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Facebook Marketing Tactics

Social Media Marketing: A Comprehensive Social Media Strategy Guide for Online Marketing
By: Michael Sim

Module 3: Facebook Training (3hrs)
This training series was created to help inform social network marketing teams on the basic concepts, how to monetize activity, and generate a positive ROI using Facebook. Added benefits to the company include an increase in brand awareness, retention and market share.

Section 1: Learning the ropes (1hr)
1) Facebook Member Statistics

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 60 million status updates posted each day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month
• More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
• The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• The average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
• The average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
• The average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month
• The average user is invited to 3 events per month
• The average user is a member of 13 groups
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
• More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month.
• Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect
• There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products.

2) Profile Content
Content is king with all social media websites. With Facebook, filling out your company or personal profile with as much quality information as possible will result in better visibility through relevant keyword searches. Also, be sure to include links to your company website, blog, and other social networks wherever possible. Your profile image is also a very important element to consider. Make sure you have a picture that doesn’t give people the impression that you are anything less than a professional. The biggest issue that most people have with Facebook is the conflict that arises from diluting a network built with friends and family with business contacts. If you would like to maintain separation between your personal connections and professional, simply create a new profile. However, if you are using your personal account to do business, it is best to remove as much material as possible that would lower your chances of appearing like a trustworthy professional.

3) Friend-Adding
Friend-adding is Facebook’s way of allowing users to add people to their networks. Adding a friend works much like Twitter’s follower feature. Friends are able to view your updates in their public timeline, and are also given many more interactive options than Twitter. A general rule of thumb is to add around 30 friends per day, and try to make a quality connection with most of them. Identify common interests with your new friends, provide feedback on updates they’ve made, and present them with advice and assistance. By building a strong presence for yourself and your company through a demonstration of kindness, interest, assistance, and expertise, you are ultimately creating a network of people who will praise your brand. Since social networking is heavily based on word-of-mouth referral marketing, making a good impression can have a significant impact on lead generation.

4) Wall Posts
Wall posts enable users to post public messages and comments to individual users. Wall posts are not only visible to the individual, but also all of the friends of that specific user. Wall posts tend to turn into conversations, which have a very high viral marketing value. Companies can take advantage of using wall posts to create or continue existing conversations from within their friends’ profiles. It also presents the opportunity to refer people to your company website whenever it is relevant to the conversation.

5) Status Updates
Status updates are visible in the public timeline (wall) of all your friends. Each update displays individually in a public timeline, and each friend of that specific friend has the ability to comment or interact with that update. Status updates are the most powerful means of creating highly valuable conversations within your network of friends.

6) Groups
Facebook’s Groups feature is another tool that can have a significant impact on its marketing value. Inviting people to become a member of your group is usually non-threatening. This allows you to generate a significantly larger group of individuals as compared to a standard website capture page. Groups create the perfect environment for establishing your company’s presence, expertise, knowledge-base, and services/products. Groups also feature bulk-emailing to your group members, which can be used to send updates, invitations to events, coupons or discounts, and more. It is also possible to set-up your groups page with affiliate advertisements or products, from which you could then create affiliate commission. It is also a great way to interact with a large amount of people without violating Facebook’s terms of services.

7) Connect With Your Leads
When making a contact with a lead, encourage them to view your profile or company page on Facebook. Becoming someone’s friend or follower within any social environment is one of the strongest forms of opt-in marketing available.

Notes
The notes feature within Facebook serves as a custom call-out posting utility. Creating a new note allows you to create a customized message that appears on your profile sidebar. By using this area to post links, photos, and other important information, you are adding a customized touch to your pages that provides your viewers with the added convenience of connecting with your company information. When a new note is created, it is also posted as an update in your public activity stream.

9) Contact Importer
The contact importer helps you connect with people that you have made contact with via several email platforms. By uploading your contacts from AIM, Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail, a message will be sent to your new contacts inviting them to add you to their friends list.

10) Photo Tagging
Photo tagging is a feature that allows you to select a region on a photograph, and assign it to a specific person (or people) within your friends list. This originally was intended to allow you to tag pictures of people, and link to the people that were included in the photo. When a person is tagged in a photo, (regardless if they are actually in that photo or not), the image appears within their “Photos” section along with a status update alerting the person that they have been tagged in a photo. This feature can be used to send out personalized image-based invitations, coupons, greeting cards, and so on. Be careful however, overdoing it with photo-tagging can have negative consequences if your friends view this as a spamming technique.

11) Facebook Badge
Facebook’s badge feature allows users to embed a small widget of profile information on other websites. This increases the visibility of your company by connecting your website or blog viewers to your Facebook profile page.
URL: http://facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

12) Messages
Facebook’s default settings include a standard messaging system that allows users to send secure, private messages to friends. When sending a new message, you also have the ability to mass-distribute your message to contacts within your friends list. This can be a highly marketable feature if used to update existing clients, or to send out a generalized marketing message to a select group of prospects.

Section 2: Applications & Add-Ons (1hr)
13) Automated Friend Adding and Listing
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
This process utilizes custom script add-ons for Firefox to automate the process of requesting friendship from members on Facebook. The script also includes a feature that allows you to pre-determine a list that you will automatically assign new friends to. This section lists where to obtain these scripts at no cost, installation, and how to begin using them to build your community.

14) Facebook Marketplace
Facebook’s Marketplace application opens your company to a wide variety of classifieds-style posting that is very similar to Craigslist. The marketplace allows you to advertise your company’s products or services, recruit new employees, and easily connect with other marketplace users. The added value of marketing from within the marketplace over a site like Craigslist is the convenience of being able to connect with and view marketplace user profiles. The marketplace can also be used as a means to identify other companies or potential clients that are also actively participating users. Using relevant keyword searches, request friendship from those you would consider part of your target audience.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/marketplace/

15) Events
Facebook Events feature provides users with the ability to publish and manage events, invite members, and build a loyal following among your targeted viewers. This works well for promotional offers by creating “events” out of product or service sales and discounts. The location of the event can then be set to your company’s location, which will increase the potential of in-house visits by clients and customers.

