Courtesy of web123.com.au

#1: Target Specific Audiences

The new LinkedIn targeted updates allow you to send messages to a specific segment of the people following your company page. That means you can reach certain demographics with specific messages, to increase interest, promote product launches and hype up an oncoming sale.

Send messages to your followers based on industry, company size, geography and more. Used properly, LinkedIn updates like this can make individual sales skyrocket, especially if you’re in the information business.

#2: Your Message is Amplified

When you send out your targeted message, each one is amplified – through the power of social sharing. Your followers can choose to share your update across their own networks, which means greater reach for you and your brand message. The opportunity of viral marketing on LinkedIn has never been so attractive.

#3: Collect Information on Your Followers

When you use LinkedIn targeted updates, the analytics area on LinkedIn tracks and collects a host of follower information that can be very useful to the savvy marketer. You’ll be able to see how your followers interact with your messages. From seniority, industry, and region, to company size and function – these are stats you want to have.

#4: Analyze The Data For Improved Marketing

You’ll be able to analyze the data from your LinkedIn targeted update analytics, to greatly improve your marketing tactics as time progresses. Use stats like clicks, likes, engagement, shares and comments to work out which messages are making the most impact among your selected audiences. Then streamline your marketing messages to get the most bang for your marketing buck!

The LinkedIn targeted status updates are incredibly potent marketing tools. LinkedIn has given the ambitious marketer everything they could need to craft excellent marketing campaigns on the platform. Don’t neglect to use your LinkedIn audience as a resource tool, or as a buying public. They can be both.

How Do I Use Targeted Updates?

You’ll need a LinkedIn company page first. If you don’t have one yet, it’s highly recommended that you do take the time to set one up. People follow companies they admire, for great information, tips, resources – or just because you’re in an identical niche and have something to say.

Create targeted updates by limiting the audience parameters, so that you’re speaking directly to someone who has the highest buying potential. The targeted updates section has already proven invaluable for executive search companies, job boards and local businesses. If you want to take advantage of this new feature, then test it out today!

How do you use LinkedIn? Have you ever tried to sell your products there? Tell us your story!

Courtesy of socialmedianewsalerts.blogspot.com

Step 1 is always going to be building your community. You can’t excel on a platform, if you don’t have an interactive community there. This needs to be priority number 1!

#1: Explode Your Online Reputation

Commit to getting as many recommendations as you can, from friends, colleagues, group members – everyone you can. They’re a free source of social proof that you can use on multiple social networks, in marketing collateral and on your website.

#2: Seek Out a Small Network of Influencers

If you run a niche blog, find the top 10 influencers in your niche on LinkedIn, and befriend them. This will lead to many joint ventures, guest posting and – if you play your cards right – inclusions in marketing materials, ebooks and other ‘high impact’ sales tools.

#3: Use Your Group Network For Product Launches

Launching a new product? Use your LinkedIn group network to source real testimonials, for use in other materials. Partner with a few of them and create a solid affiliate network, to access larger online communities.

#4: Use LinkedIn with Mobile Marketing

Use LinkedIn to share a text campaign with your networks, to build a quality subscriber list for your restaurant, pub, fitness center or dance studio. You can include your mobile keyword in your monthly email, or in your weekly group posts.

#5: Always Use ‘Add Sections’ To Enhance Your Profile

On LinkedIn there are several widgets that you can include on your profile to give you more credibility. Add your honors, awards, certifications, organizations, projects, patents, publications and more to your profile. You’ll soon get more connections, and more business!

#6: Become an Authority in Under 1 Month, With Answers

Answer LinkedIn questions, in the answers section. The more questions you answer, the more respect and authority you can gain. This is crucial if potential clients want to know who you are online. A quick search will prove that you’re an instant authority.

LinkedIn is a business focused environment, which means that your network is a great tool for your company. Most small business owners have a LinkedIn profile, but they don’t know what to do with it. First you need connections, and you can get many of them by joining groups. These groups are interactive and give you a chance to meet new people.

Once you have a few groups that you frequent, start asking for help. But make it worthwhile. No one can survive social media by ‘taking’ all the time – you must ‘give’ just as much! Always incentivize your requests, and be there to help others build their businesses as well.

Do you struggle to connect with your LinkedIn community? Tell me what your business needs, and I’ll come up with a plan for you!

