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Adding Your Twitter Account to Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn lets you add social media feeds to your LinkedIn profile. This lets your profile visitors see what you’re up to on the social media front.

Adding Your Twitter Account

Open your LinkedIn profile, Click on Add Twitter Account and enter your Twitter username. I prefer to Display my Twitter Account on my LinkedIn profile by checking the box. This allows me to Tweet from Twitter and have my Tweets show up in my LinkedIn profile and as my Share status.

Now my Twitter account is tied to my LinkedIn profile so my Tweets appear in my Status box.

People can easily see your full Status activity by clicking on See all activity where they will see a full listing of your LinkedIn activity.

Filed Under: LinkedIn Tagged With: Adding Twitter to LinkedIn profiles, adding your twitter account to your linkedin profile, Linkedin, linkedin profile, social media, Social network, twitter, twitter account, Twitter feed in LinkedIn, twitter username

Supercharge Your LinkedIn Profile

By Ted 1 Comment

Think of LinkedIn as your online resume and your profile as the introductory paragraph of your resume. As people scan your profile, they should be able to understand exactly what you do as they read your headline.

Your LinkedIn profile provides people with a comprehensive summary of you, your education, work experience and your achievements. Your LinkedIn profile also links people to other social media properties and websites where you can showcase your expertise.

Your LinkedIn profile consists of:

Your headline
Your photo
Status updates
Vanity URL
Summary
Applications
Experience
Education
Recommendations
Additional information
Personal information
Contact information

Headline

Your profile headline is the single most important part of your profile. Your profile headline will appear next to your name in the search results. As your name appears in the search results, your headline must be compelling enough to make people want to click on your profile to learn more about you. You should never just put your name and company name in your headline.

You will also select your Location and Industry in this section of your profile setup. You can also create multilingual profiles in the Basic Information section of your profile.

Here’s my finished Profile Headline.

Here’s the profile headline for Viveka von Rosen. You know exactly what she does for a living.

And here’s why it’s important to use your target keyword phrases in your profile headline. Viveka is the top search result in Google for “LinkedIn expert” out of 159 million search results.

Take time now to create your compelling profile headline using your target keyword phrases.

In my next blog post, we’ll continue developing your LinkedIn profile. Feel free to add your profile headlines in the Comments of this post and I’ll let you know how you’re doing.

Filed Under: LinkedIn Tagged With: google, Linkedin, linkedin profile, linkedin profile tips, optimizing your LinkedIn profile, Search Engine Optimization, social media, supercharge your linkedin profile, Target Keyword Phrases, viveka von rosen

Is Social Media a better investment than SEO?

By Ted 1 Comment

: Image via CrunchBase

I read an interesting guest blog post today from Gary Arndt of Everything-Everywhere.com. Gary was a guest blogger on Problogger.com and you can read his post here http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/11/08/why-social-media-is-a-better-investment-than-seo/

Gary thinks focusing your efforts on social media instead of SEO provides you a better ROI. Gary’s debate centers around Brand vs. Individual Authority. Since Google loves big brands and seems to favor them in the search rankings, small businesses and consultants have a hard time ranking highly. By building your individual authority using social media, you can build a large following. The individual authority won’t necessarily give you high search rankings for particular keywords, but it will generate a lot of web traffic and probably lots of business for the little guy.

We all know SEO is a lot of work and your rankings can change overnight when Google implements one of it’s infamous updates. If you aren’t trying to game Google by using Black Hat techniques, you actually benefit from the Google updates because they knock the gamers down in the search rankings.

Social Media is no picnic either. To become an individual authority, you have to spend many hours every week Tweeting, updating Facebook and connecting on LinkedIn. Like SEO, social media is not a one-time event or an occasional event. Success in SEO and social media takes a focused, consistent effort.

I agree with a lot of what Gary says in his blog post but I also think you need to focus on both SEO and social media to be successful online. SEO provides you long-term search listings while social media ranking has become a real-time event. Your Tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts come and go quickly in the left column of the Google Search Results page. If you spend a little time adding some SEO to your blog posts, you can rank for years in the natural search rankings (the middle column of Google).

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Gary Arndt, Google search results, guest blog post, is social media a better investment than seo, natural search rankings, Problogger.com, Search Engine Optimization, Search Rankings, social media, social media ranking

More answers from the 5 Ingredients of Social Media for Your Website Webinar #5socialmedia

By Ted 2 Comments

Here are some more questions from the Sitecore 5 Ingredients of Social Media for Your Website Webinar.

Q: How can we use facebook for a non-profit company, what are your recommedations of what kind of info we should display on facebook?

A: There are hundreds of Facebook Groups and Fan Pages for non-profits. I would start by searching Facebook for Non-Profits on Facebook and check out the Fan Page that has almost 300,000 members. There is a lot of great information that will get you started.

Q: How do you ensure that the content people put on your website is in good taste?

A: Unfortunately you can’t control what people post in forums and on your social media pages so you have to have someone delete inappropriate content. By inappropriate content I mean spam or offensive material. You should not delete negative comments about your product or service. Address those comments in a reply and contact the person offline to resolve their complaints. Most of the time when you respond to them in a timely fashion they will be satisfied and will post a positive reply on your website.

Many content management systems have modules that will detect and not publish spam and offensive material. WordPress uses a plugin called Akismet that blocks spam comments.