16) Facebook Pages
As an individual user, members are able to create a “page” that is dedicated to a specific theme. As a business owner using a personal profile, Facebook Pages can be used to create a unique landing page specifically for your company. If the Facebook profile is a business account, companies can create pages for relevant theme-related materials. If I was a contractor from Chicago, I could create a new page titled “Chicago Contractors”. I would then send out mass-invitations to my personal friends list to become a “fan” of my new page. Facebook pages are also highly searchable, which increases the potential for generating new “fans” for your company’s page. The marketing power behind Facebook pages is that you are essentially building a sub-community among your peers, colleagues, associates, competition, and target audience. Facebook pages also enable the page creator to assign multiple administrators to a page. This is highly valuable for companies who have multiple employees using Facebook for business purposes. Each member can be assigned as administrators to the page, and have the ability to post new content and updates. By adding multiple administrators, each new administrator has the ability to mass-invite their personal friends list to become a “fan” of that page. This exponentially increases the potential fan-base for the page, instantly creating a highly viral marketing vehicle.

17) Facebook Advertising
Facebook’s advertising features include custom ad design, relevant targeting, campaigns and account management, customized polls and surveys, traffic analytics and more. Users are able to quickly create new ads, which are then distributed to Facebook members based on keyword relevancy. With the campaign management system, users are able to create new ads, modify existing campaigns, bid for relevant keywords, and more.
URL: http://facebook.com/advertising/

18) Polls
The Poll-Daddy application feature offers both individual and company account holders to collect valuable data from their network of friends. Poll-Daddy’s Polls also allow the creator to choose the location of where the poll will display, including a users Wall, Group, or Page. When creating a new poll, entering in a question that engages people on a personal level will result in a higher percentage of participation among your friends. From a marketing perspective, this can be used to create sales or consultation opportunities among your friends. By creating a targeted poll that identifies a need or want within a specific audience, those who participate can be considered pre-qualified leads.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/polldaddy-polls/

19) RSS, Updates, & Blog Promotion
NetworkedBlogs and Social RSS are both 3rd party Facebook applications that has a several key features that add a tremendous amount of marketability to your social presence. Both applications allow you to display your various blogs and RSS streams from across the web on your profile. Take both applications into consideration and decide which works best for you.

URL: http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/rss-connect

20) Payvment + Paypal for eCommerce
The Payvment Facebook application combines the free ecommerce storefront capabilities of www.payvement.com with the payment gateway integration features of www.paypal.com. As a member, you are able to create a fully functional ecommerce storefront from within your profiles, either adding your own products or displaying those from affiliate/reseller accounts.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/payvment/

21) Video
Facebook’s default video page enables a user to upload or record video content to their profile. Websites like YouTube and Vimeo are the leading examples of how multimedia-based marketing can drastically increase brand awareness and visibility. The same marketing concepts illustrated by both of those sites are directly applicable when using video from within your Facebook profile.
URL: http://facebook.com/video

22) Ustream.tv Live Mobile & Webcam Video
Ustream.tv allows you to stream live video from a webcam and most smart-phone/mobile devices directly to a web-based video player. The Ustream Facebook application allows you to add a streaming video player to your Facebook profile. In terms of marketing value, the live video features of Ustream.tv creates new ways for you to connect and interact with your page viewers.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/myustream/

23) My Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking utility that allows users to bookmark, tag, and publish an RSS feed of quality links. The My Del.icio.us application reads the RSS feed created by the Del.icio.us member’s profile, and displays the content in a widget within the user’s Facebook page. From a marketing perspective, Del.icio.us is typically used by businesses to drive traffic to the company’s website, external blogs, partner websites, and more. Including those links within your Facebook profile increases the likelihood that members will connect with you, make contact, and become a future client or customer.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/mydelicious/

24) Web Profile
Facebook’s default profile editor allows you to add a variety of outbound links to your profile. However, the links that are created tend to be somewhat plain, and consume a large amount of page real estate in a profile’s sidebar. The Web Profile application allows you the ability to add a wide variety of hyperlinked icons to your page instead of the standard text-based links generated by Facebook. The icons available within Web Profile allow linking to many websites and social networks not available in the default link-adding utility.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/webprofiles/

25) My LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the web’s most popular business oriented social networks. Driving traffic to your LinkedIn account from your Facebook page increases the strength and influence of your social media marketing efforts. The My LinkedIn application displays your LinkedIn profile details within a tab located on your profile’s navigation panel.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/linkedinprofile

26) Page Maps
Including a map to your business location greatly increases the chances of driving relevant visitors to your company location. Page Maps utilizes the Google Maps API to display a module within your Facebook profile showcasing your business location.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/pagemaps/

Section 3: Generating Leads & Clients (1hr)

26) Lead Harvesting
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
Whether it’s getting more friends, fans, or group members, this section will demonstrate several unique techniques that will help you obtain either of those goals. This section presents the resources available, and the best way to approach them in order to find highly targeted users to add to your community.

27) Friends Lists as a CRM in Facebook Chat
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
This process demonstrates how to utilize Facebook’s friend lists as a way to better manage your contacts and use it as a CRM to help build better communication and engagement tactics with both existing and new clients/leads.

Twitter Marketing Tactics

Social Media Marketing: A Comprehensive Social Media Strategy Guide for Online Marketing
By: Michael Sim

Module 2: Twitter Training (4hrs)
This training series was created to help inform social network marketing teams on the basic concepts, how to monetize activity, and generate a positive ROI using Twitter. Added benefits to the company include an increase in brand awareness, retention and market share.

Section 1: Learning the ropes (1hr)
1) Twitter Member Statistics

2) Definitions of Common Twitter Terminology
1) RT (Re-tweet)
The “RT” stands for Re-tweet. A given user typically re-tweets another user’s message to show appreciation and give credit to the author. Most applications (including Twitter itself) have clickable buttons that automate the task of creating a Re-tweet.

2) @ (Mention or Reply)
The @ symbol allows you to publicly reply to other members. This is done by creating a new update, and including @ + username (i.e.: @chicagodesign) somewhere in the message.

3) Follow
By following a user, you will receive their updates in your public timeline. Similarly, anyone who follows you will also receive your updates in their public timeline.

4) Block
Blocking is an alternative to unfollowing a user. Blocking unfollows the user, prevents them from viewing your profile, and disables the option for them to follow you in the future.

