIn networks you through the companies in your current and past work history, education, and any associations. Creating a new profile for every single business you have defeats the whole purpose of that.
There are company profiles that interact with the personal profiles. You can create events on your personal profile and invite people to them. You can also create a LinkedIn discussion group for a particular topic.
Who is this person who sent me this? I have no idea.
The craziest thing about this is that it is for a social media expo!
Does anyone else see the problem with this? Does this seem incongruent to anyone else?
I am assuming that whomever sent this must be the organizer of the event . . . very odd.
With all of the social media options out there, business owners are often confused on what to use, how to use it and how often.
Who has time to sit on the computer posting updates from site to site? I know I don’t. I have work to do!
So you want to make the most you can out of every online effort. The report I wrote, “10 Steps to Success with WordPress” covers just that. How to make the most out of the content that you publish on your site. You can download the report for free here.
If you’re more of a visual person, I’ve recorded a short video with step by step instructions on how to connect your site to automatically publish on your LinkedIn profile, which is one of the recommendations in the report.
To recap, it is just two steps:
Add the web site url to your LinkedIn profile.
Add the Bloglink application to your LinkedIn profile.
In order for this to work, the url that you enter has to have an RSS feed that is autodetected by browsers and feed readers.
A word of warning: If you add this application, Bloglink will publish everything on the RSS feed that is discovered at that url. So make sure that what shows on the RSS feed is what you want displayed on your LinkedIn profile.
The concept behind this is to publish once, but to promote in multiple places. If you want to learn more easy ways to promote your content, business, and web site, download my free report, “10 Steps to Success with WordPress.”
Last night my community enjoyed the Second Annual Tasting the Town, a food festival held at the Humble Civic Center. I wasn’t able to go until later, but even at 8 pm with only an hour until the event closed, it was still hopping, so I can only imagine what it was like earlier.
The event is organized by Lake Houston Area Events, which is the team of Jennifer Jozwiak (aka the Coffee News lady) and Tiffany Bauer of Power Promotions. I am actually working with them on a web site for a new event they are launching in 2011, the Lake Houston Area Home and Garden show.
Besides the fact that the event was an opportunity to get together with friends and enjoy great food from area restaurants, the thing I loved about it was that it was a great marketing opportunity for businesses . . . and not just food related businesses and restaurants.
After organizing an event myself for six years, I know that the key to enduring success for an event is not just the attendees but the businesses that participate and sponsor. It is so important to create an environment at the event where businesses can connect with new potential customers and strengthen ties with existing ones. Your event’s success hinges on the success of your vendors and exhibitors.
That was the motivating factor behind all of our decisions for the event that I managed and it is obvious that Tiffany and Jennifer have had that in mind as well at Tasting the Town.
This event was a no brainer for area restaurants; however, they also created several marketing opportunities for nonfood related businesses which I think were absolutely brilliant. Nonfood related business could have a table in the entrance hall to the event, they could sponsor one of the seating areas, and they could also be a sponsor for one of the beverage booths.
Events like these are a chance for a business to capitalize on an audience that they wouldn’t normally have exposure to. However, while some of the businesses did a better job of engaging attendees than other, there wasn’t one that didn’t fail in least one of the three critical points to connect with customers.
Serna Insurance was one of the sponsors of the beverage booths where they staffed the booth and handed out the drinks. Their method of getting their information in the hands of attendees was to secure a promotional pen with a band around the drink bottle or can. It was an ingenious idea. I would have liked to see them also have a method of collecting names and addresses, like a raffle, drawing, or a Facebook contest, but they did do a good job of sending something out that had their company information.
There was another restaurant, I couldn’t tell you which one though as they didn’t make it over to me, that had servers circulating through the event with trays of samples and inviting people to visit their booth. They were being proactive about getting people to come to them.
The Winery of Kemah was there with a booth in the Wine Walk. They were the only exhibitor that I saw that had a sign up for an email newsletter. Having a newsletter sign up was good; however, the signup was just a blank notepad with a pen and absolutely no explanation of what it was for.
Also, it was just sitting there. No one was encouraging people to sign up and there was no mention of any benefits to do so. When I went through about a half an hour before closing, there were only about 15 names on the list. Now I will sign up for it because I look for things like that and I want to see what people are doing. But in general, you need to be a little more proactive than that. I also recommend following up with people after an event and thanking them for stopping by your booth.
The other place where I think the Winery of Kemah may have lost new business opportunities that while they had several different marketing pieces available for people to take, not all of them had their web site listed on it. This is a huge mistake. People aren’t necessarily going to take every single item you have laid out. I know that I didn’t. If you don’t have your contact information on every single piece, how do you expect people to contact you? Don’t make them track you down. Make it easy for them.
(After I published this, I went through and visited some of the company sites. The domain that I found on one of the marketing pieces for the Winery of Kemah that I linked to above actually goes to an error page. I did find another piece with a second domain name . . . but as I’ve said before, this is one of the worst things you can do.)
One of the areas that I saw that the majority of restaurants failed to do was make it easy to tell what they were serving. There was a lot of great food there, but most of the time you had no idea what it was.
For example, HEB had a huge spread with three different entrees, wine samples, and several different desserts. I am assuming that all of the components are available to purchase at the store, but I have no idea what any of them were. There were no labels, no menus, no suggested shopping lists . . . nothing. The only thing I saw was the weekly circular. The wine they were sampling was amazing (I like sweet wines.) I asked the lady giving out the samples if she had something with the name on it. She didn’t, but suggested that I take a picture with my phone, which is a resourceful suggestion . . . but come on . . . seriously, make it easy for someone to be a buyer.
