1. pick strategically,
2. share information,
3. join the discussion,
4. network.

LinkedIn will only allow you to join 50 groups. Some of those groups are going to require that you be approved to join them, so you will submit your information and then you will get the approval later. Some of them you will be approved to join immediately.

1. Pick Strategically ~ When you are looking through the groups on LinkedIn, look through the topic areas that compliment your business. They don’t necessarily only have to be about your business, but something that compliments it. Where do you some of your customers and clients come from? An example, for me I teach and coach and implement for social media marketing, but I also am a sewer. Therefore I have also joined a couple of groups on LinkedIn that have to do with sewing. I have found customers and clients in the sewing niche. You are going to have to decide how much time you’re going to devote. Take a look at the groups, which ones are going to be the best and don’t join more than you can handle. Be strategic, pick the ones that you believe in the beginning are going to give you the most value for your time.

2. Share Information ~ This information can come from a variety of sources, but you’re going to have common interests with the people in the group, that’s why you join groups. You can share blog posts or you can share articles. If you are a prolific article writer, that would be great, you’ll have tons of things to share. If not, you can also review things that you particularly find interesting and it very likely is that other people in the group will find it interesting as well. And be sure to share things that are directly related to that group. I’m not going to go in to the sewing group and just start immediately blasting out information about social media. I’m going to go in and I’m going to talk about sewing because it is also an interest of mine. I’m going to find out if there are any people in that group who actually have businesses that might benefit from social media. Going in like a bull in a china shop will probably just get you ousted out of the group.

3. Join the discussions ~ Participate in what’s happening in the group, ask questions, post questions in the feed. You can watch for questions, you can put alerts on your computer so that you know when the discussions are happening within each groups. You might be able to answer a bunch of questions. If not, you definitely want to comment and give your opinion. Make sure you are adding value. Don’t go in and say “nice post”. That doesn’t add value. Be sure that you’re adding value, that people are going to want to read your comment and get something from it.

4. Network ~ Get to know the people in each group. Connect with them, send them invites to connect. When you send the invites to people within the group, what you want to do is you also want to personalize them. You want to say that you are both in the same group, maybe perhaps you liked the question they asked or a comment they made, or an answer they gave. Personalize any requests you send to people in the same group as you. LinkedIn groups are a really valuable source of clients, customers or contacts. Whether you end up doing business with them or not, there’s still some awesome people to met in LinkedIn, just go out there and get started.

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Three tips for LinkedIn to get your profile noticed, get more connections and increase your to visibility is to use the question and answer, brain storm and post questions.

When you post questions for people to answer, you’re starting the interaction. Post your questions systematically. You can post questions based on your business or you can post questions based on different topics that you’re interested in. But post your questions systematically. Set up a schedule, when you’re going to ask them, what you’re going to ask them, and know what are you leading people towards. I like to ask social media questions because that is my business. However I am also interested in dogs. I have gone to LinkedIn for dog questions and received some great responses there too!

Brain storm by asking questions on LinkedIn. These don’t have to be questions to entice people into your market funnel. They can be questions that you need answers to. Maybe you’re looking for some help. LinkedIn is a great place to get those kinds of questions answered as well.

You need to be transparent about what it is you’re doing on LinkedIn. Are you looking for customers and clients. Don’t try and pull the wool over people’s eyes. Be transparent. Let them know you have a business, you’re looking for customers and clients. The beauty of LinkedIn is that is the type of people who are on there. They are business people who are looking for answers to their questions and they are looking for customers and clients for their own business. So please, be sure that you are very clear and transparent about your intentions.

You also need to make sure that you network and pay attention to answers. I find excellent ideas for articles based on questions and answers posted in the groups I have joined. You can find people in LinkedIn that are in your area, in your niche, in your specific area of expertise, and then you can find out what people are asking them. Develop the quality answers, create blog posts. You’re going to add your own twist on your own website. They can also be used to write your own articles. They can be used as material that is going to draw people towards you.

Get out there, network, ask those questions, answer questions, be transparent about what you’re doing and make sure that you take advantage of the answers that you’re seeing and that you’re receiving. LinkedIn is a very, very valuable way to find new leads, customers and contacts.

