Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are still perceived as the holy trinity of social marketing activity, based largely on their reach and popularity. Many businesses assume that the big three act as the cornerstone of an effective social media strategy, but is this a) a true reflection of how people are using social media today and b) the best option for every type of company?
Facebook marketing may be a no-brainer for global brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, but for a law firm specialising in divorce, nobody is likely to publicise their personal situation by ‘liking’ your company page. It may be more useful to create expert video advice on how to prevent divorce, or steps to finding the correct lawyer if separation is unavoidable. This video could then be posted to your own website, and adapted into a company blog post to be shared on Twitter.
These steps will help anyone from a reiki healer to a bookkeeper establish which platforms to make part of their social media activity:
1. Discover and investigate your target market by searching Google, Facebook, Twitter Search, YouTube, LinkedIn (especially the Groups and Q&A sections) and niche specific forums. More »
PostcardMania, a Florida-based DM postcard marketing business, has revealed that it can attribute at least 24 fresh leads per week directly to LinkedIn.
This amounts to around 600 leads in the past year, more than either Facebook or Twitter are delivering for the company – and bear in mind LinkedIn’s high quality, business-focused user base; leads from this source are more likely to convert.
Joy Gendusa launched PostcardMania in 1998 with just a computer, a phone and a powerful philosophy. Mendusa wanted to offer free, valuable marketing advice that companies might pay through the nose for from an agency.
Such a content marketing strategy, regularly serving up compelling information, works a dream on social media channels.
LinkedIn, serving a business community where PostcardMania could build a contact base of advice-hungry marketing professionals, has proved the ideal platform on which to execute Gendusa’s philosophy.
PostcardMania shared its top LinkedIn marketing tips on socialmediaexaminer.com, which are adapted here: More »
Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch today revealed that LinkedIn is fast surpassing Twitter as a social driver of traffic to its site, attributing much of this growth to the new LinkedIn Today product. The chances are that you have a LinkedIn account that you use to connect with business contacts. But are you making full use of LinkedIn marketing opportunities?
LinkedIn may not yet pose a serious threat to Facebook, but intelligent features coupled with user growth make it an increasingly strong component of a social media strategy.
If your profile is lying dormant, here are five simple strategies which will help to exploit its potential:
1. Company profiles
One of the lesser-known perks of setting up a company profile is the function to add company products to LinkedIn. ProBlogger did just this with its book and has already attracted 18 professional recommendations. Click here to see social peer-to-peer recommendation in full effect.
2. LinkedIn Today
Launched in March, LinkedIn Today aggregates news from LinkedIn and Twitter, yet serves as much more than just a news source for anyone that publishes content online. Consider getting aggregated via a LinkedIn Share button on your site to exploit its traffic-generating possibilities. Find more information on getting set up here. More »
LinkedIn announced on their blog yesterday that video sharing is now available on their site, which is great, but the festive video card they’ve invited us to share in celebration seems, well just a bit sinister:
With the launch of the LinkedIn ‘Share’ button this week, corporate blog content and website articles can now be easily shared with professional networks on LinkedIn.
If you click a LinkedIn Share button on a website or blog, you will be asked to login with your LinkedIn account, and then you’ll be able to share a URL (with the network’s shortener) in your status update box.
According to Techcrunch the option to share content via a universal Share button makes sense for the network, since users already tend to share business content such as news, whitepapers and presentations with their contacts. Significantly, the button will show how many shares have been made for a particular piece of content – data which will be of particular use to publishers on the type of content that readers are sharing with their contacts.
Until recently LinkedIn has lagged behind other social networks in building connections to external sites – Facebook has its ‘Like’ button and Twitter its retweet one. The move will build on other strategies implemented by the social network this year (improved groups functionality, integration with Twitter) The Share button is part of LinkedIn’s broader strategy of bringing LinkedIn to platforms that people may use in their professional life, including Twitter and corporate blogs. More »
Social media sites now account for nearly 15% of referral traffic to B2B websites that have a social media presence, according to the LeadForce1 analysis of 4.4 million leads analysed over a three-month period.
LinkedIn is the top referrer, accounting for 27.1% of traffic to B2B sites, followed by Wikipedia (16.8%).
Bookmarking site Reddit (18.4%) and developer site Dzone (13.0) also feature prominently, though this is probably due to the relatively high number of tech companies included in the study.
Meanwhile, Twitter accounts for just 9.5% of referred traffic to B2B sites and Facebook 6.9%.
Visitors referred to B2B websites from LinkedIn are more interested in finding out about the people within a company rather than what the company does: The most frequently visited Web pages are “management team” pages (13.76%) and “contact us” pages (13.49%). More »
While it may have been Twitter’s year from a publicity point of view, LinkedIn, the grand old dame of business social networking – who turned seven this month, continues to dominate corporate America. New research from Netprospex shows that 43% of large company employees are members of the site.
Facebook is a distant second with 11% while Twitter languishes back in fifth spot (3%) behind Flickr and MySpace (both 4%). You quite often hear the phrase in relation to consumer social media ‘we need to fish where the fishes are’ but how often do you hear of the same thing translated to B2B, i.e., LinkedIn marketing campaigns
In our experience of LinkedIn marketing, judicious seeding of content can generate 75% of referred website traffic, far more than Twitter can manage, so why not do more of it?
The answer may lie in another recent study, marketers were asked what the main obstacles are to using social media. They said lack of analytics (35%), lack of management buy-in (25%) and that their audience isn’t yet active on social media (21%). More »
B2B marketers are equally split in their take up of blogs and social media and are bottom line focussed, a US survey has found.
50% of B2B marketers in the Genius.com/BtoB magazine survey said they don’t blog, 49% don’t use Twitter, 43% don’t use Facebook and 25% don’t use LinkedIn.
Many are also not using Adwords or SEO tools.
The key success measurement for B2B marketers is revenue, with 61% focussed on revenue generation, followed by sales agreements (40%) and qualified leads (39%).
Over five times more marketers cite revenue generation as a key metric than they do website traffic or impressions (12%) or click-through rates (12%).
The use of LinkedIn for B2B sales prospecting has increased by 47.8% since last year, according to US research from OneSource, reported in Emarketer.
Around 20 percent of those polled were also increasing their use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter for prospecting purposes, though the overall majority still do not use social media for prospecting.
The most popular approach for gaining qualified leads remains outbound prospecting, which was rated 3.7 out of five for effectiveness, followed by the company website (2.9), inbound calls (2.6), email campaigns (2.6), shows & events (2.5), social networking (2.1) , direct mail (2.1) and webinars (1.8).
In January Hubspot research showed that 45% of US companies who have used LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site. Company blogs were considered effective for 43% of respondents, while Twitter for 38% and Facebook for 33%.
LinkedIn has announced a new job matching service which automatically suggests qualified candidates from their 60 million strong professional database.
Called ‘Real-Time Profile Matches’ and currently in beta mode, LinkedIn say they have developed proprietary technology “to make it faster and easier both for users to find the right jobs and for hiring companies to find the right talent.”
Hiring managers and recruiters will see qualified candidates immediately after posting a job in the form of a ‘job poster’ containing up to 24 profiles of qualified candidates, presented in business card form.
Within the job poster recruiters can view the profile of each match and contact those that are a good fit. More »
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are still perceived as the holy trinity of social marketing activity, based largely on their reach and popularity. Many businesses assume that the big three act as the cornerstone of an effective social media strategy, but is this a) a true reflection of how people are using social media today and b) the best option for every type of company?
With the launch of the LinkedIn ‘Share’ button this week, 
LinkedIn has announced a new job matching service which automatically suggests qualified candidates from their 60 million strong professional database.