Courtesy of brandnexus.com

#1: Do a Vigorous Company Search

Instead of searching for individuals, search by company on LinkedIn. You’ll be able to refine your company search repeatedly until you’re left with several people who are connected with you in some way. If you have a shared connection, that’s an automatic in – then all you have to do is introduce yourself and make your way through the ranks.

#2: Pick a Group and Make 5 Friends

The fastest way to meet people in your niche, is to participate in groups. Answer questions, offer insight or discuss the latest trends – as long as you interact. Group users will remember your conversation and professionalism, and will be glad to accept your friend request. Do this each week, and grow steadily by 20 users each month.

#3: Use Badges For Visual Impact

If you have a website or blog, then use a LinkedIn badge to attract traffic back to your LinkedIn page. Readers will love your words or posts, and will connect with you on LinkedIn – based purely on your website content. This can be a valuable connection stream, especially when your blog is growing in popularity.

#4: Email Marketing For Social

LinkedIn page links or badges can also be included in email marketing campaigns or newsletters. If your business has a strong email marketing campaign, then adding in your LinkedIn details here will greatly benefit your page. Try including a small section about your group, or about a group that you participate in, to draw people’s interest.

#5: Keyword Optimize Your LinkedIn Page

Do you need to get your organic visits up? Then you need to improve your LinkedIn page SEO. It’s a fact that people see this page before your website, Facebook or other social pages. LinkedIn ranks very well, so you’ll want to take advantage of niche orientated keywords to help you find valuable business connections.

#6: Applications Create Tighter Networks

When you add apps to your LinkedIn page, it creates a more complete profile for you. It also highlights who you are, what you do and what you’ve achieved. One of the best ways to attract new connections – is to use these apps to show people who you are. They’ll see that you’re worth knowing, and will add you to their network.

#7: Attend Some LinkedIn Events

LinkedIn isn’t only about networking on the site, it’s also about connecting with people to network with in the real world. Attend a LinkedIn conference, workshop or event – and have your business cards ready with your LinkedIn address on it. Soon, you’ll have dozens of new connections on the platform, that you’ve met in real life.

How else can you expand your LinkedIn network? Any tips for the SMM community?

Courtesy of couwenbergh.wordpress.com

What is Buffer?

Buffer is a social content management tool that people have been using on Facebook and Twitter for some time. It neatly and simply queues your posts, and then publishes them for you at specific times during the day. You can pre-schedule these publishing times, so that your pages always have some nice fresh content.

LinkedIn has just joined the list of buffer fans, which means that you can now create, queue and auto-publish on the business network.

How To Use Buffer

To use Buffer, you need to sign up with a Buffer account. Once your account is up and running, you can connect it to your social profiles – including LinkedIn. Then it’s up to you to use the browser extension or Buffer button to find and queue info.

You can do this by browsing the web and clicking on your Buffer button to queue up the post you’re reading. This post will then sit in your Buffer profile, until you are ready to set a publish date. The great thing about Buffer is that it formats the posts naturally, so that they look like hand written posts.

Unlike Twitter, these posts generate more responses because of the way they are formatted. If you find that no one in your LinkedIn community responds to your Tweet updates, then perhaps it’s time to switch to buffering your information. It’s a new and fairly organic way to curate and share content on your LinkedIn profile.

Buffer allows you to publish certain bits of content on certain platforms. This reduces the repetition that happens across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In doing this you can add more value to your LinkedIn profile, with exclusive business orientated content that speaks to your business network.

Segmenting Your Audience

I’ve explained before that audience segmentation is important if you want to interest different types of fans in certain networks, or indeed one fan in all of your networks.

You must publish original content on each platform, and curate great articles for individual platforms as you browse the web. Buffer makes this process easy, and it doesn’t require any fangled extras.

Use Buffer to add genuinely interesting content to your LinkedIn stream, to get more responses from your business network. You can also add a Buffer button to your blog, if you want to boost interaction there. Data has shown that Buffer actually generates more interaction than the Google+ button, so it’s worth using!

What do you think of Buffer, and has it added value to your LinkedIn stream? All reports are welcome! We want to get to the bottom of this new tool, with your help – so add your experience below!

Courtesy of batey.tm.mbs.ac.uk

Moderating Your LinkedIn Group

At the core of any functional LinkedIn group, is a published posting policy. This your members can browse as they like. It will detail what the rules are for posting in your group. Some LinkedIn users think that strict moderation will strangle your right to free speech. There will always be nay-sayers. The bottom line is that LinkedIn is a business network. In business, there is no room for time wasters.