5) Bulk Follow
Bulk Following is a process of following a large number of people at one time.

6) Bulk UnFollow
Bulk Unfollowing is a process that unfollows people who are not following you in return. It is an essential process for maintaining a 1:1 follow to following ratio as often as possible.

7) # (Hash Tag)
The hash tag symbol is used to start, monitor, and link-to a trending topic within Twitter. (Example of use: #followfriday) When a trending topic is posted, it becomes an active link. The link takes you to a page that displays all of the Tweets that contain the exact hash tag-word combo. This allows a user to view others who are tweeting about the trend, and also opens up the potential for finding opportunities to engage people. For example, if someone includes me in a #followfriday mention, I’m going to thank them. At that point, I can decide if I want to initiate a conversation with this person.

3) Understanding the Marketing Value in Twitter
Twitter is no longer used predominantly as a means to answer the question “What are you doing?” Like many new online application websites and social communities, most tend to be defined by the people who use it. It can be a way to share links, ideas, news, multimedia, and more. In marketing terms, Twitter requires you to build and maintain your community of Followers in order to see any value from it. Simply put, the more you put into Twitter, the more you can get out of it. Since it’s one of the top social networking websites in existence, it’s a safe bet that using it to help promote your will return positive results. So to start, I would like to cover a few do’s and don’ts.

1) DO: Content Posting
Post valuable content regularly. While this document will show you how to automate your content posting, make sure you use it and make it personalized every now and then. Remind your viewers that you’re not a robot, and that you do participate from time to time.

DON’T: Post Irrelevant Content
Do not post messages about standing in line waiting for your order at a restaurant, or any other trivial and personal data that would otherwise be considered irrelevant. While yes, you can treat Twitter as your personal blog, and make it your own daily journal, but it doesn’t provide any value to your followers. Also, consider each Tweet a 5 second marketing opportunity (or a Commercial). Are you going to spend that commercial providing value to your viewers, or are you going to talk about yourself and disclose information that is only interesting to you?

2) DO: Send Re-tweets
Re-tweet valuable posts by your followers several times per week.

DON’T: Manipulate or Deceive
Do not re-tweet someone else’s posts and then change the link to whatever you like. I had one of my followers try that, and when I viewed the link, it was a completely different site. I immediately unfollowed and blocked that person for their actions. Expect others to do the same. Also, try to avoid any abuse through the use of link shortening. While they do make it useful for posting long links with character restrictive sites like Twitter, they are often times abused by many users because of its “disguised” appearance.

3) DO: Establish Credibility
Post messages about your company, and establish your expertise by providing it freely to your viewers. Provide general feedback, advice, and answer questions about topics surrounding your profession. The more credible you appear, the more likely people will want to do business with you.

DON’T: Talk Only About Yourself
Don’t sit there all day and post messages solely about yourself or your company. While it may be relevant to you, it may not be to your viewers. Keep in mind how easy it is for someone to simply unfollow or block your account. If you space out your marketing posts and mix in some value posts throughout the day, you should be fine.

4) DO: Communicate
Encourage others to carry a conversation with you over Twitter. The communication aspect of Twitter is what makes it so valuable. It is the perfect lead-in to any situation.

DON’T: Carry Conversations Publicly
Do not carry all of your conversations over the public timeline. Take it to Direct Messages. The first or second reply to a public inquiry is fine, but anything more and it can start to appear intrusive on other followers. Keep in mind, each follower has their own public timeline, and may have no idea who or what you’re talking about when you’re carrying on a public conversation.

5) DO: Make Offline Contact
Encourage people to contact you when the opportunity presents itself. Twitter is great for the Lead-In, but it quickly becomes very restrictive for conversation.

DON’T: Post Sensitive Material In Publicly
Do not post your email address or any personal or private data about yourself of your company in the public timeline. If you have to give someone your email address or any other private data, do it over Direct Message. If you receive the alert “User is not following you” while attempting to Direct Message someone, request that the user follow you in order for you to send them important information.

6) DO: Use Trends
“Follow Friday” is one example of a Twitter trend. In order to “use” Follow Friday (and other Twitter trends) correctly, you first have to know what it is. Every Friday, the people of Twitter share with each other the people that they wish to recommend that other people follow. It’s a great way to show appreciation to a select group of users, and it may get them a few new followers in return. The way to use Follow Friday is to start a new Tweet. Then, there are two different ways you can send the message.

The first method is to use the @ symbol along with a person’s username (ie: @chicagodesign), and then do this for each profile you wish to include in a Follow Friday post. You can click on “reply” inside of HootSuite to add that users name to your Follow Friday post.

After you have your list of Follow Friday friends, you’re going to have to add the Hash Tag # symbol and the trend term “FF” or “followfriday” to the post (ie: “A shout out to my #ff friends @chicagodesign, @graphicsms, @tweetro”).

The # symbol tells twitter that the information you are assigning that symbol to is important. Twitter automatically creates a hyperlink from anything that contains the # symbol. They do so to make that content searchable, and so that others can find and monitor that trend.

The “@” symbol before a username indicates that this message will be sent as a reply or mention to the username used. Normally, you will only be replying or mentioning one person at a time. However, the Follow Friday technique allows you to include multiple users at once, increasing the visibility of that Tweet. The following websites seem to be the best available for finding trends:

http://twopular.com
http://www.twitscoop.com/

DON’T: Abuse Trends
Do not get carried away with Trend-Tweeting or overusing multiple @ replies or mentions. They can easily be used (and also viewed) as a spam device, so be careful of how you use it. For Follow Friday’s, I usually create about 2-3 Tweets that contain the users I wish to promote. Any more than that, and it starts to look like you are deliberately adding people to lists for marketing purposes. 2-3 trend tweets per day should be sufficient to use it effectively.

4) The “Great Debate”
Many Twitter users argue over the question “is a large following count better than a small, more focused network of followers?” Many would say a smaller, more focused network of followers creates more value for a person because they are more in-touch with and influential over their network than someone with many thousands of followers.

Personally, I believe that any person using Twitter for marketing purposes can only experience the true value and marketing potential of Twitter by being connected with as many people as possible. A better way to look at this is to consider Twitter a TV commercial. The larger your audience, the more people have the potential to view your messages. It’s really up to you to interact with and participate in the Twitter community. The more your voice is heard, the more people will start to tune into your posts and help to build an affinity for your brand.

