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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!

Master B2B Video Marketing | BrightTALK video webcast

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Get camera-ready and start focusing.  The trend of using rich media, such as video, on business websites is increasing. Audiences have been engaging actively with rich media websites, generating higher visibility.

How can you incorporate video in your marketing campaign? How can you use video on your website to lure business followers?  And, how can you make this video exciting, and purposeful?

This BrightTALK video, featuring experts from Edelman and Velocity Partners, discusses the best practices in B2B video creation, including how to use video in marketing strategy and current trends.

Watch the BrightTALK video on how to make video!

Versatile video

  • Storytelling: Create a beginning, middle, and end
  • Can use in all marketing tactics: Teaching, demos, etc…
  • Video works in increasing views for all businesses

Content is king

  • Create depth and vision
  • Aim for engagement
  • Structure videos strategically
  • Be an authority on your topic
  • Represent your brand

Content characteristics

  • Purpose: Nail objective & story
  • Tight script
  • Expert generated
  • Establish trust
  • Transparency

Analytics

  • Track how long people watch
  • Track sentiments, measure comments
  • Analyze results and then adapt

Best practices

  • Fit your audience: “If you speak to everyone, you speak to no one”
  • Humanize messages
  • Summarize points at beginning of video
  • Visuals, use graphics
  • Be careful with comedy, avoid “cheese”
  • Practice, create natural flow

Example: Video savvy Pete Matthews & ‘Meaningful Money’

It’s your turn, start creating your B2B video

  • Establish objective & strategy
  • Find your story
  • Use team of experts
  • Create several videos
  • Embed on YouTube, go where your audience is
  • Engage audience

Use video marketing to increase your B2B visibility. Standing out with strong content is necessary, so be sure to create a purposeful and informative story that targets your intended audience.

On a final note, remember video is only ONE  part of your marketing campaign.  After sharing your video, keep conversation going with your target audience. Tell them a story, while creating a strong relationship with them.

For more expert insight, check out these tips from professionals in the video-marketing field:

2012 Stevie Executive of the Year Award-Winner

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Designated Editor wins 2012 Stevie Award Female Executive of the Year – Business Services – 10 or Less Employees

Suzanne McDonald 2012 Stevie Award Winner

Suzanne McDonald 2012 Stevie Award Winner

Thrilled to be in New York for the awards ceremony, baby-bump and all, about six weeks before Elise was born. 2012 was a great year, personally and professionally!

Here’s why Designated Editor won 2012 a Stevie Executive of the Year

Make no mistake: most small and medium businesses don’t know enough about Social Media to make educated decisions.  As a result, they hire companies whose expertise is the “Social Media Game”:  exorbitant retainers for standardized reports; “pushing” only what they know rather than being effective and generously giving what is needed; or providing rarely utilized “platforms,” driven by ” machines” when an educated human is needed.

And then there is Suzanne McDonald, a revolutionary in the Social Media arena, whose business – Designated Editor – has fast become the go-to company for Social Media in New England.

Ex-journalist and visionary who predicted print’s demise and dove headlong into New Media, McDonald is one of few if not the only pro in the region who is a TRUE expert on all aspects – from Google+, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to  WordPress, Websites, blogger outreach/strategy, content development/strategy, SEO, events, press and newsletters to integrated marketing/branding.  A teacher at heart (McDonald designed and taught the University of Rhode Island’s first Social Media Strategies course), McDonald studies New Media the way a star pupil does, sharing her vast expertise with a diverse client base so that they, too, become pros – all for far less than the “big guns.”

Why? Because McDonald alone among so-called “techies” knows that “Social” involves far more than “Media.”  “For business growth, face-to-face trumps Social Media; mastering both – and the interplay between the two – is critical.”

Mid- 2011 to mid-2012 was Suzanne McDonald’s banner year. It was then that Suzanne McDonald’s “techie” forum, Newport Interactive Marketers became a regional household word – 700 members “off the bat”; speakers who normally receive $5000-plus fees agree to show up, for free, just to be in the company of McDonald and her following; and a powerful reputation for being one of the only techie forums that attracts 50% women.

McDonald’s Workshops, inaugurated in the same banner year, are also a magnet for businesswomen. McDonald knows user-oriented technology better than anyone, but she also knows that this female following often comes to “reinvent” themselves. In McDonald they have someone who makes them feel comfortable.

For instance, the company with 44 wheelchair ramp franchises:  To boost their business, McDonald chose to craft stories – yes, this former journalist is a brilliant writer and editor, too – focusing on an Iraqi war veteran, a stroke victim, a young disabled couple. As per McDonald’s POV, not as an opportunity for corporate braggadocio, but for readers to identify with. “Nobody cares about the company,” says McDonald. “The reader, the human being, is all.”

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