This summer has been a busy one for the staff at LinkedIn, the business-focused social network. There has been a complete site redesign, lots of new features rolled out, and the whole thing now has a more modern feel. But how will these changes - and others on the horizon - affect how you promote your company on LinkedIn?
Peg McDermott
Social networks, especially ones like Twitter where update lengths are limited, have frequently been blamed for a decrease in the quality of our communication. Often when chatting with friends online, we tend to abbreviate words and take a looser approach to things like grammar and punctuation. While this may not make much of a difference when using social media on a personal level, when you are using social networks for the purpose of business marketing you may want to keep a few things in mind.
There has been a lot of debate over what, if anything, Google+ brings to the table in terms of small business marketing. Opinions tend to be highly polarized, with some saying that G+ is the absolute way forward, and others claiming that it's nothing but a lesser Facebook clone. If you're wondering whether to push forward with your G+ marketing or abandon it altogether, you should consider these four points.
The early days of the web were mostly about exchanging text, but as computers and download speeds got faster, adding images and even video to web content gradually became more and more common. Over the past couple of years, there has been an explosion of image sharing as mobile apps have made it simple for anyone to take a photo wherever they are and send it all over the world with a single push of a button.
It's already abundantly clear that social media marketing is a huge factor in how businesses develop their online presence and connect with their audience. It can be frustrating, then, when despite your best efforts, your social network clout seems to go nowhere and you don't see the growth you were hoping for. If this is the situation you find yourself in, here are a few things you can do to help get things back on the right track.
Now that all Facebook Pages for brands have been moved over to the Timeline format, if you haven't optimized your Timeline you're missing out. Some business owners have stubbornly avoided making changes on the basis that they never wanted to be moved over to Timeline, but now that it's a done deal, you may as well make the most of all the features that are now available.
In many ways, when you first have a look at Twitter it seems like a free-for all. Millions of users, everyone talking at the same time... it can be both exciting and frightening. Although it may look like there's no rhyme or reason to it and that you can say anything you want, how you present yourself does matter, especially if you're representing your business. Here are four things you want to avoid when you're trying to build a good social media reputation.
There are a lot of fun aspects to using Pinterest, and if you're using your account to promote your business, there are even more ways to reach your audience in an effective way. Sometimes even small tweaks to your social media use can yield major results - here are some Pinterest tricks that can help give your marketing efforts a boost.
When you're focusing on social media marketing, you might think that the broadcasting is the whole point - after all, you want to get your message out to the greatest number of people, right?
We've all been there: you're building up your company's social media accounts, and it just seems to be going so slowly. You get a trickle here, a trickle there, but in the end the growth is not nearly what you'd hoped it would be. You look at the social media accounts of your competitors, of celebrities, even of your personal friends, and wonder why your numbers aren't up where theirs are.
Thanks to the internet and especially social media, the way business owners communicate with customers is changing rapidly.
If you're spending a significant amount of time on Twitter trying to increase your presence there for marketing purposes, it can be frustrating when you don't get the level of following you expected. What's even more frustrating is when people do follow you, only to unfollow again a few days later. If you're finding that your Twitter following is waning despite all your efforts, here are three issues you might want to have a look at to help turn things around.