While recent social media conversations tend to be about Facebook and Twitter, I find that many professionals and businesses aren’t maximizing their LinkedIn presence. There are many that simply don’t know what else they can be doing on the platform, while others still believe in some of the many common fallacies about the social networking platform for professionals that exist. Social media is a tool, and you can only leverage the tool by thinking outside of the box and applying it to your situation. Believing in what you hear about any social media platform, without taking the initiative and experimenting …
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Today’s blog post is from someone I met Windmill Networking on Twitter, Aaron Lee. Aaron represents how truly global Twitter (and social media) have become, as I have been able to build up a virtual relationship with him being in Malaysia through someone else I met on Twitter that was in Hong Kong! Aaron is very social on Twitter, so if you haven’t been following him, you’re missing out on great tweets and getting to know a great person. When he commented on my previous blog post as to where to find great content to tweet, I thought that we …
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Twitter is both a tool for communicating with your network as it is about sharing information that interests you. While you may only connect with those in your professional network on LinkedIn and friends & family on Facebook, we are also following those that we share a similar interest with on Twitter that is helping to expand our networks. If you are active on Twitter, then, you are probably already sharing information that your target audience, whether personally or professionally, might be interested in. Sure, there’s never a lack of personal information that you can share about yourself, but …
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I find that Twitter is slowly becoming a “last resort” for consumers who are having issues with businesses and cannot get them resolved through the normal means of phoning or emailing customer support. We’ve seen it time and time again, made famous by @Dooce and the Maytag washing machine incident, but repeated by many others, including myself which I documented in my how to deal with angry customers on Twitter post, that a tweet is the most direct and quickest way of getting out your message to the world in realtime when all else fails. As Twitter membership grew by …
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Social bookmarking websites always confuse my social media strategy customers. There seems to be an aura that somehow just posting all of your own content to these sites will somehow magically drive massive traffic to your website. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. And unless you have a certain objective or niche demographic that tends to find a large population of your targeted users using sites like Digg, Reddit, or Delicious, my advice is simply to concentrate efforts on other more popular sites. I will make one exception, though: StumbleUpon. First of all, StumbleUpon is not a niche site. …
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As I consult with more clients on social media strategy, I am always amazed after I do a competitive analysis to find out that most American companies that I run across don’t seem like they know what they are doing on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. I’m not talking about the big consumer brands like Starbucks and Coca Cola that have gathered lots of Facebook Fans and are truly engaging with their customers. I’m talking about most B2B companies as well as those B2C brands that don’t necessarily fall into the Fortune 500. According to Hubspot, 72% of businesses have …
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Let’s face it: Since email as we know it today started developing from the 1960s, a lot has changed. The way we use email, the way that businesses try to get our email addresses to opt-us-in to their newsletters, and the fact that we tend to use email less and less as we send more and more messages through social media websites means that it may be time to start looking for more convenient forms of representing our virtual mailboxes beyond email that might exist. In fact, a recent report by Hubspot mentioned that Facebook is now our most popular …
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Over the past several months there has been a significant increase in the number of social media-related events occurring nationwide. These events range from formal educational seminars and full-day events with multiple speakers to networking social events and tweetups over lunch or on a weeknight. If the target audience for your business is using social media, which is increasingly the case, it makes business sense for your company to start participating in these events through event sponsorship. If you have been a blog reader of mine from the past, you’ll know that I am a co-founder of ConnectOC, a group …
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I recently got asked a great question in my Windmill Networking LinkedIn Group: Neal, what is one of the most recent insights you have learned about LinkedIn that can help us? Since I wrote the book on LinkedIn, although 90% of the functionality of the site is still the same, I am finding the “Follow” features that LinkedIn have introduced to be of value for some. While this “feature” may still be a mystery to many, here is my advice on how you can strategically use it by thinking outside of the box. For instance:
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If you’ve been reading my blog and following my tweets, you’ll know that I am a huge evangelizer of StumbleUpon for marketing and professional use. I consume my media a little different than other people. I’m not an RSS person. I know the blogs and websites that I find resourceful and will visit them. I search for the latest conversations on Twitter to see what people are talking about. And I use StumbleUpon to help me find new sources of relevant information that I might be interested in but might never have found otherwise. Let me explain it another way: …
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