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.

2. Look at competitor websites and social networks to see what is working and what isn’t.

3. Contact your target market directly, perhaps using your existing email marketing list, to ask them where they engage online.

4. Once you have established which platforms to use, create a strategy to create regular content and cross-post that content for maximum exposure. For example, if you post a video to Vimeo, remember to repurpose the content as a blog of tips, for example, and post related pictures and enticing screenshots to Flickr, linking back to the full video.

Every business ultimately wants to attract loyal customers and drive sales, but each has a unique offer and specific target audience. It is perhaps time to look beyond a ‘one-size-fits-all’ social media fix, and with each platform comes a new way to share your unique content with the right people.

One word of advice: avoid setting up presences on multiple platforms if you won’t be able to maintain them with great content. It is preferable to have one or two lively, regularly updated social presences over six empty ones.

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:

1. Create compelling content

This means valuable information…no fluff. Find multiple opportunities to share links back to that content. Direct links to a landing page where readers have to sign up to access content, thus converting into proper leads.

2. Build your face and voice

Decide who from the business will act as a LinkedIn persona (obviously somebody who possesses excellent knowledge of your sector), and maintain a consistent tone.

3. Connect with your contacts

Always follow up invitations to connect on LinkedIn with a friendly message, which should never stray into sales territory.

4. Join groups and contribute

These should obviously be groups related to the types of businesses you’re trying to target. Once joined up, don’t stagnate. Be sure to join in with discussions and answer as many questions as possible.

You can also use the ‘Discussions’ feature to share valuable content with links to your website. Don’t be afraid to reply privately to any interesting looking prospects, keeping your response on topic and, again, non-salesy.

5. Cold message contacts

Make cold-messaging potentially useful prospects a routine part of your LinkedIn marketing activity. Keep it light and conversational – perhaps with a friendly introduction and a “how’s your business these days?”

FPR’s Final Thought:

Facebook and Twitter marketing success stories are not hard to find these days, but LinkedIn is still much perceived as a networking and job-searching site.

It’s exciting then, to see case studies trickling through to showcase the true impact that LinkedIn can have on the bottom line.

Offering regular, compelling content and nurturing a quality contact base of potential prospects have been key to PostcardMania’s success.

One final point to note: PostcardMania would never have been able to attribute these leads and sales to LinkedIn if it hadn’t been carefully tracking all of its social media marketing activity.

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.

3. Status updates

Everybody is familiar with the status update feature reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter. To maximise your reach be sure to share links to every blog you post, as well as links out to other sites. Use the tool to pose questions and spark conversations in your network, taking time to respond to any feedback.

4. Groups

Set up a group on your industry or blog’s topic. Not only will you automatically become an authority in your sector, but you’ll also create potential for extra targeted networking.

5. Source guest writers

One of LinkedIn’s USP’s is the high calibre of its user base. Harness this by searching for people with relevant expertise and approaching them to write a guest post for your business blog.

Tips adapted from ProBlogger.net

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.

Publishers can embed a branded LinkedIn share button with a few lines of code from LinkedIn’s ‘publishers’ page, onto their sites and choose between three options for the share button: vertical with a share counter, a horizontal button with a counter, or a horizontal button with no counter.

The button is already implemented on sites including Bloomberg, the Huffington Post and Mashable with take up already evident.

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%).

Visitors referred to B2B websites from Wikipedia are likely to be in the research stage of their buying decision process: The pages most visited on B2B sites are features pages (16.74%) and products pages (13.22%), followed by the about us pages (10.95%).

Most visitors referred to B2B sites from Twitter are in search of content, with blogs the most-visited pages (4.76%), followed by the “about us” section (4.0%).

Similarly, visitors referred by Facebook are primarily looking for content or company information: The “about us” page (4.0%) and blog pages (3.26%) are the most-visited pages on B2B sites, followed by “management team” pages (2.55%), “contact us” pages (1.97%), careers/jobs (1.85%), and products pages (1.11%).

Most visitors (47.8%) come to B2B sites directly by typing in the website URL, whereas 16.2% arrive via search and 5.71% via paid search. Some 30.3% of visitors arrive via referral sites—consisting of news sites, job sites, and social media.

Source: MarketingProfs

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%).

So there appears to be a bit of a myth exposed here – if almost half of major corporate America is on LinkedIn, how can a fifth of marketers claim their customers don’t use social networks.

The truth is probably that B2B marketers don’t think of LinkedIn as a social networking tool in the same way as Twitter or even Facebook, yet it is actually the most powerful one of all.

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%.

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.

LinkedIn urge candidates to make sure their profiles are up to date,” to ensure that you are matched with the best possible jobs through this new feature. For e.g. filling out the experience, summary and professional headline sections of your profile with details about your skills is a good start.”