You should also use social media monitoring tools like Trackur or Radian6 so you will be instantly notified when inappropriate comments or complaints are posted. Responding quickly is the key to heading off an online disaster.

Q: How do you use Facebook for business? I use it personally.

A: Keep your business and personal Facebook pages separate unless you are a consultant or professional service provider and your name is your brand name. Look at the Facebook pages of the companies we talked about in the webinar and see how they’re using Facebook. Also search for any major brand name and see how they’re using Facebook.

Q: Is it better to have your blog as a different url than your company website?

A: This is an ongoing debate with many SEO experts. Some say its better to have your blog and website on the same URL because you’ll have more focused content on one domain name. Others say it’s better to have the blog on a different URL and on a different webhost so you can generate a lot of links between the two sites.

Personally I’ve tried it both ways and I think it’s best to keep the blog and website on one URL. It’s hard to maintain two different web properties unless you have staff to keep the content fresh on both sites. Google likes to see a lot of related content on one URL so it will help your search rankings by combining them.

Q: What is the best free social media monitoring tool out there? What is the best very low cost one?

A: If you’re on a low budget you can set up Google Alerts to monitor specific keywords you are targeting. Every time Google finds those keywords you will receive an email (or a daily digest so you’re not overwhelmed by emails). You can use tools like TweetDeck which is a free program that lets you monitor Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

You can also search Google for “free social media monitoring tools” to see what’s out there. I recommend using a paid service because “you get what you pay for” and Trackur seems to be the best low priced tool I’ve seen.

In case you missed our webinar here are links to the webinar recording, podcast and slides.

http://mediacontent.sitecore.net/5IngredientsSocialMedia/5IngredientsSocialMedia.html

http://mediacontent.sitecore.net/5IngredientsSocialMedia/5IngredientsSocialMedia.mp3

http://www.slideshare.net/sitecore/5-key-ingredients-of-social-media-for-your-website

Ted

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Brand Name, Content management system, Content Management Systems, Diffe, Disaster, Facebook, Fan Page, Fan Pages, Good Taste, Inappropriate Comments, Inappropriate Content, Media Tools, Monitoring Tools, Negative Comments, Non Profits, Offensive Material, Positive Reply, Professional Service Provider, Profit Company, Service Address, Sitecore, social media, Timely Fashion, Wordpress

Questions from 5 Key Ingredients of Social Media for Your Website

By Ted 5 Comments

We had a lot of questions from yesterday’s 5 Key Ingredients of Social Media for Your Website webinar that I didn’t have time to answer so here we go.

Q: Are the social media components on “the knot” available via the Sitecore Developer Network?

A: You can use RSS which is available in Sitecore CMS to pull content into your website. Twitter has an RSS feed so you can display your Twitter stream on your website and LinkedIn has a public RSS feed so you can display LinkedIn updates and Answers on your website. Facebook turned off it’s RSS Feed last year so you can’t display your Facebook News on your website but you can install Simply RSS in your Facebook account and pull in your blog posts, LinkedIn updates and your Twitter stream. LinkedIn lets you pull in RSS feeds so you can display your blog and Twitter updates on your LinkedIn profile. This diversifies your traffic and automatically updates numerous social media properties.

Q: My biggest issue is, I have two kind of posts on our fb-fanpage. 1. I love the company, you’re the best or 2. This product is broken, damaged etc. and questions concerning customer support. I have trouble getting customer service involved with FB and don´t know how to handle those messages as an it proffesional. Any tips?

A: Since customer support doesn’t want to get involved with Facebook, you can create an Support tab on your Fan Page that contains ways to contact customer support. Search Facebook for play.com and you’ll see their extensive Customer Support list under the Info tab.

Q: how much impact do custom tabs (canvas tabs) have (programmed with Facebook Markup language). are they alot more effective than “normal” facebook sites

A: I’m seeing more Facebook pages using the Facebook Markup Language which allows you to create Fan Pages that look like your website. This extends your brand to Facebook and lets you add newsletter opt in forms and custom content.

Q: For your customers to develop content on your website, what are some recommended platforms to develop that? I have looked into Google Friend Connect as one way, but it doesn’t do everything.

A: There are solutions for any open source or .NET content management system. For example, Joomla has Community Builder which lets you build your own online community. If you’re running on .NET you can look at www.onesite.com. Another option is to use a hosted service like www.ning.com which is very customizable.

Q: Have you found a tool that aggregates the various social media metrics in a way for more easily created reporting?

A: Social media monitoring is an evolving market and there is a range of products for different price points. You can look at tools like www.trackur.com which is low cost but high in features and www.radian6.com on the higher end. Do a Google search for “social media monitoring” and you’ll see many products. MarketingProfs.com has some case studies that review social media monitoring products.

Q: Help me understand how to apply SN to a Local Service company doing Bathroom Renovations

A: You could create a Facebook Fan Page and upload before and after photos of your work. You can also upload those photos to www.flickr.com and to your website. People love to look at pictures and they love to share their photos. You could even do a Twitter campaign where you encourage people to Tweet a picture of their bathroom and the person with the ugliest bathroom would win a discount. Then you could feature them in a Before/After campaign on your website and Facebook Fan Page.

I’ll answer more questions in my next post.

Thanks for attending our webinar and here are links to the webinar recording, podcast and slides.