Angela Crocker

Write. Teach. Organize.

Using LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

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With over 100 million professionals on LinkedIn and a new member joining every second (yes – every second!), LinkedIn is a valuable social network for both professionals and businesses. Last week I sat in on Social Media Success Summit webinar called “How to Use LinkedIn to Enhance and Grow Your Business” by Mario Sundar, LinkedIn’s in-house social media guy.

In his presentation, Mario shared some tips on the key things you must do to represent your professional identity and emphasized the importance of focusing on relationships, after all it’s a social networking community.

Take a moment to log-in to your LinkedIn account and then keep reading. Have you done these things?

  1. Include a photo that’s recognizable as you.
  2. Make your connections public (not private) so people can find you.
  3. Update your specialties regularly. What’s true about you today may not be the same as when you signed up for LinkedIn.
  4. Mario also recommended syncing your Twitter, blog and Slideshare accounts to share your expertise widely. (However, I firmly believe you should NOT autofeed your tweets to your LinkedIn status update. It’s ok to share your Twitter link just not every tweet, please.)

To manage your relationships on LinkedIn and offline as well, take some time to do the following:

  1. Synchronize your real world connections to LinkedIn. If your computer is a PC and you use Outlook look for the Outlook plug-in that lets you sync your LinkedIn contacts with your address book.
  2. Use your LinkedIn address book as your relationships in-box. Whenever you can note news and updates from your contacts and comment or connect as appropriate.
  3. Transfer business cards via Card Munch, a card reading app that translates a photo of a business card into a digital contact file. (I discovered this app a couple of weeks ago and I LOVE it! Super easy to use, pretty accurate and zippity do da fast.)
  4. Organize your contacts and add notes to categorize them. Help jog your own memory so you know when you met people and why you want to stay in touch.

One last tip, update LinkedIn profile constantly. Share new information, comment in a group, post a link – whatever you’ve got going on that’s relevant to your community should be shared on LinkedIn. Every time you make a change you’ll show up in the newsfeed of your connections.

Tweetup: Defined

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Have you ever been to a Tweetup?

As you’ve probably discovered by now, Twitter is full of “tw” lingo – tweets, tweeps, twitterverse, Twitpic, & so on. Tweetup is one of my favourites because it’s a chance to connect offline. A tweetup is simply a gathering of Twitter users in the real world as opposed to a tweetchat which is a gathering of Twitter users online.

The name is a mash up between Twitter.com and Meetup.com, a site used to organize events. Tweetups are organized on Twitter when someone announces a time, place and topic. For many tweetups, you simply show up while others have a more formal registration process through Meetup, Eventbrite, or some other online registration system.

The Nanaimo Family Literacy Day Tweetup brought book lovers & readers together.

Photo Credit: WendyD.ca

Most tweetups are open to anyone who wants to come. If you see a tweetup announced that interests you then plan to attend. Sometimes the organizer will ask you to RSVP to ensure enough food, etc. but often it’s a cash bar or BYOC (buy your own coffee) arrangement. Keep an eye out for any registration links as some tweetup organizers charge admission (usually a modest amount) to cover the costs.

Tweetups are a great way to meet people in your community who share your interests. Before the event start following the tweetup’s hashtag so you can get acquainted with others who will be attending. You’ll discover some new people to follow and may get a few new followers yourself.

Once you’re at the event be sure to live tweet some of your experience. But don’t spend all your time tweeting, after all you’re there to interact with people not their avatars.

After the event, pop back on to Twitter and have another look at the hashtag. Follow any folks you got to talk to and retweet any gems from the tweet stream. And be sure to @mention folks you met to continue the conversation.

Do you know how to search?

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Do you know how to search?  Can you find what you’re looking for on Google? Do you just Bing it when you need an answer?  I suspect you’ve got the basics down but did you know there’s a simple way to refine your search and get better answers?
Three simple words will change your life:
  1. OR
  2. AND
  3. NOT
Ok, maybe Boolean searches won’t change your life but they will certainly help you find what you’re really looking for. In social media, these can help hone your efforts to monitor your brand and your keywords.
Searches that use the OR command allow you to look for several different but related search terms at the same time. The results will show all web page that mention one or more of your search terms. For the upcoming Social Media Camp Victoria event, blogs, tweets and status updates will use the name of the conference (Social Media Camp), the conference’s hashtag (#SMCV11) or the conference Twitter name (@YYJSocialMedia). To find a broad cross section of content related to the conference I’ll probably monitor this search:
Alternatively, searches that use AND command will be limited to only those web pages that include all the search terms.
Note that the OR search returned 577,700 results while the AND search came up with 1,320 results. You’ll decide if you want lots of information or a very focused result.
Finally, the NOT command can be used to include one search time while excluding another. For example, maybe you want to do a search for birds but exclude the pages that also mention cats. NOT is a very useful tool to filter out distracting search results.
Also, note how I’ve put quotation marks around the search for “Social Media Camp”. Quotes are important to ensure that your search results include the entire phrase. You can use quotes in any search – simple search or Boolean search.