This may be a hard line against the people who like to spam in groups, but ask any moderator that has had to deal with it – it’s really the only line you can take.

Tip #1: Publish a spam policy. Make it detailed and thorough.

Sometimes group members will see link exchanges or other forms of spam, and start sprouting it themselves. You don’t have to ban someone like this. But make sure that you warn them against doing it again.

Tip #2: Warn group members that spam unintentionally.

Social media is all about promoting that sense of community in your group. Inform group members about your policies, and encourage them to be a part of it. They are also able to flag inappropriate comments or spammy messages. Share this job, and your community will pull together, to make your group better, and spam free.

Tip #3: Involve your group in community moderation.

This can’t be said enough – but if you have a genuine troll, who spams repeatedly, leaves profane comments or starts fights with you, you must ban them. Kick them out of the group. This can be a tough thing to do in front of your other members. But you have to keep the peace, and promote quality interaction.

Tip #4: Don’t be afraid to ban repeat offenders.

Running a successful group means cleaning up after spammers and trolls who swoop in, to destroy your efforts. The easiest way to deal with these comments, are to delete them. They serve no purpose on your group discussion board, and are an irritation for your other group members. Do this often, and your group will reap the benefits.

Tip #5: Delete spam comments regularly.

These 5 tips will help you moderate your LinkedIn group, and keep it as spam free as possible. If you let spammers do what they want in your group, it will lose you real members in the long run. Your goal is to promote an intellectual, peaceful sharing environment – where members of your group can exchange ideas. Spam only behaves as a cog in the works. It benefits no-one but the spammer.

Are you for or against LinkedIn group moderation? Leave us your opinion below!

Courtesy of windmillnetworking.com

#1: Ask For Likes

You might have 100 or 10,000 group members on LinkedIn, but it doesn’t mean they’re always ready to engage. Why would they? They just chatted with their friends on Facebook, and fired off a few tweets and Google+ updates moments ago. The trick to gaining some ground, and getting people to connect – begins with likes. Make a statement, and ask your community to like it. Then below, ask them why they like it.

#2: Less Selling, More One-on-One Engagement

Group owners are driven to sell. After all, you didn’t just spend six months building a group to chat to random strangers. Though your ultimate goal is sales, don’t forget to take it step by step. Skipping ahead and always publishing sales content in your group is a sure way to lose readers. Instead start chatting – for no other reason than you want to help someone, or show off your knowledge on a subject.

#3: Make Friends, Turn Them into Advocates

Set out on a mission to make 5 really good friends in your group. Once you have established a great relationship with each of these people, invite them to help you run your group, or brainstorm on how you can make it better. You’ll be surprised how many of them will want to help, just because they can. It helps that they’ll be getting free exposure as well of course.

#4: Give Your Members a Reason To Engage

Run a special LinkedIn group promotion, or contest – inviting your group members to enter for free. The prize? An ebook or another desirable digital product. If you figure this out correctly, you’ll be able to get free reviews for your new digital product, and score some happy group members. The key is to use this free giveaway as incentive to spark conversation about your topic and in your group area.

#5: Buy Some Conversation

Horrid as this sounds, it’s a practice that is fairly common in LinkedIn groups these days. The site owner hires one or more writers to contribute thoughtful, insightful and interesting comments to the group – which in turn encourages interaction from other group members. No-one has to know that you’ve paid for the conversation, and most of the time it generates some excellent discussion that the owner could not have produced on their own.

Remember to stay in contact with your group members, but try not to send them a lot of direct messages – it can scare them off. Once a week is more than enough, and you should be creating anticipation for your group newsletter that is released every month. Keep people coming back, or checking in – and engagement will happen!

How do you keep your LinkedIn group engaged? Share some of your secrets with the social media magic team!

Courtesy of gotriangle.org

Creating The Right Message

Assuming you’ve spent some quality time segmenting your LinkedIn community – what’s your next move? You know they’re fans, clients and potential clients, and that you’d like them to read your email…but how do you get them to do it? Step 1 is avoiding the most common Inmail mistake.

Dear sir/madam or something similar. You can’t call people by their names because it’s a bulk email, but you can do something else that works almost as well. Launch immediately into what you want to say to your community. We are subconsciously trained to read messages with no introduction, because this is how friends and family contact us. Use friendly language and be polite.