5) Twitter’s 2000 Follow Limit
When new users approach a “Following” count of 2000, Twitter will deny the ability to follow more people until their “Followers” count reaches approximately 1800-2000. This is Twitter’s attempt at reducing the amount of noise caused by internet marketers and spammers.

The first step is to follow 2000 people. Yes, this may take a good half-hour to an hour (depending on how discerning you are about your following choices). A good way to do this is to do a Google search and find lists of people who are identified as those who “automatically follow-back”. There are also other mass-following tools which are mentioned later in this document.

At first, you may only be able to follow a few hundred people at a time. However, that number will grow steadily as you receive more followers. Twitter has a rule that restricts you to following only 1.1x the amount of followers you have. This is another anti-spam tool that Twitter put in place so that members are forced to build their followings, put in the work to make them grow, and truly get the value out of having a personal community.

During the next 3 days, you should start posting relevant content, and get into the habit of making regular posts. After day 3, you will unfollow everyone who didn’t follow you back. Yes, you did spend a lot of time finding the people that you followed, and it sometimes hurts to unfollow 600+ people at a time. But, unless you’re a celebrity, well-known blogger, politician, superstar marketing guru, or any other form of celebrity figure, this is one of the best ways to maximize your follower count (for free). You may have to repeat this process three or more times until you’ve received enough followers to lift the follow limit. Once you do reach the point where Twitter no longer restricts you to 2000 follows, you are able to continue the process over and over, building your follower count each and every time.

6) Communicating With Members
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

Communicating with your Twitter followers allows its marketing potential to come to life. This section includes the variety of ways you can interact with people using twitter, and where to find valuable content to share with your viewers.

Section 2: Applications & Add-ons (2hrs)
7) Automate Tweets
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

This section demonstrates how to set up an automated Twitter posting feed that works on auto-pilot. With a simple 5-10 minute setup process, you can begin automating the posting of relevant and valuable content to your social networking profiles.

Bulk Listing Techniques
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

Using Twitter’s list feature is a valuable asset to a positive marketing experience with Twitter. This section shows you how to bulk-add people to specific categorized lists, manage them, and then how to harvest them for potential leads and clients.

9) Publicize Your Lists for Search Visibility
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

With a powerful arsenal of lists at your disposal, the next step is to publicize them in order to gain awareness of the list so that other people will find it, follow it, and also join your network by following you in return.

10) Twitter Lists as a CRM
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

This unique process demonstrates how to build lists of your contacts. This essentially becomes a virtual CRM, allowing you to interact with current clients and maintain communication with potential clients/leads.

11) Bulk Reciprocate Follows
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

This process shows you how to reciprocate the follow of someone who follows you first. This is a great technique to maintain a healthy following to follower ratio (which increases your value within the community).

Section 3: Generating Leads & Clients (1hr)

12) Mass Follow Techniques
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

This section includes 4 unique processes for building your network with highly targeted members. Each process is slightly different, each bringing a unique dynamic to the value you will build within your community.

13) Mass Unfollow
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

Building your community within Twitter comes with a small drawback of having to remove users who do not reciprocate your following. This is a simple 2-step process that allows you to quickly remove non-followbacks from your profile.

14) Personalize Tweets
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

This unique process demonstrates how to create unique and valuable content that you will share with your community. It also takes note about how to prepare that information so that it is searchable, and how to distribute it to your community.

Marketing Tactics for LinkedIn

Social Media Marketing: A Comprehensive Social Media Strategy Guide for Online Marketing
By: Michael Sim

Module 4: LinkedIn Training (3hrs)
This training series was created to help inform social network marketing teams on the basic concepts, how to monetize activity, and generate a positive ROI using LinkedIn. Added benefits to the company include an increase in brand awareness, retention and market share.

Section 1: Learning the ropes (1hr)
1) LinkedIn Member Statistics

2) What is LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social networking site focused on building connections among professionals. LinkedIn provides you with the opportunity to connect with colleagues, meet new people, identify recommended services and create new contacts from within your network.

There are currently more than 60 million professionals worldwide using LinkedIn, including all Fortune 500 companies. By creating a network built entirely of industry professionals, business owners, and entrepreneurs, LinkedIn creates a unique opportunity for users to engage and connect with people that they may not normally have had the chance to reach. This allows for deeper market penetration, an increase in brand visibility, and the residual effect of generating new leads and sales.

3) How do I use LinkedIn?
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is targeted towards reaching specific people. It is not a suitable environment for bulk or large-scale marketing efforts. If reaching or connecting with vast numbers of people are the foundations on which you determine success, Facebook and Twitter might be a better option. If making targeted connections and building strong relationships with professionals determine your success, LinkedIn can be a very powerful tool.

4) LinkedIn Benefits
• Build connections by utilizing the contacts of your friends as a means to create an introduction or opportunity for interaction.
• Identify the members of a company or organization that you “need to know” in order to make the contacts necessary to get in touch with the right people.
• Increase the visibility and awareness of your company and brand.
• Increase website traffic and improve search engine optimization.
• Establish yourself and your company as a source of credible information and expertise.
• Generate new leads and sales from within your network of professionals.

5) Risks
There are a few risks that most companies face when using LinkedIn that should be taken into consideration prior to implementation, including:

1) Security
Companies that employ a large number of people that have LinkedIn accounts may be revealing a good amount of private information about the company. This includes specific positions for employment, specific levels of education and experience, previous employers, and so on. While this fact remains true for most social networks, this issue should be approached and discussed internally before moving forward.

2) Recruiting
Job recruiters and head-hunters tend to rely on social networks to identify and target potential talent. Putting your company or personal profile in the public eye opens you to the potential of facing this situation. While recruiting takes place offline as well, identifying and understanding the risk for potential conflict will better prepare you to deal with this situation if it occurs.

