LinkedIn dominates the world for freelancers, small businesses, and corporations. Well, not always, because there is a social market called Facebook where hundreds of millions flock every day. But the key benefit of LinkedIn marketing over marketing in other social media is simply this: you can focus on business.

Facebook is not run directly for businesses, while LinkedIn is a social network for every business, from the solo freelancer to the corporate CEO. It’s unique, it’s useful, and LinkedIn marketing is relevant when it comes to social marketing.

So how can you succeed with LinkedIn marketing? Consider these 5 features for the social network which can be easily implemented.

Contacts
You start with a few contacts, but upload your digital address book to LinkedIn and you can get hundreds if not thousands of contacts. Still, you might need only to increase from 1 to 10 contacts in order to get what you want. But the shear weight of users available to network with makes it a dream for a business at any level looking for new ways to connect with contacts.

Web Networking
You can learn about your customers, their needs and wants, in new ways with LinkedIn marketing. You can do so much just on your main network page. Right there you can watch for job changes, updates from colleagues, new job offers, companies looking to connect in your niche, and much more. Of course, with Facebook the usability is paramount, but LinkedIn has some similarities in terms of updates and following friends. For example, you can post updates much like Facebook,while also connecting these short updates to your Twitter account.

New Jobs, Leads
You can turn leads into prospects and prospects into clients. You can find new jobs for yourself or others. You can ask 100 people to recommend your small business and refer to this on your main site.

Lead Management
Say you’re a small technology firm looking for new clients in relatively small amounts. You send out 10 emails every week to new leads. You want them to be customers. With LinkedIn, you can connect and nurture them through the sales process of lead, to prospect, to client. A lead is someone who may be interested, a prospect is someone who’s shown interest, and a client is someone who buys. With lead management, you can see what they’re looking for. In most cases, the company will hire someone for the work you want to do with them. This is simply the nature of the business–supply meets demand. If you can connect with a potential client via LinkedIn, you can have an advantage over the competition.

Stay Connected
With all the options you have with LinkedIn Marketing, you may not know where to begin. The best option is to sign up, upload your email contact list, contact these leads through LinkedIn, and start asking for referrals and testimonials from your current clients. If you’re a small business, you can upload your Gmail or Yahoo address book to the site, follow up with all leads who agree to connect, and then ask them for referrals after your work is done.

6 Benefits of LinkedIn Marketing

If you run any kind of business, you can reap the benefits of LinkedIn marketing. While it’s beneficial for getting traffic, LinkedIn is masterful in engaging new clients for your business in new ways.

The benefits of any social media marketing can be huge, but using networks together is the best way to use the social web. While there are many useful social networks to use, and many strategies on succeeding, one of the best ways is to connect to readers via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This guide focuses on one important piece–the LinkedIn marketing formula and its benefits.

1-Make More Sales with LinkedIn Networking
If you don’t want to use all the social networks, if you don’t have the time to market separately, you can connect to buyers directly with LinkedIn and use the Twitter application to post all updates on both networks. LinkedIn uses the same 140-character update as Twitter, and it can be posted to all your fans on both networks simultaneously.

Social media may be a friendly technology, but for businesses, the opportunities it presents are enormous. Perhaps best of all, if you’re a B2B service, there are hundreds of thousands of businesses and professionals of all kinds on LinkedIn.

2-Study the Competition with LinkedIn Search
If you’re a startup or new to the social web, no problem. With LinkedIn, you can directly access pages for thousands of businesses in your niche (if not more), to see what they are selling, who they are selling to, how they are using social networks like LinkedIn, and how you can compete with them via certain products/services. Simply use the built in search feature at the top right of the screen. You can look under people, jobs, and companies for most success. Just type in your niche, decide whether you want to focus on companies or people or jobs, and you get instant researching tools.

3-Brand Awareness and LinkedIn Marketing
Perhaps one of the best parts of social marketing is using the network to create awareness and buzz about your brand. We’re all equal on LinkedIn in most cases, but the more you and your company network, the more connections you get, and the more reader feedback you receive, the better chance your LinkedIn marketing effort will succeed.