Keep your call to action near the top, and give them a good reason why they would want to take action just below it. You can only send 50 of these mails at a time, so you might want to sort your wish list into groups, according to market research of analytics you’ve collected along the way.

Always make your email as personal as possible, and remind them who you are in one quick line. Use a short paragraph or two to get your message across. End with a question to prompt them to answer you, and your name. That’s all you need. Keep the email short, direct and to the point. Copy and paste the email into the LinkedIn message box.

Sending The Message

One of the first things your contacts will see when your email flies into their inbox, is the huge amount of other people you’ve sent it too. Immediately this is identified as bulk spam and deleted. Make sure that before you send your emails, you uncheck the “allow recipients to see each others emails” box at the bottom of the message box.

You can target your emails to a specific location or a specific industry, which should be taken into account when you draft your email. Segmenting your audience like this will result in a higher ROI for your LinkedIn email campaign. Finally, in every email you send – regardless of the fact that it is a marketing mail – you need something of value.

If they can use it, give it to them. Then with each email you send over time, they are more likely to read and act on the information. They might even share your links or free products on groups and add to your viral potential.

Email campaigns on LinkedIn should not be run more often than once a month, and even that can be pushing it a little. Respect your connections, use LinkedIn mail properly and no-one will ever call you spammer!

Have you ever been flagged as a spammer? What happened? We’d love to chat with you!

Courtesy of greenbuzzagency.com

Working Towards a Valuable Profile

You will want to get your LinkedIn profile as close to 100% complete as possible. That means focusing on areas of your profile that aren’t directly on the front of your homepage. Assuming you’ve done some extensive keyword research – you’ll need to integrate these keywords into each section. Don’t keyword stuff, the content still needs to promote you without sounding strained once your browser arrives.

Upload a comprehensive resume, and make sure that you record the appropriate number of previous and current positions. You’ll also need to get at least one recommendation – which shouldn’t be too hard if you add a few of your past clients immediately. Your goal is to add as much valuable SEO content as you can!

Adding In Those Great Extras

If you want an optimized profile then start taking advantage of LinkedIn’s excellent extras – like app integration and sections promotion. With the app integration tool, you can add a workspace, slideshare presentations and a host of other business tools that will enhance your profile. My travel, an Amazon reading list, Polls and SAP Community Bio are just a few you can choose from.

‘Sections’ on the other hand, allows you to add more information about yourself to your profile. Awards, organizations, projects, courses, schools – they’re all relevant if you want to build a more complete profile. Do your best to add in as many sections as you can. Remember that each piece of content is another opportunity to insert niche keywords on your profile.

Making connections and joining niche relevant groups will also help your profile become more valuable. People often find LinkedIn groups, and source businesses from there, instead of direct from Google. Starting your own LinkedIn group is an excellent way to capitalize on your niche keywords.

You already know that Google loves pages that always contain fresh content – so to have that on your LinkedIn page – integrate your Twitter account into your profile. Once you’ve set up your profile and it’s complete, concentrate on getting new connections. When you add a connection on LinkedIn, this is regarded as an ‘incoming link’ of sorts. The more you get, the higher your profile will be ranked.

Participating in group discussions and LinkedIn answers, is also worth integrating into your LinkedIn optimization strategy. Like all social media sites, your LinkedIn profile will need to be updated regularly, and perhaps even split tested – if you aren’t seeing an increase in traffic. Hang in there, focus on keyword research and soon you’ll start getting clients contacting you through the LinkedIn business network.

How did you optimize your LinkedIn page? Please share your tips below!

Courtesy of blog.onlymarketingjobs.com

You’ll need to sit down and think about what you will and won’t allow in your group. Here are some important things to consider before drafting that policy document.

1. Brainstorm With Other People in Your Business

To get a complete version of the vision you’d like to instil in your new discussion group, sit down with a few colleagues or your social media manager, and brainstorm. Begin by coming up with a succinct and clear ‘mission’ for your group.

Define its purpose, and everything that it entails. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to pick apart the things you don’t want in your discussion group, and list them neatly in your discussion guidelines document.

2. Open a Featured Discussion and Post Your Guidelines

When you have a rough draft of your group preferences, post them on your LinkedIn page as a featured discussion. Encourage your group members to read the guidelines and add to them if they come up with related ideas.