3) Negative Representation
It is important to understand that the activity you perform within LinkedIn directly represents your personal, professional, and business reputation. Any public material that you post and share with users over LinkedIn (also with most social networks) is recorded for an indefinite amount of time (usually until it is manually has removed or deleted). This means that at any time, a potential or existing client, lead, or employee have access to a great deal of sensitive information about you and your company. If any of those individuals were to view your company’s archives and find an argument with a previous employee, negative replies to client feedback, or anything else that falls short of exemplary professional behavior, it could have a significant negative effect on your personal and professional reputation. Ultimately, this can damage both your reputation and ability to do business by preventing you from growing your network. The type of content and material that you share with your network can affect the impression of your company in the eyes of your viewers. If the content that you post is done in poor taste, irrelevant, or out of character in regards to the image you or your company represents, it can confuse, offend, and turn away potential business.

6) Import Contacts
LinkedIn allows users the ability to send invitations to connect by importing contacts from major email service providers (such as Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL). By entering in your email login details, LinkedIn automatically generates a list from the email addresses that it imports. You can then hand-select which members you wish to invite to connect, but often times it is much easier to simply select-all and click “invite”. Importing contacts is one of the most successful strategies for building a network from your personal email contact list. LinkedIn also automatically identifies which of your email contacts are currently LinkedIn members, providing an added level of convenience for inviting new connections.
URL: https://linkedin.com/secure/importAndInvite

7) LinkedIn Groups
The concept behind LinkedIn Groups is fairly simple. Joining a group basically creates a connection out of each group member. Members of the group can create new discussions, post news articles, post jobs, join subgroups, and view updates from other members within the group. LinkedIn Groups are very similar in marketing value to Twitter’s list feature. Groups and lists alike contain members of a focused interest group who are all able to interact and view the updates of other group members. Taking advantage of the marketing value presented by LinkedIn Groups requires a two-stage approach.

1) Join Relevant Groups
Joining relevant groups will help you create exposure for your brand among like-minded users. It is acceptable to join groups that are both directly related and complimentary to your company’s products or services. Joining a group that is considered a conflict of interest may not seem like a viable technique to attract new members to add to your network. However, it does increase the size of your network, creating new opportunities to connect with other users. There is a limit to the amount of groups you can join at one time, so choose wisely.
URL: http://linkedin.com/groupsDirectory

2) Create a Group for your company
Creating a group for your company will help generate a following behind your brand. Similar to how you were instructed to join relevant groups, so to will others join yours based on relevancy to their interests. It is also important to include a logo or design when creating a new group. Users tend to either join or avoid specific groups based on their professional appeal.
URL: http:// linkedin.com/createGroup?displayCreate

Search Engine Visibility
1) The “No-Follow” Tag
Many forums and social directories use a term known as the “no-follow tag”, which prevents posters from receiving back-links to their site when they posts links in updates or forum messages. LinkedIn does not use the “no-follow” tag, which means it is a source of a back-link for your website and company information. Essentially, the more content that you put into your LinkedIn profile, the more keyword relevancy and back-links you will be creating for your company. This improves search engine visibility and rankings, and will likewise drive more traffic to your website.

2) Back-Links
One way for a company to look at the back-linking and content relevancy scenario is to consider the amount of employees they have actively using LinkedIn. If they have 50-100 employees, and each listed the company in one of the three link areas available on a profile, there will be 50-100 back-links created for the website. This is a very big deal in terms of search engine visibility and will have a significant effect on your relevant keyword rankings.

3) Enable Profile Links
In order to make links visible to search engines from within LinkedIn, you must add the “show website” feature to all profiles that will display the company link. This can be done from within each account by viewing the “Edit My Public Profile” page and making sure both “Full-View” and “Websites” are selected. This makes the website link and anything else that is posted in this area public.

4) Questions & Answers
Answers pages are indexed by search engines, giving you additional back-link potential if you choose to use it. Each answer page allows you to add up to 3 links for reference purposes. The more questions you answer, the more relevant content search engines have the ability to index.

9) Your Profile
The profile area is a significant asset for your brand. It is important to make profile information not only informative, but optimized in order to appeal to search engines and profile viewers.

1) Profile Picture
One of the most significant ways to turn away viewers is the lack of a professional profile image. Social networking is based on a virtual relationship that you build with members of a community. If you’re profile has no image, or an image that doesn’t reflect your goals with social network marketing, the chances of building a successful connection are greatly diminished.

2) Personalized URL
When creating multiple profiles across different social networks, it is important to have a username or a personalized URL that is consistent and memorable. For example: www.facebook.com/chicagodesign. Your username can your company name, describe your profession, and help localize your presence by including a city or state name.

3) Relevant Keywords
Search engines such as Google are heavily based on reading and indexing relevant content from the web. Keyword strategy plays a significant role in taking full advantage of the fact that search engines actively index content across most social networks. The most successful way to do this is to use a combination of location, description, brand name, or other information consistent with the way people search for content relevant to your product or service. For example, a real estate agent in Chicago might post “Chicago homeowners, find a realtor in your area today (insert hyperlink here).” It is also important to consider keyword strategy when posting URLs on websites that allow link-tagging or anchor text. Keywords are also important to consider when creating descriptions for images and other materials.

4) Privacy
If you’re using a social network to promote yourself or your company, privacy is much less of an issue that it might be others. In fact, certain privacy restrictions found in sites like LinkedIn and Facebook limit the ability for search engines to index specific content, reducing the keyword relevancy and search engine rankings for your material.

5) Back-Links
Include links to your social profiles within other online pages, social profiles, and email signature. This creates multiple streams of traffic, increasing the potential for your marketing efforts to drive traffic to your website. Back-links are also part of the algorithm that search engines use to determine value in the content that it indexes. If a search engine finds 30 links spread across a variety of websites, each pointing to a single website, the value of that website becomes 30 times higher than a website with back-links. In terms of business, this will eventually result in a higher listing than your competition (given that they have a lower back-link count and less relevant keyword data).

6) Update & Engage Frequently
Most social networking websites offer their members the ability to post a status update. Actively updating your social profiles demonstrates that you are a human user, which creates a much higher potential for you to engage with that person in business matters. When social profiles become inactive for long periods of time, people forget that you exist and the connection that was once made with them becomes lost. While many of the strategies listed in this document mention automation, it is important to remember to be “human” about your approach as often as possible.