4-Product Demand via LinkedIn
You might be interested in starting a new service business. Let’s say you wanted to be a tech consultant, and you weren’t sure of who was buying what and for how much. You can do this with LinkedIn networking. Not only can you ask questions, but you can also see the main competition. If there are a lot of competitors, the market may be saturated but hot. Or it could be a smaller niche with less competition, and more demand than supply.

5-Networking with Professionals on LinkedIn
If you’re a small business owner or freelancer, you might want to be introduced to certain people and companies on LinkedIn. On the other hand, you may want to market your job skills in your hunt for employment. The more connections you make, the more opportunities you have for your network size to grow. LinkedIn has a feature where you can ask to be recommended to associates. So if you want to meet Employer 1, and you are already connected to Employer 2 who is connected with Employer 1, you can be introduced.

6-Feedback and Recommendations on LinkedIn
Feedback is one of the prime benefits of social media marketing in general. However, LinkedIn has a recommendation feature where you can personally be recommended by others in your profession. If you’re just starting out as a tech consultant, a few recommendations on LinkedIn can really “up” your business skills. In fact, many resumes now feature “see my recommendations on LinkedIn” as part of the reference or experience section.

As you can see, LinkedIn can be both a networking portal and a marketing gold mine. Now that you know the benefits, it’s time to reap the rewards.

The growing phenomenon of Facebook hasn’t been all due to one simple form of content, marketing or application. Facebook’s success is a combination of dozens of features, which make the user experience better. And any change to Facebook, no matter how small, could impact your social media marketing campaign greatly.

The most recent change proves the point: Facebook will change the “become a fan” button for business pages to a “like” button. This means, if you follow an author’s Facebook page, or a company’s or your favorite brand of coffee, instead of “fanning” the page, you’ll be “liking” it when you subscribe to updates on the Facebook page.

This may seem to be an insignificant change, but few one-word changes will have as much impact on marketing as this one. As you can already “like” a comment, picture, wall post or status update on Facebook, you can now do the same for brands you’d like to give a thumbs up, without declaring yourself a “fan”.

This came about after recent research that Facebook users, an estimated 400 million who log in daily, use the “like” feature far more than the “fan” feature. The Facebook study said nearly twice as many people “like” items than “fan” brands and company pages.

Why is this so important? And what effect will it have on web marketing?

Users feel less commitment to “liking” a page. It can seem less promotional than “Becoming A Fan”. Users feel it’s less of a stretch to say they like a brand. And what if you fan more than one brand? Now you can “like” as many brands, even competitors and not feel conflicted about it.

The idea behind the change then is that more people will “like” business pages than those who were “”fanning” them. Facebook is hoping the new feature will encourage more companies and startups to build Facebook pages and pay for additional advertising, Facebook’s main source of revenue.

But will this truly make a big difference?

Experts are arguing what will happen is users will simply “like” brands the same amount as they became a “fan.” So there are predicting no change whatsoever.

Traditionally, Facebook marketing was not a major business. With companies actively looking to promote their brands on Facebook over the past years and with many other social networks connecting to Facebook (such as Twitter and LinkedIn), it’s become a boon for marketers with any size plan. You could be a Fortune 500 company or a small business selling cookies. With companies actively courting readers to follow them on Facebook and Twitter, it’s only logical Facebook would try to encourage more uses to follow theses companies. It is the companies who write the checks after all.

One word may seem to be a small change, but Facebook is betting money this tiny twist will lead to more users connecting with brands and more advertising dollars. For marketers, it may encourage a larger following. But is more followers what businesses really need to be more successful on Facebook? Or will this just over saturate Facebook with business updates and dilute their messaging to their actual target market?

For now, we have to wait and see.

These days, there is no question that social media marketing is a major buzzword in promoting your company. Whether it be Facebook, blogging, Twitter, or Digg, people are investing a lot of time and money into making these sites work for them. In fact, according to a poll by e-Tailing Group in September of 2009, by the end of next year 96% of brands and retailers will be using Facebook fan pages as a community and social networking tool for their business. So the question is how can you use these sites to help you too?

Great question! All of the sites mentioned above can be fantastic sources (and to find out more about how Twitter can help you, watch our Twitter for Business video blog series about it in posts below!!) but we will explore some options with Facebook in this post.