Your goal is get people to read and contribute to this document. As time progresses, you’ll uncover more and more things you didn’t initially think about, for your discussion guidelines. When this happens, your featured post is ready and waiting for your additions.

3. Practice What You Preach

When you appoint a group manager, it’s their job to follow each and every rule you’ve posted in the featured discussion section. It will act as a practical example for your group members, and will help them stick to your guidelines as much as possible. If your group manager goes around breaking your own rules, don’t expect your community to follow the rules either!

4. Don’t Forget to Get Technical

While its very useful adding moral and general guidelines, you’ll also need to think about the presentation and technical aspects of the discussions in your group. Will you allow links in the headlines of your posts?

Can people advertise their business services in a discussion? Do you allow people to post discussions encouraging random connections from strangers? These are considerations that need to be addressed.

5. Your Banned Member Policy

Last but not least, don’t forget to draft part of your policy guidelines that clearly states why and how someone can be removed as a member. You’ll come across new and interesting reasons why you’ll want to kick someone off your discussion board, so make sure you amend this regularly.

There’s nothing worse than not being able to explain why you’ve banned someone from your group. Openly displaying these rules will prevent that from happening.

Work on an average length of about 1000 words, depending on your industry. Before you post them, get someone to review it to ensure that all of your guidelines are clear. Attract quality LinkedIn connections by posting your discussion guidelines, but remember to be lenient – people make mistakes too!

What 1 guideline is an absolute must-have on LinkedIn? Tell us about yours!

Courtesy of millermosaicllc.com

If you don’t know them, LinkedIn isn’t going to make it easy for you to make that connection. So how do some businesses have 5000 connections on LinkedIn? Here are some excellent best practices that will help you make more quality connections than ever before.

Before we begin: Why even bother finding the right connections on LinkedIn? Business connections can be enormously useful, to attract new clients, to get good recommendations, and to impress other industry authorities – so that one day they might be interested in doing business with you.

If you make the wrong or ‘easy’ connections, this will never happen. It defeats the entire point of being on a business network.

#1: Join Groups That Are Relevant To Your Industry

The most comprehensive way of meeting new people on LinkedIn, is to have a discussion with them before deciding they are worth adding to your network. To do this, answer as many relevant questions as you can, and keep the dialogue going until you have made a few connections with the people that take part in the discussion.

Then politely ask them if they’d like to join your network. Remember to keep your business goals in mind. Its nice talking to people, but if they aren’t relevant to your end goal, your time is better spent elsewhere.

#2: Browse The Connections You Have and Ask For Introductions

If you find a person you’d like to connect with, either for business purposes, or because they work in a similar field – ask your closest connection to them to introduce you. People on LinkedIn love to make connections, and if you’re friendly and honest, there isn’t a person in the world that would refuse (unless their connection refuses).

Even if you’re three times removed from this person, you still have common ground. Many people fail to make connections because they are afraid to initiate the contact needed to meet that person on the platform. But making connections is essentially a social activity, so get used to the idea of contacting people first!

#3: Don’t Accept Random Memberships or Invites From People

Your network is just as exclusive as the networks you’re trying to connect with. People with premier accounts will often send you invites to ‘barely’ relevant groups, or you’ll be invited to join networks that aren’t relevant at all. Remember that to keep your connections worthwhile, you must learn to reject offers from people.

#4: Sharing Recommendations Strengthens Your Relationships

If you’ve worked with a few of your connections on LinkedIn, offer them a recommendation. If you do, they will be more inclined to comment on your discussions, return recommendations and introduce you to people in their network that you may find interesting. LinkedIn is just as much a sharing site as Facebook or Twitter, and you need to have just as much interaction to attract connections.

#5: Find a Networking Event in Your Area

When you join authority groups, you’ll often be invited to networking events, or to participate in an online discussion off the LinkedIn platform. Take the initiative and attend these events. They are enormously beneficial when it comes to making real-life connections, and they will help promote your business beyond anything you can add to your profile on the network.

If you stick to these best practices, you’ll soon build a quality list of connections that will stimulate business growth and development. For every network there is a set of rules to abide by. With Twitter there are some things you can get away with, that you can’t on Facebook for example. Always stay on the right side of these rules to get more connections and grow your business network!

How do you meet people on LinkedIn? We want to know!