7) Promote your profile
In order to obtain maximum visibility with LinkedIn, or any other social network is to actively promote your respective profiles across all networks. Include links to your profiles on your website, blog, individual blog posts and social updates, email signatures, and on business cards.

Section 2: Applications & Add-Ons (1hr)

10) Connect with LIONs
1) LION – LinkedIn Open Networker
Within LinkedIn is an exclusive type of user known as a LION, which stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. LIONs typically accept invitations from as many people as possible. In fact, LIONs have an unspoken oath to never “IDK” a user, which is the equivalent of denying an invitation. By inviting a handful of LIONs to your network, you will then have full access to their first and second-degree contacts. With as little as five contacts, each with roughly 20,000 contacts apiece, I will now have access to roughly two million additional users.

Locating a LION is quite simple. Go to the keyword search box for “People”, and type in the word LION. Since there is no official “LION” status for LinkedIn to search, it relies upon users who have LION status to include the word LION in their profile. This enables LIONs to be visible in the People search according to keyword relevancy. Since LIONs typically accept all invitations, many include their email addresses within their public profile. This is an added convenience for users to work around LinkedIn’s restrictions that require you to know and enter in a users email before inviting them to connect.

2) LION Network
Toplinked.com allows you to find and connect with a large directory of open networkers. If you were to become a LION, you also have the option to join the TopLinked.com “Invite Me List” group. This will generate a decent amount exposure for your new LION status, and will be the first step into receiving new invitations from other LinkedIn users. As a general rule of thumb, try to restrict the following of LIONs to members who include their email address in their profile, claim to accept all connection invitations, and are somewhat relevant to your specific interests.
URL: http://toplinked.com

11) Alternative Content
LinkedIn serves as the introduction point for many companies in terms of being located and identified by their target audience and potential employees. It also helps businesses form stronger relationships and bonds through collaboration, affiliation, and partnership with other companies. Building your profile to include alternative information resources will ultimately help you to benefit from the diversity of your potential viewer. This can include downloadable resumes and media kits, presentations and slideshows, and more. The following applications will provide the ability to add these features to your profile page.

1) Application Directory
View the entire LinkedIn application directory for a first-hand look at the available content that you can add to your profile page.
URL: http://linkedin.com/static?key=application_directory&trk=hb_side_apps

2) Polls
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=1900

3) Blog Link
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=1500

4) Events
The LinkedIn Events application allows users to view posted events by users within their network. It also allows you to create an event, establish a location, set the date and time, and view who’s attending. There are also advanced event detail features that allow you to be very detailed with your event, including a description, event type, industry, keywords, and more.
URL: http://linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=2000

5) Tweets
The LinkedIn Tweets application allows users to post updates to Twitter, view their public timeline, tweets made by them, and a list of their followers. Although a useful tool for those who use LinkedIn predominantly, I suggest using HootSuite and/or the Flock browser for social management.
URL: http://linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=2700

6) Box.net Files
The Box.net Files application allows you to manage important files within your profile, sharing it as downloadable content for your viewers.
URL: http://linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=1300

7) SlideShare
SlideShare allows you to upload and display presentations, or to view the presentations of other users in your network.
URL: http://linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=1200

Company Buzz
Company Buzz allows you to monitor Twitter activity about your company, trends, or specific keywords relevant to your industry or sales approach.
URL: http://linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=1000

9) TripIt
TripIt allows you to view where your LinkedIn network is traveling, and when you will be within the same city or area as your colleagues. TripIt also allows you to share your upcoming trips, current location, and travel statistics with your network.
URL: http://linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=1800

Section 3: Generating Leads & Clients (1hr)
12) LinkedIn Search
LinkedIn features an advanced set of search options that will help you to broaden your network by connecting with general users, companies, job seekers, and more. The following list includes the different types of searches that a user can perform from within the site, including a small note about the best way to approach each search type.

1) People
The people search option allows users to search for individual members within the profile directory based on profile keyword relevancy. The people search also features a large selection of search filtering options that allow you to refine your search based on Location, Relationship, Industry, and more.

2) Jobs
The jobs search option allows users to search for jobs based on keyword relevancy. The jobs search features a large selection of search filtering options that allow you to refine your search based on the hiring Company, When Posted, Location, Job Function, Industry, and Experience Level.

3) Companies
The companies search option allows users to search for businesses based on keyword relevancy. The companies search features a large selection of search filtering options that allow you to refine your search based on Company Name, Industry, Location, Company Size, and more.

4) Answers
The answers search option allows users to search Questions and Answers based on keyword relevancy. The answers search features the ability for users to narrow results based on All Questions, Open Questions, Keyword, Category, and the option to display only unanswered questions.

5) Inbox
The inbox search option allows users to search their inbox for messages containing relevant keywords. While there are not any search filtering options, the inbox search is useful for quickly locating and viewing relevant messages.

6) Groups
The groups search option allows users to search the groups directory for relevant groups to join. The general groups directory allows users to navigate between several categories, including My Groups, Following, Groups Directory, and Create a Group. The group directory search features a selection of search filtering options that allow you to refine your search based on Keyword, Categories, and Language.

13) LinkedIn Marketing & Engagement Tactics
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

This section includes the strategies and techniques that will help you interact and build relationships with other users, and likewise be able to generate more business from it. It will demonstrate how to create opportunities for you to assist others, establish yourself as an expert, and be recognized for your skills. This helps qualify you in the eyes of your community, and will lead to an increase in communication, referrals and potentially sales.

Social Media Marketing Overview

Social Media Marketing: A Comprehensive Social Media Strategy Guide for Online Marketing
By: Michael Sim

Social Networking Overview (3.5hrs)
This training series was created to give management and executive officers a full understanding of how social networking can increase ROI when used to generate new leads and sales. The series will also present the materials and structure to develop a social networking team, assign duties, and educate the team to utilize the materials to support the social media campaign.

Section 1: Learning the ropes (1hr)
1) What Is Social Networking?
Social networking consists of participating in, and communicating with a community of members within a given social media website. Most social media websites tend to provide users with a profile, the ability to include hyperlinks to the user’s website or social profiles, and a variety of other services (often communication based). Social networking is quickly becoming the most widely used system for generating new leads, sales, and referrals for almost all types of businesses.