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You want to be able to have your finger on the pulse, know what is going on, with social media you will hear it from the experts all over the place. “You have to listen”. It is the number one thing that you need to do. The benefits of listening online are that you’re really going to know what is going on; in your target market, in your niche, in your subject area, in your family — you are going to know what is going on.

You’ll also be able to see any problems developing. Are people talking about you or your field in a negative way? Has the tone of the comments, questions or requests changed from positive to maybe a hint negative or really questioning? You’ll be able to see some of those problems coming, which means you’re going to be able to address them early when they are small rather than later when they are large. If you see something that is negative about your product or service, you’re going to be able to jump right in and do something quickly.

So, how do you listen online? I have four ways that you can do just that…

1. Google alerts. An excellent tool. You can set them up for any number of topics that you want. You can set up as many as 1000 Google alerts. And you can decide when you are setting it up, how often you want to receive those Google alerts. I have Google Alerts set up for my name, company name, keywords and article titles, it is your decision what you want to set yours for.

2. Set up searches on terms or key words in Twitter. Once you set it up, you can go in and monitor it. You will find out exactly what people are saying, when they are saying it, where they are saying it, how they are saying it. AND you will know at the speed of Twitter, what is happening.

3. Twilert.com. Is a web site where you can go and you can set up some Twitter alerts, so that you are not going to have to go back in and take a look at the searches that you have generated. They will send you the results and so that you know what ‘s going on.

4. SocialMention.com Social Mention takes it one step further in that it monitors all of your different social media. What is happening? Where are you being mentioned? Where is your product being mentioned? What key words — you will be able to go in and set up whatever you want.

There are hundreds of ways to listen online. These are four of the easiest and they are all free. You need to get started. Get out there, get listening, understand what is going on.

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Do you really know the value or even what you have in there. Is there information on potential customers or clients that can only be found in your social media conversations?

What would be the impact if they closed down your Facebook account? What would be the impact if there was a big glitch again at Twitter and you lost all your Twitter conversations?

Take a look and decide just how important are the social media conversations to your business, and I’ll bet, like me, you discover that there is a heck of a lot in there that isn’t anywhere else. It’s not backed up, it’s not in your database. It’s not in your email, it’s nowhere else but in your social media conversations. That’s why it’s so important to get in there and back things up.

Originally, I thought it’s not that important, I don’t have much in there, and I’ll get to it later. Well, guess what? What you really need to do is to get yourself into the habit, develop the habit of backing it up now, when there’s not a ton in there. It doesn’t take long, and you’ll be able to see how it works, how it happens. It won’t be at a point where something’s gone wrong and, oh my gosh I’ve got to get this done as quickly as possible. Take the time, do it now, and develop that habit.

Personally, I store tons of things in social media, that whole initial contact. And I had no way of backing it up. Do you know how you store yours? Do you know what’s in your Gmail account? Take a look at where your traffic comes from, because as you grow, so will your traffic. So that little bit of traffic that you’re getting now, or even if it’s a lot of traffic that you’re getting now, find out where it is, start with that social media platform, that one that’s the most important today.

There are free services out there that will back up all your stuff for you, but there’s no guarantee, and losing your social media information is just like losing a customer.

I have five options, five ways that you can back up different social media platforms.

1) With Twitter, there is one that is called Backupify. When this first happened to me, that my Twitter account was affected during one of the people attempting to bust into, to hack into Twitter, and my Twitter account was down for three days and I had nothing, no backup at all. And you, I’m sure, will understand the huge sigh of relief when all my Twitter streams came back again. I was so grateful that Twitter was better at backing things up than I was.

2) Gmail: Gmail has Mailstore.com, and you can back up more than just Gmail, but it is a place to back up your email. If you’re like me and a lot of your first contact is in there, you direct people over to your website to get them into your database but they don’t, that first contact stays in your email. How do you back that up? Mailstore.com will be able to help you with that.

3) Facebook also has a process. You can go into your Facebook account and you can back up all of your Facebook, and they will send you an email when it’s done. I probably do mine about once every two weeks. It takes quite a while, and depending on the number of friends and the number of groups and pages you are a part of, it may take a while.

4) LinkedIn also has its own special process; you can actually export your information on LinkedIn over to another file that you can store. You may choose to store it as an Excel document; I choose to store mine on notepad.