The first thing to do is to set up a Facebook fan page for your business. Just follow the set-up instructions or if you want a more branded or interactive fan page, we can help by developing a custom Facebook fan page for you. Either way, with a fan page, you will have a venue to get whatever message you want to whoever “fans” your business.

It is a great idea to send messages to all your Facebook friends suggesting they follow your fan page and hopefully you gain more followers from that. Through your fan page, you can post exciting things happening with your business and upcoming events that are going to happen. Specifically, you can post messages about upcoming deals you may be having at your company.

For example, if you are giving a special offer to customers because your company is celebrating its five-year anniversary, why not tell all your fans on Facebook in hopes of a potential sale?

Messaging your fans could also be used if you want to host an event that you want people to attend. You can send them an invite to attend your event. All their Facebook friends will see the event as well and could greatly increase the awareness and attendance of your event than if you chose to stay away from Facebook. With how competitive businesses are now, you should do whatever you can to get noticed by the public.

The potential doesn’t end there! On your fan page, you can link back to your website and have your company telephone number listed. This not only gives people another way to reach your site, it can also help bump up where your website is ranked in Google searches and other search engines. It could be the difference that sends your company to the top of the charts!

The fun never ends when you join Facebook! Adding Facebook to your company’s marketing repertoire makes you more relatable. Your customer will see you as someone who is social and in tune with recent trends. This means you are using a venue that they feel comfortable using. They can see what your company is all about through Facebook before giving you a sale later.

Once you have tackled Facebook, you can take the basic principles you have learned to then further market yourself in other online social tools. From fan pages to messaging, higher rankings to higher customer usability, Facebook does it all. It’s time you start using it for your company and see your sales grow!

Well, if you’ve stuck with us this far, hopefully you’ve got a good grasp on Twitter and how you can use it to increase business and communication with your consumers. But one very important question remains: How do you measure its success?

Measuring Social Media Success and ROI

• Exposure
       •  Visits
       •  Search Engine Rankings
       •  Comment Tonality
       •  Buzz
• Engagement
       •  Click-Throughs
       •  Repeat Visitors
       •  Readership (duration of visit)
       •  Subscriptions
• Influence
       •  Awareness
       •  Purchase Consideration
       •  Attitudes
• Action
       •  Visit Key Pages
       •  Attend Events
       •  Make a Purchase
       •  Tell a Friend
       •  Contact

Thanks for watching!

We hope you found this presentation helpful and wish you luck as you start your Twitter marketing campaign. Remember, the most important factor in determining your success when it comes to social media is participation. So what are you waiting for? Go on, join the conversation. Or better yet, start it!

From understanding its culture and attracting followers to choosing your following and using desktop applications, there are a number of factors that can increase your odds of social media success when it comes to using Twitter for business.

Part 8 of the Minnesota and North Dakota BBB’s 2009 Focus Seminar, offers simple tips and information to help you succeed when it comes to using Twitter as a business and social media marketing communication tool. Driving community participation is key and the best way you can get participation is to publish the fact that you are on these channels. Put it on your website. Use it in your email signature. Promote it on your offline materials.

Aside from creating a following and getting real participation, another item that’s going to effect your success with Twitter is finding the right programs.  We mentioned earlier that by itself, Twitter is not exactly “user-friendly” but there are desktop applications and software programs that work with Twitter to make it easier and more convenient for the user.

Tweet Like A Pro

• Desktop Clients – view tweets, replies and direct messages all in one interface, group people together, handle multiple accounts, monitor what others are saying
• Twitter Search – Find other people
• Tweet Schedulers – setup tweets to be published at a later time, auto follow people, send automatic direct messages to people who follow you
• Integrate Files - images and video
• Twitter Mobile – tweet and monitor your twitter account from your mobile phone

The more you know about Twitter and the people who use it (tweeple), the easier it will be for you to use it to leverage your business and marketing goals. Watch Part 8: Setting Up for Social Media Success now and be sure to tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of “How to Use Twitter for Business.”

If you haven’t had that “ah-ha” moment where everything becomes crystal clear, the clouds part, sun comes out and the little Twitter bird starts a chirping… or I mean tweeting, you are not alone. Using Twitter for business and marketing is still new for a lot of companies and even the ones who have been using it for a while are still playing around with their accounts, trying new things to really get the most out of their time and efforts.

Keep in mind that every business is different, so what works for one company will not necessarily deliver results or even make sense for yours. But to get an idea and good example of a real life business application of Twitter in action, check out Part 7 of the Minnesota and North Dakota’s Better Business Bureau’s 2009 Focus Seminar presentation, “How to Use Twitter for Business.”

This should help shed some light on what we’ve been building up to for the last few weeks now and maybe even help you reach your “ah-ha” moment.

Using Twitter for Business

• Think of Twitter as vehicle to get the word out
• Twitter works in real time
• Your followers represent your audience
• Twitter is a great place to find new people
• You need to participate – it’s suppose to be social
• It is not a dumping zone  – that’s what your blog’s for!

Watch Part 7, “Twitter In Action” now for a real life example of how Twitter can be used for business and be sure to stay tuned for more useful tips on using your business Twitter account.

Often times the most difficult or challenging part of learning a new technology is understanding the lingo. When you don’t understand the jargon, it can seem as though what you’re reading is in a completely different language.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, Part 6 of the 2009 Minnesota BBB Focus Seminar presentation, “How to Use Twitter for Business,” will help you learn the foreign tongue of Twitter lingo. And once you’ve mastered the lingo, it will be much easier to go about using your business twitter account.

The Language of Twitter

• Tweet – Update or post
• DM – direct message
• RT – retweet
• @username – public reply (dialogue)
• #keyword – hash tag
• Tinyurl.com, Bit.ly or is.gd – url redirects (used to shorten and track urls)

Watch Part 6, “Learning the Lingo” now to get a handle on the jargon Twitter uses. And be sure to check back again next week for more useful tips on using your business Twitter account.

Now that you’ve created and configured your business twitter account, it’s time to get comfortable with it so you can begin using it as a social media marketing tool.

Part 5 of the “How to use Twitter for Business” presentation from the 2009 Minnesota BBB Focus seminar gets you acquainted with your Twitter homepage, dissecting the various components which include:

• Following – People you are subscribing to
• Followers – The people who are subscribing to you
• Updates – Number of Tweets you’ve made
• @username – People who have made public comments about your tweets, that are visible on their personal profile pages
• Direct messages – comments others have made to you that are not public

The video continues to walk you through your new business Twitter account, showing you how to find people to follow and how tweets work. Tweets? What’s a Tweet?

Tweets are how you communicate on Twitter.

• They are small updates consisting of 140 characters or less
• Can include trackable links to images, content, videos, etc
• Will be public on your page unless you protect your account (or direct message someone)
• And with be visible to your followers as well as on your own profile page (this also means they are indexable by search engines)

Watch Part 5, “What the Tweet – Dissecting your Twitter Account” now and be sure to check back next week for another exciting installment of “How to use Twitter for Business,” and more insider tips on how to leverage your twitter account to get you more business.

Alright, now that you have a grasp on what Twitter is and how other businesses are using it in their social media marketing plans, it’s time for you to “join the conversation.”

Part 4 of the Minnesota BBB”s 2009 Focus Seminar provides a basic walkthrough of the steps involved in setting up a Twitter account and offers some tips on how to best configure it as a business marketing tool. Like initiating any business or marketing strategy, it never hurts to be prepared.

Keep in mind your overall marketing objectives as you set up your account. It might be a good idea to think through or even prepare a few of these before you start like your username, bio, what picture you want to use (yours or your company logo?), a background image, etc.

Creating Your Account

1. Choose your username
2. See if your friends are on Twitter
3. Choose others to follow

Configuring Your Account

1. Choose your time zone
2. Write your bio
3. Select to protect or not protect updates
4. Add your phone number
5. Choose to receive update notices
6. Upload your picture
7. Design your background

For more tips and insight on using Twitter to get you more business, watch Part 4: Creating and Configuring a Business Twitter Account. And be sure to stay tuned for more from, “How to use Twitter for Business.”