2) How Does Marketing With Social Media Work?
Successful social marketing consists of several guidelines that I have coined the i5 Process. Listed below is an outline of the process, which is explained in better detail in the video found here:
URL: http://youtube.com/watch?v=U2Sie7QTqh4

1) Introduce yourself as an expert
Confidence in your personal ability to help your clients is essential for successful social marketing. Establish yourself as a source of expertise, advice, support, or reference in your specific area of interest. Most social networks include a personal statement or bio section. Tell people who you are, what you do, and how you can help them. Most personal statements are searchable, so keyword strategy does play a role in how you should write content for your profile.

2) Interact with your viewers
Social networking is built heavily on the idea of generating and fostering a community of like-minded users. Showing interest in your viewers creates opportunities for you to introduce your company’s services or products. Instant Messaging, Re-tweeting, replying, direct messaging, liking/disliking, and wall posts are the most common types of social interaction.

3) Inform your viewers with valuable content

By interacting with, and showing interest in your viewers, you will naturally open up new opportunities to inform them with your expertise. By doing so, people tend to remember the experience of working with you, and will be much more likely to consider your company when your service or product is needed. Valuable content includes links to news articles, blog posts, or other online resources that clarify, explain, illustrate, or better communicate your company’s message to your viewers. If you have your own blog, you can post the articles yourself, and then post links to that content via a social network.

4) Indicate your availability
You’ve introduced yourself as an expert in your industry, showed interest in your viewers, and informed them with valuable content. Now, it’s time to let your prospects know that you are available to assist them or provide them with the solutions that they are seeking. While interacting with your viewers, try to request a phone call follow-up or an email address, or simply ask when the best time is that you can reach them.

5) Initiate consultation
While social networking is a great way to have a short conversation and provide generalize feedback with potential clients, the consultation is where you close the deal. Traditionally, this is done over the phone, in person, or even through online chat features. Opening the lines of communication after you’ve qualified a lead through social networking will greatly increase the likelihood of a sale.

Other areas to pay attention to include being available during the time you schedule for the follow-up. Try to be informative and resist the urge to up-sell unless requested or if the opportunity presents itself. Be prepared with a general list of issues, objectives, and solutions for the client to consider. Being prepared and demonstrating your interest in your clients will increase the likelihood of closing a deal. Finally, prepare the proposal from the information that you gathered during the consultation.

To summarize, introduce yourself as an expert to your viewers. Interact with them on a regular basis, inform your viewers with valuable and relevant content, indicate your availability to help them achieve a certain goal, and then initiate the consultation.

3) Benefits of Social Media
• Build a network of loyal viewers, and increase the traffic to the company’s main website
• Increase Brand Awareness and visibility across multiple networks
• Develop relationships with existing clients and generate new leads
• Increase the traffic to the company’s main website

4) General User Expectations with Social Media
1) Non-Invasive Discussion
Viewers have come to expect and utilize social networking to participate in non-invasive 2-way discussion between followers/friends.

2) Referrals Are Key
Users are more likely to do business with companies who are referred to them by reputable followers/friends.

3) No Sales Pitch
Users are more likely to respond to an engagement with the use of non-sales based dialogue. Direct sales techniques will typically offend or be completely ignored by users.

4) Sense of Community
Users are interested in building strong relationships, expanding their networks, and feeling like others care about their interests.

5) Valuable Information
Users are interested in non-sales based advice, recommendations, referrals, consultations, and answers to general inquiries.

5) Examples of Social Media
1) Blogs
WordPress, Blogger, Live Journal

2) Social Networking
Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter

3) Social Bookmarking
Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon

4) Photo Sharing
Flickr, TwitPic, yfrog

5) Video Sharing
Vimeo, YouTube

6) Live Broadcasting
uStream.tv, Skype, Qik

Section 2: Campaign Preparation (1/2hr)
6) Understand Target Audience
1) Age group/bracket
2) General Financial Bracket
3) Gender, ethnicity, and orientation (if applicable)
4) Psychographics & buying patterns
5) General location of target client/consumer
6) Identify specific sectors that can be eliminated from consideration
7) What associations, clubs, or organizations do my target audience members belong to?
What events, conferences, lectures, or other gatherings do my target audience members attend?
9) What publications, broadcasts, advertisements, or websites do my target audience members view or respond to?
10) What social media websites do my target audience members most frequent?

7) ROI & Metrics
1) Prior to initiation, how many sales were made without using social networking last month?
2) Determine how social networking increased page views to the company website.
3) Determine how many new leads or sales were made through the use of social networking.
4) How have operation costs been reduced by implementing of social networking?
5) Determine retention estimates: number of bookmarks, downloads of company material, etc.
6) How many new members/followers/friends/subscribers have company profiles accumulated?
7) Which social media networks work best for the company? Adjust the time spent on each.
Track which updates received the most views/clicks. Then modify or update campaign accordingly.
9) Identify status of competition, and set goals to reflect or improve their marketing techniques.
10) Determine growth objectives and adjust campaign to achieve the new goals.

Marketing Your Company
1) Strong Brand Presence
Since Twitter is a micro-blogging social community, creating a distinct identity to resonate with your viewers will help you stand apart from your competitors.

I’ve had a lot of people tell me “My logo is just fine. It resonates with my viewers, and there are a lot of reasons it works.” Well as much as that may be true, a logo in and of itself is simply the representative of the brand. A strong brand sets the standards for how all visual information is displayed either internally or to the target audience. A brand also makes connections with the cultural, rational, subliminal, and emotional qualities of the end-user. It identifies their needs, spending patterns, biases, influence, and much more. A strong brand summarizes the key values of the company, and translates that message into a visual presentation. I’ve noticed a good deal of my clients originally under the impression that branding is simply the quick efforts of a graphic designer creating a symbol and giving it a title. Know what you are paying for, and chances are if you’re paying $25-200, you’re not getting a brand. You’re getting a graphic designer’s “best shot” at getting it right (with a logo), without going through the true process to make your company look and feel like an industry leader.

A true identity consists of consistent high-quality design applied across a variety of media, such as:
Business Cards, Direct Mail, Post Cards, Envelopes, Letterheads, Mailing Labels, White Papers, Data Sheets, Business Plan, Flyers, and even Apparel. A logo should also be created using vector-based illustration program such as Adobe Illustrator, and should have the ability to be resized to any scale without losing resolution quality.