5) WordPress has a plugin that allows you to set it and forget it. I get that email every day, that my WordPress is backed up, and I go in and delete the old one. I actually keep about a week’s worth, when a new one comes in, I go back and delete an old one.

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Use Facebook to promote your business.

1) With the new format in Facebook, you can actually put in advertisements in the comments underneath your photo. It’s an amazing way to let people know about your products or service. Make sure that you are tagging your photos with the appropriate key words so that people will find them for the reasons you want them to find them, and comment on photos using appropriate key words. Don’t just say things like, “oh, nice photo”. Comment on them using your key words, and yes, comment on your own photo. Comment on your own photos using key words.

2) Promote your business on Facebook by upload videos. And again, you need to tag those videos with the appropriate key words. Same as a photo, you get the option to put in specific key words that describe your video, your product or service that’s highlighted in your video. Remember to comment on your own video. Just like the photos, go in there and comment. When people go to a fan page or a Facebook wall, if there’s no comments, likes, or anything like that, then they’re thinking, “oh, well nobody comes here, so why should I”. When you make comments on your posts or you Like them, then the first glance at the page, “oh, people come here”. There’s some action going on. Well maybe it’s worth reading because other people are reading it too.

3) You can become a fan of a Facebook page that’s in your target market and then, what you can do is you can write on the wall of that fan page. Now there will be a few pages where they don’t allow that, but the majority of pages will allow you to write on the wall or post on the wall. You can write a review of the fan page. It’s an excellent way for people to understand your business, because of course, you’re going to write the review from your business perspective, correct? So go in there, become a fan of the fan page, write on the wall, and write a review. Talk about why you’re there, why you like it, what you anticipate using it for.

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Here is a great quote from Bill Gates:

Information, technology, and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other.

How many times in the past year have you gone to the Yellow Pages. I personally don’t use the Yellow Pages anymore, and if you were to take a look at the Yellow Pages from your community, I’ll bet that they are thinner now than they used to be. When you and your business consider getting involved with social media, take a step back and think of it simply as a marketing tool, like the Yellow Pages used to be. They used to be thought of as an excellent marketing tool. Not so much anymore. Even if you were to go in and take a look inside, I bet you you’ll find lots of blank spaces in your Yellow Pages, because they don’t get enough businesses advertising with them anymore.

Online information technology is becoming the way to connect with your customers and clients. Personally, if I’m looking for something, in my own area and when I am traveling, I always go online and Google it first. What do you do? Where do you go when you’re looking for a business solution or an answer to your question?

One of the big things that I’ve come across is people who are starting to get involved with information technology and social media is they have a web site that is static. It just sits there, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just one big pretty picture with some contact information, maybe a phone number, an address, nothing interactive, nothing to give the person, nothing to entice the person to take a closer look at the business. It’s just like having a great big business card online. Take a look at your website, is it working “for” you?

One of the things that you want in your business is social proof. You want people on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube to be talking about your product and/or your service. You want social proof. And the easiest way you’re going to get that is for you to have a presence in social media. If you don’t want to get left behind in marketing your business then you must get on board with social media marketing. All business can benefit whether they are big or small; brick and mortar or on-line.

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You have the ability to set your privacy in all of the different social media platforms. Facebook has an enormous amount of options for privacy. You can have your Facebook be wide open or you can have it locked down tight so hardly anyone can get to see it. That is your choice. But everyone needs to take a look at what they are comfortable with, what they want out there and, yes, okay sometimes there will be a blunder. We’re all human!

Maybe you’ll be in a bad mood one day and post something inappropriate on your wall or you will allow friends to post on your wall. We’re all human. The thing you want to make sure is that that’s not consistently on your wall. If it’s a one of thing that happens very rarely, that’s not going to be considered your normal behavior, but if all you have in any of your social media, whether it be videos, Twitter or Facebook, then that’s going to demonstrate to people that that’s the type of person that you are.

You don’t want anything on any of your social media profiles that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see, and that includes what your friends are saying. If you have friends or followers who come back and comment or retweet things that are not so nice or they swear, use vulgar language, inappropriate language, you want to ask them to stop doing that. And if they don’t stop doing that, you want to block them.

All of the different platforms will allow you to block friends, followers, and or comments. They all have some tool to allow you to block. It is your responsibility to check and see that your privacy settings on each and every one of the platforms is to your liking that fits your reason for being on the social media platforms.

Recently, in my job, we discovered that one of the senior managers was using Facebook while she was at meetings. She didn’t know how to set the privacy settings on her Facebook wall, and everyone could see everything. Everyone could tell that she was playing games on her BlackBerry while she should have been paying attention in a meeting. That could be reason enough for her to lose her job.

Make sure you set your privacy settings exactly where you need them to be. It really is worth the time and effort to check out the privacy settings on each and every one of your social media accounts.

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There is so much power in LinkedIn for business when you use it properly.  I have written a number of times on the topic of LinkedIn and thought you would love to read from another perspective.

Here is Geniece’s email…

OK so back to the point. I want to ask you a few questions regarding your linkedin profile:

Have you filled out your profile to it’s complete capacity?

Are you making new connections on a weekly basis?

Have you used your keyword (example: “social media” if you’re a social media business) in as many places in your profile that you can think of?

Have you given any recommendations to anyone you know on LinkedIn?

Do you provide helpful tips and engage in conversation?

Have you maximized the amount of groups (you can join up to 50) you can join on LinkedIn or created your own group?

Do you post a self promoting blog once per week to your relevant LinkedIn groups?

 

If you did not answer yes to the majority of the questions, then you’re missing out on clients who want what you’re offering.

How do I know this? Because, I implemented these techniques just a few short weeks ago and have added two new clients to my business, getting more messages to my inbox with people asking to meet with me, and secured a slot with a well-established editor to be a writer for a new online women’s magazine that’s coming out in May (I’ll tell you more about that later!).

You can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. but LinkedIn is my number one tool for social media marketing.

 

Now I’d like to ask a favor from you my friend. Here it is:

I have search engine optimized my profile with my keywords (words that I want people to find me by on linkedin). My keywords are:

• virtual assistant/virtual assistance
• administrative assistant/administrative assistance
• email marketing

Can you do me a favor and go to your linkedin profile, go to people, and search by one of my keywords? When you’re done, send me a quick note and let me know if I was successful at showing up on the first page of the search rankings in the people section of LinkedIn.

Like I said, I’ve gotten most of my tips for successful linkedin marketing from one of my coaches and by following Lewis Howes (www.lewishowes.com). And here’s another great video where Lewis Howes talks about keyword search on linkedin: Click Here 

Go to your LinkedIn profile and clean out the cobwebs!

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It’s amazing how many big businesses are coming online and using all of the different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; some of the big name giants!

When you have a website that has social proof, meaning people are complimenting you on your product, complimenting you on your service, saying great things about you, what you’re doing when you have those kinds of testimonials on your website, is you are influencing the decisions of others. Influencing the decisions of people who come to your website who haven’t yet made up their mind about what they’re going to do. When you have a website with the social proof, you are going to maximize your reach. Now wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Maximize your reach even further than you already do, because you will find that when people start talking, they have friends in other areas. They have friends in other geographic locations, and if your product or services are available to be used by people in different areas and different geographical locations, you will definitely be expanding your reach.

With social proof, you will also find out what people are thinking about you. They’ll be talking about your product or service online and you’ll be able to go in and thank them for the compliments and take action if necessary if there are any complaints or anything that’s not so great online. You will be able to identify the people who want or need your product or service.

You will be able to go into forums, into Facebook, into Twitter, and see who has a problem that your product or service might be able to solve. What kind of problems do people have, what kind of solutions are they looking for. You will know whether or not your product or service will be able to help them.

Social proof and social media will also allow you to engage with your customers more. You will see what’s happening with them in their life, in their business, and you will be able to interact with them much more easily and much more quickly.

Recently, I had someone give me a good compliment and someone give me a not so good complaint, and I was able to very quickly go in and address the complaint. Plus I was able to have the compliment be spread more widely than the complaint, but then once the person’s complaint was resolved, they were another happy customer as well. Save these compliments so that you can use them later in your on-line and off-line advertising.

Where do you look when you go online. When you do a Google search these days, you will find that comments and posts from both Facebook and Twitter come up on your Google searches. Facebook is the second highest ranked website out there, and Twitter is 10th.

Your social proof of having other people talk about your product or service will definitely bring more traffic to your website, more traffic to your business, and more traffic will lead to more profits. How important is social proof to you?Do you want people finding you there? Do you want people to find you more easily?

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