The Chinese restaurant, Grand Garden, was the only one that I noticed that clearly labeled the entrees they were serving.
Also, there was a huge opportunity to get customers for the holiday entertaining seasons, which I think was largely missed by the majority of businesses there. The only businesses I saw promoting it were catering businesses . . . and they didn’t have any sort of contact capture system in place.
This is the end of September. People are going to start making plans for their Thanksgiving, Christmas, and holiday parties. Besides the catering, I know that many of the businesses that participated in the event also have event and party rooms. None of them were promoting it.
in general, these types of missed opportunities are very common at events like these. The primary reason I offer the Exhibitors’ Edge seminar is to teach small businesses on how to make the most of their participation in events and festivals in their community and the best way to include events in their overall marketing plan. I will soon be launching an on demand version of the seminar, sign up for my mailing list for advance notice.
All in all, it was a wonderful event and I hope that the participants are able to benefit with new business from the attendees that Jennifer and Tiffany worked so hard to attract.
In the never ending quest of businesses and organizations to build traffic to their web site, and in turn, hopefully increase revenue, many are increasingly expanding their promotion to social networking and 2.0 sites. Everyone has heard of MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. In fact, they have become so entrenched in the fabric of our culture that references are made to them in TV and movies and even the most staid of traditional media, newspapers, have capitulated to the online tsunami by feeding their news stories to Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The majority of the Westernized world knows what Facebook is. The majority of businesses believe that they need to utilize it in some way. This belief is true. As a matter of fact, in March of 2010 Facebook surpassed Google in number of weekly pageviews. Considering that Google still makes up 65 percent of total search traffic, this is something that every business that has customers that use the internet should take note of.
Social media in general and Facebook specifically have seen a huge growth in usage just in the past year. Being competitive online is not just a matter of ranking organically in one or two search engines anymore. As the internet expands and becomes ever more niched, it also increases the number of online fronts a business has to participate in and compete on.
Facebook is one of those major players.
However, even though most small business owners know they should be on Facebook, there is still a lot of confusion on how to use it. Below are a few basic principles for businesses using Facebook.
Take Care of Your Own House First
Before you worry about which social media sites to participate in, you should always make sure that your own business web site is squared away first.
If you have an old static site that hasn’t seen an update in this millenium, addressing this should be your first order of business.
You should have a strategy for your site, know your optimal target keywords and have landing pages for each before you run around on multiple 2.0 web sites throwing your business information out there.
Your site should be the focal point for all of your online efforts, not some minor page on a mega social network. When you create profiles on other sites, the goal should be to direct them to your business site and to funnel them into your lead generation system.
Never, everput yourself in a position where you are relying on income and leads generated on a platform that you don’t have control of. Keep in mind that you don’t have a right to those profiles and pages. At any time, your account could be shut down or deleted and then where would you be?
Every other online hub that you make should be viewed as a support for your own site.
Direct them to your site and get them on your list.
That should be the goal. And if you don’t have a list . . . well that is something else we need to talk about.
Accounts are for People. Pages are for Businesses
Facebook accounts are for people, not organizations or businesses. Every week I get “friend” requests from organizations and businesses. I am not friends with the business, I am friends with the person that owns it.
A person can create Facebook pages for any number of businesses, organizations or web sites. For example, I have set up Facebook pages for Legacy Marketing, my daughter’s blog (I see I need to teach her how to use spell check 🙁 ), and the Picnic on the Park event.
Each of these pages has their own set of fans, integrated RSS feeds, and settings.
One of the benefits of using pages for businesses and organizations (besides the fact that that is what they are designed for) is that you can add other people as administrators to the page. Whereas if you set up your business as a Facebook account, the only way you will be able to have someone update it is by giving them full access to that account itself, which isn’t a good thing to do for security reasons.
Also, you can’t promote your Facebook account with those cool Facebook widgets like you can with pages.
Facebook is Not the Be All to End All
I know this may sound like heresy to Facebook fanatics, but this is the truth. The amount of potential Facebook has for your business really depends on the type of business you do and who your audience is. As I mentioned in a LinkedIn discussion yesterday, I have clients who get their best targeted traffic from Facebook. I also have clients with sites that get most of their referral traffic from Twitter. My site gets good traffic from LinkedIn.
You just have to find out where your potential customers are and focus on those platforms.
Increase Your Efficiency by Integrating Your Web Site and Profiles
Sometimes when I talk to people about using social media, I can see that they find it overwhelming because they think it is going to be just one more thing on their To Do list.
It doesn’t have to be an extra effort. Your web site and social media profiles can be integrated so that any update to your web site will automatically be posted on your social media platform. Assuming you have taken care of item #1 and have a web site on a modern CMS platform, it is just a matter of connecting your RSS feeds.
I cover the specific steps to do this in my free report “10 Steps to Success with WordPress.” If you aren’t on WordPress, but are on a platform like Joomla, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, etc., you can still accomplish the same results, the specific steps will just be a little bit different.
Whatever online marketing steps you take, always look for a way to maximize your exposure and streamline the process. Another example of this is Aweber’s feature of publishing notification of your email broadcasts to your social media sites that I explained in a previous post.
While today’s online landscape requires small businesses to become increasingly adept at promoting their business on a variety of platforms, a focused strategy and marketing plan can yield maximum results with a minimum of effort. If you need help streamlining your promotion efforts, contact us.