For logo design samples, please visit www.graphics.ms/portfolio/identity

1) Twitter Background

Any use of your company name, or any marketing platform used should incorporate the company brand in some way. A Twitter background can also be strategically created to include a paragraph of info, links to the company website or other locations, and so on. It is a great opportunity to create an affinity for the brand by demonstrating consistency with the brand and distinction among other users. I create High-Quality Twitter Backgrounds for my clients as well. For samples and an overview of the service, please visit www.twittro.com

2) Have a Professional Website
Display your company’s website on your Twitter profile. From my experience, Twitter can generate anywhere from 20-200 hits (or more) per day for your website (depending on how you use it). Also, take a look (using Google) at some of your competitors’ websites. Find out which companies are the “market leaders”, and do what you can to either replicate or build upon the tools and features they are using. For examples of website designs that we’ve created, please visit www.graphics.ms/portfolio/web.

3) Writing Your Bio
Fill your bio with content with relevant keywords, and make it simple and to-the-point. Try to include a City Name if possible, and the top features about your profession. This is your chance to establish yourself as an “expert” in your field, the leading service provider or manufacturer in your area, and so on. Be creative, but also take into consideration what terms other users might be searching for.

Section 3: Social Media Marketing Team Development (2hrs)
9) Social Media Cycle
1) Define Strategy
Identify which social media sites you will incorporate into your company work-flow, who will maintain those accounts, and what type of material you will be posting.

2) Establish Presence
Sign up with each of the chosen social media websites. Fill out all of the profile details and upload your personal or company profile image. On the sites that allow for it, customize the design, color, and layout to be consistent with your company brand.

3) Identify Tools
Many different social networking sites allow for certain 3rd party tools that enhance the experience and marketing potential with these services. Identifying the tools that will work for your cause is important to streamline productivity. Three application-types that we utilize are: Automated updates, social management, and networking building.

4) Build Network
With many of the right tools in place, there are still many times where you will have to personally partake in building your social network of followers/friends. The tools listed above will assist in doing so, however it often requires your personal attention to generate the best results. In social media terms, a network usually consists of individuals who are considered followers, friends, or subscribers of your social media profile.

5) Build Relationships
Adding people to your networks for the purpose of marketing has no value if the people within those lists do not have some form of relationship with you or your company. Social networking presents you with the opportunity to capitalize on the opt-in and non-invasive marketing effect of personalized engagement. By establishing your company as a resource of information, advice, or expertise on a given subject matter, the more influential your business will be over your target audience. The more trust that there is built between a viewer and the business, the more likely the viewer will either directly do business with, or refer to others whenever the opportunity arises.

6) Maintenance
Social media marketing is not simply a “set-up and forget” type of marketing environment. It is a fast-paced and constantly evolving atmosphere that requires human interaction to reach its full potential. The tools listed above do in fact make many of the tedious tasks much simpler to manage. However, without regular updating and maintenance, your company’s social media marketing potential will steadily decrease over time.

10) Social Networking Action Plan
1) Marketing Strategy
Develop a sound marketing strategy, and identify which sites will encompass your social networking toolset.

2) Define Toolset
Identify the 3rd party applications and other utilities that will be used by the social networking team member(s).

3) Create Policy
Implement a policy for members of the company who will be using social networking for business purposes.

4) Create Social Team
Designate social networking administrator(s), and clearly define duties and responsibilities.

5) Signup with Social Sites
Begin registration and setup of designated social media websites. Customize accordingly to fit the company brand.

6) Integrate Tools
Register with, install, setup, and begin using the designated 3rd party (and other utilities) for Social Networking purposes.

7) ROI & Metrics
Define terms of success from website analytics data, evaluate results, and then refine your strategy.

11) Recommended 3rd Party Applications & Tools
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us

Summary of section: This is a comprehensive list of tools and applications that have been tested thoroughly by our team for over one year. Each tool was pushed to the limit to test for practicality from the end user, the ability to generate positive results, and to help streamline productivity in a work environment.

12) Contact Importing
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
Summary of section: Learn how to import your contacts into multiple social networks from a wide variety of popular email providers, including Outlook.

13) Link Shorteners
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
Summary of section: Link shorteners aid in reducing the length of a long URL link for the convenience of a shorter social networking post or update. We’ve included our list of link shortening websites, each offering unique benefits to the end user.

14) Social Directories
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
Summary of section: We’ve created a list of social networking directories for you to display your profiles. The name of the game is exposure, and we have a comprehensive list of where you can do just that.

15) Update Guideline
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
Summary of section: Knowing what to post, and how it reflects upon you or your business is very important to fully understand. We’ve broken down the process into several different update types that will help you identify how to write material for different areas of your company.

16) Social Media Itinerary
Details of this section have been removed and included as part of our social media training program. Please contact us for more information about the training program, or a personal consultation about social media. http://graphics.ms/contact-us
Knowing which social media sites to post to, and how often can be a valuable asset. Based on our experience, we’ve created a custom social media itinerary that you can use as a reference for where to post, when to post during peak usage hours, how often, examples of how to write posts, creating a campaign of relevant posts, and much more.

17) Alternative Techniques
1) Include a module on your website that shows recent tweets, a “Follow me on Twitter” button, perhaps some profile data.

2) Enable Social Sharing features on your blog, so that viewers can “Tweet” about (or share) your blog posts directly from your blog.

3) Start including a link to your Twitter profile in the footer of your emails. It helps to build an added level of communication between you and your contacts.

4) Use Twitter to announce Webinars, teleconferences, white papers, important events, and other information about your company to drive traffic to your website. With specific announcements, it’s also a good plan to include a capture or landing page to funnel in the leads generated by your Tweets.

For Example: “I’m hosting a Webinar at 3:00PM, www.sampleURL.com”. The link should take you to a page with content relevant to that which you’re posting about with Twitter. It should have details about the subject matter, methods to request more info, and clear-cut informative text that doesn’t appear to be “Spam-filled”.

WordPress 3.0 Menus – Preview and Overview

WordPress 3.0 menus are risking in popularity, here’s a preview: