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Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Social Media Convergance
Increasingly businesses are utilizing multiple social media outlets to connect with and engage customers or potential business partners. For a small business keeping up with all of the social media sites can be a daunting task. But it is possible to utilize multiple social network tools to provide a uniform face to the world.
Personally, my first problem is keeping fresh content on all of the sites my company is currently active on (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and my company blog). Here are a few ways you can manage your social media presence to minimize time spent and maximize your company's visibility and credibility online.
First: I maintain a company blog to establish myself and my company as experts in the special education data tracking domain (yes, I do two blogs). The way I manage this is to use scheduling features for my blog which allows me to write posts one or two months in advance and have them appear at regular intervals. I mix this up with writing "current" blog posts in response to events in the news to keep my content fresh and interesting. I try to never go more than a week without posting something new to my blog.
Second: I use TwitterFeed to automatically send my blog post titles and shortened URLs to Twitter. This helps me to keep my twitter feed current.
Third: I use Hoot Suite to schedule other types of posts to my twitter account including, retweets of interesting tweets I see from people I am following, re-posting the links to my past blog entries and commentary on current events that I think will be of interest to my followers. I try to post to twitter every day. Again my goal is to keep my content current - not to become one of the twitterers that posts multiple times an hour.
Fourth: I use a custom background on my twitter page to allow me to brand my twitter account and keep it consistent with the image portrayed on my company website. You can put a variety of company relevant information in the Twitter background, including logos and contact informaiton. See my Twitter profile (ddtracinfo) for an example.
Fifth: I keep my company Facebook page current using RSS Grafiti which grabs all of my blog posts and all of my Twitter tweets and puts them on the Wall for my company page. Again this helps to keep my Facebook profile current - so all I have to do is check in on the discussion board to see if people are asking questions I need to answer.
Sixth: I use Twitter to help with my business networking. I used Twitters search feature to find people interested in or involved in the disability community and followed them. Many of these people then followed me back. It is possible to invite those that follow you back to connect with you on LinkedIn to enhance the relationship. You obviously need to put the information in your Twitter account about the fact you are on LinkedIn and that you would be happy to connect.
Seventh: On LinkedIn it technically against the rules to have any personal contact info in your profile and depending on where you put it you could get your account suspended. But you can put your Twitter name in your LinkedIn account with out risk and on your Twitter account you can give people the information to connect on LinkedIn. In addition, you can invite you rLinkedIn connections to follow you on Twitter. Twitters more lenient policies on chatting with others allow you to communicate more easily.
These are very simple ideas but they do add tremendous power to your social media networking if you use them to your advantage.
-------------------------------------------------------
http://onlinebusinessnetworker.net/blog/2009/07/using-twitter-to-help-your-linkedin-networking-and-vice-versa/
Personally, my first problem is keeping fresh content on all of the sites my company is currently active on (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and my company blog). Here are a few ways you can manage your social media presence to minimize time spent and maximize your company's visibility and credibility online.
First: I maintain a company blog to establish myself and my company as experts in the special education data tracking domain (yes, I do two blogs). The way I manage this is to use scheduling features for my blog which allows me to write posts one or two months in advance and have them appear at regular intervals. I mix this up with writing "current" blog posts in response to events in the news to keep my content fresh and interesting. I try to never go more than a week without posting something new to my blog.
Second: I use TwitterFeed to automatically send my blog post titles and shortened URLs to Twitter. This helps me to keep my twitter feed current.
Third: I use Hoot Suite to schedule other types of posts to my twitter account including, retweets of interesting tweets I see from people I am following, re-posting the links to my past blog entries and commentary on current events that I think will be of interest to my followers. I try to post to twitter every day. Again my goal is to keep my content current - not to become one of the twitterers that posts multiple times an hour.
Fourth: I use a custom background on my twitter page to allow me to brand my twitter account and keep it consistent with the image portrayed on my company website. You can put a variety of company relevant information in the Twitter background, including logos and contact informaiton. See my Twitter profile (ddtracinfo) for an example.
Fifth: I keep my company Facebook page current using RSS Grafiti which grabs all of my blog posts and all of my Twitter tweets and puts them on the Wall for my company page. Again this helps to keep my Facebook profile current - so all I have to do is check in on the discussion board to see if people are asking questions I need to answer.
Sixth: I use Twitter to help with my business networking. I used Twitters search feature to find people interested in or involved in the disability community and followed them. Many of these people then followed me back. It is possible to invite those that follow you back to connect with you on LinkedIn to enhance the relationship. You obviously need to put the information in your Twitter account about the fact you are on LinkedIn and that you would be happy to connect.
Seventh: On LinkedIn it technically against the rules to have any personal contact info in your profile and depending on where you put it you could get your account suspended. But you can put your Twitter name in your LinkedIn account with out risk and on your Twitter account you can give people the information to connect on LinkedIn. In addition, you can invite you rLinkedIn connections to follow you on Twitter. Twitters more lenient policies on chatting with others allow you to communicate more easily.
These are very simple ideas but they do add tremendous power to your social media networking if you use them to your advantage.
-------------------------------------------------------
http://onlinebusinessnetworker.net/blog/2009/07/using-twitter-to-help-your-linkedin-networking-and-vice-versa/
Labels: blogging, facebook, linkedin, social media, twitter
