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Engaging Followers on LinkedIn | HootSuite University Presentation

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With more than 160 million users on its platform, LinkedIn is a strategic digital platform to connect with top decision players in your industry. A newer addition to LinkedIn, the “Company Page,” allows you to add your company to the professional networking site and stay on top of industry news. The Company Page allows you to establish strong social relationship with other companies, and gives you the capabilities to connect with the movers and shakers in your industry to drive your business objectives.

What is the best way to use the Company Pages to grow your business?

HootSuite University hosted Mike Grishaver and Andrew Kaplan from LinkedIn with best practices on how to grow your business using LinkedIn’s Company Pages in their presentation, “Relationships that Drive Results: 5 Key Steps to Engaging Followers on LinkedIn.”

Use LinkedIn Company Pages to

  • Optimize and drive traffic to your page
  • Effectively communicate and amplify your business
  • Update your status using strong content

HootSuite even allows you to add your Company Page their site, providing greater control of all your digital efforts. Do not hesistate to take advantage of the LinkedIn’s Company Page and HootSuite’s services to connect with top professionals and grow your business.

LinkedIn audience characteristics

  • Largest professional community
  • Highly educated, well-paid, high purchasing power
  • Social, yet business oriented
  • Great lead generation
  • Driven

Engage

  • Consumers are in complete control online
  • Build interest: Give members exactly what they want, relevant content
  • Target followers: How can you make members even better professionals?
  • Connect using similarities, provide industry trends, leverage audience

5 Step Approach

1. Establish company presence

  • Write your story
  • Fill in all your pages’ fields
  • Strong description: Lead with unique content
  • Recruit co-workers to help: Crowd-source!
  • Fill in product & services page

Best practices: Customize content for each audience

2. Attract followers to your page

  • Ask people on your personal page to join your Company Page
  • Add a “follow” button on your site
  • Announce your Company Page in a newsletter
  • Create reasons for people to follow YOU
  • Join Company Groups similar to yours & interact: Become an influencer

3. Engage followers

  • Message followers with great content
  • Status update interaction; keep brief, but get point across
  • Target your status updates on LinkedIn

4. Amplify users: Make your followers brand advocates

  • Ask your follows to like, share, and comment on your content
  • More follows =’s more followers … Social proof!
  • Use this

Best practices: Call-to-action, link to lists, product recommendations, videos, ask questions

5. Measure & refine approach

  • Set goals & track progress
  • LinkedIn provides statistic tracking on Company Page:  Look at these and track growth
  • Optimize page to generate more leads
  • Generate meaningful content with relevant conversation

Content creation tips, master these

  • Unique content: Blog posts, videos, webinars, white papers
  • Linked content: Industry news, expert research, news coverage
  •  Sourced content: Educational posts by guests, polls, testimonials

The Company Pages on LinkedIn help grow your business, if used wisely!  Add your company to LinkedIn’s Company Page, join the largest professional network, and start engaging with key players in your field.

How to Generate Ideas and Creativity | South by Southwest Interactive

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There’s plenty to do when the creative juices just aren’t flowing. Take it from Matthew Diffee, cartoonist for the New Yorker & Texas Monthly and The New Yorker a cartoonist for The New Yorker, who creates 10 ideas a week, just to have 9 of them rejected by management. What can you do to meet your deadlines? And how do you stay creative when your atmosphere is stale?

 

The following are highlights from Matthew’s talk, “How to Be an Idea Factory” at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

Creativity very possibly requires you to ‘unplug’

  • You must get away periodically to be more creative.
  • Acknowledge what affects your creativity:
    • YOU – Mindset …What you think
    • What you feel
    • What you do

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt

  • Creatives need to be better at controlling our emotions
  • It’s hard to be creative when you are angry
  • Don’t inhibit your train of thought when being creative
  • Just keep going. It takes a lot of bad ideas to get a good one

Big Creative Principles

  • Get in the zone (sometimes it takes a while)
    • Stephen King works every morning til noon or until he reaches his quota of 10 pages
  • Do not believe in writer’s block. You are never blocked-just go backward
  • Flip the funnel (try not to go to outside sources)

Collaboration is king

  • Tips for when you are stumped on idea
    • Change location and attitude
    • Doodle
    • Add constraints on idea
    • Bring other people in

Special thanks to @socmetrics, @RandyElrod, and @FCSdotcom for the insight!

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