4 Ways to Profit From LinkedIn
Are you a LinkedIn newbie?
Do you struggle to network and show off your expertise? Do you want to secure new business?
If so, the most important thing to know is that LinkedIn is not just a modern Rolodex or a glorified resume.
It contains more valuable information about a contact than you could imagine.
All this information can be used to start an interesting conversation that could lead to great business opportunities between you and him or her.
LinkedIn contains information that offers great business opportunities. Image source: iStockPhoto.
LinkedIn Relevance
Bill Waterhouse is a regional director for Technical Innovation, a company that provides audiovisual products, streaming media, videoconferencing and other services. He has a sales background and was the first person at his company to use LinkedIn. 
How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Social Media Marketing
Have you ever wanted to know which of your links are driving more traffic?
Seeing referral traffic from Facebook is great, but which wall post drove the traffic?
Do visitors who come from Twitter tend to spend more time on the site than visitors coming from a banner campaign?
This article shows you how to take your social analytics strategy to the next level.
About Google Analytics Custom Campaigns
You can assign a custom campaign tag to the links you share on social networking sites. This enables you to fully use Google Analytics to gain valuable insights into how well your various social networking site presences are working for you.
Google Analytics makes custom campaigns incredibly easy to work with. By using their Custom URL Builder, you can create specific links for each of your campaigns and use these to share online.
Google Analytics can then give you much more information based on how people use your custom links. And you can use this information to gain a better understanding of your referral traffic and adjust your social media marketing for optimum results.
Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site and how you can keep them coming back.
Nominate Your Favorite Social Media Blog: 4th Annual Top 10 Social Media Blog Contest
We are accepting nominations for our 4th annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest, the biggest contest for social media blogs.
We are looking for your nomination for the Top 10 Social Media Blogs. The winners will be promoted in our 186,000-reader newsletter and announced on Social Media Examiner.
How to Nominate
Please make a single nomination of your favorite social media blog by commenting below and including why you like the blog (only your first nomination counts). Be sure to include a link to the blog.
3 Unconventional Ways to Boost Your Facebook Engagement
Do you want more Facebook fans without running contests or advertisements?
Are you interested in increasing the engagement on your Facebook Page?
If you’re looking for some creative ways to boost your brand’s profile on Facebook, here are three ways to do it that don’t involve giveaways or advertising.
#1: Crowdsource
Crowdsourcing is a term credited to Jeff Howe, who wrote about the phenomenon for Wired magazine back in 2006. He defined the concept as a “new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”
In friendlier language, crowdsourcing is when you ask your community of users to offer their suggestions for how you might solve a problem or address an issue.
Crowdsourcing can be a great engagement tactic. Image source: iStockPhoto.
In the years since Howe’s story, crowdsourcing has been adopted by many multinational companies and organizations, such as the mining company Goldcorp and NASA. And with the growing popularity of social media, crowdsourcing has spread to Facebook, too.
LinkedIn Releases Ads API: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news.
To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
LinkedIn Introduces New Ads API: This new program will “empower developers to build custom tools and solutions specifically to help social marketers meet their goals.” LinkedIn’s Ads API program is only available to a select group of partners.
LinkedIn users can expect more useful advertising tools in the future.
Blogging Success: How to Create Content People Love
Do you want to drive more traffic to your website?
Would you like to create content that people would go crazy for?
To learn the secrets of attention-grabbing blog posts that generate traffic, I interview Michael Hyatt for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.
It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.
The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).
In this episode, I interview Michael Hyatt, author of Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, and the host of the This Is Your Life podcast.
Michael shares his experiences as a successful blogger and content creator.
You’ll learn why headlines and photos are the most attention-grabbing aspects of your articles.
Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry.
3 Easy Steps to Engaging Your Customers
Are your customers spreading a good word about your business?
Are you happy with your volume of referral business?
If not, it could be that your “engagement marketing engine” is not revved up.
What is Engagement?
Engagement is not just about unending, feel-good conversations on your blog or Facebook page.
According to Gail Goodman, author of Engagement Marketing: How Small Business Wins in a Socially Connected World, engagement is when people qualify themselves – when a prospect raises her hand and says, “Yes, I’m interested in your company. Help me to get to know you a little more.”
Invariably people who have engaged with you online become customers at higher rates, and they in turn tell their friends about you, revving up your marketing engine over and over again.
If you’re a small business owner who wants to strengthen engagement with existing customers, get more repeat sales and even more referrals, Engagement Marketing is exactly the book for you.
Here are a few things you should know about it.
Author’s Purpose
Gail Goodman, author of Engagement Marketing.
3 Tools to Simplify Your Social Media Marketing
Are you looking for powerful tools to manage your social media efforts?
How do you keep up with blog post comments, responses to LinkedIn status updates and Twitter interactions?
Social relationship management is about managing these relationships. And you need the right tools to help.
In this article, I’ll show you 3 new social media tools to help manage your online relationships and grow your presence on social media platforms.
#1: Engagio—Manage All of Your Online Conversations in One Place
Engagio is an inbox for conversations on the web. It tracks your conversations, your friends’ conversations and you can even track any conversations you’re interested in through the search feature!
With Engagio, you have the functionality to manage, support and encourage conversations.
5 Tips for Effectively Managing a LinkedIn Group
Are you currently managing your own LinkedIn group?
Are you considering launching a LinkedIn group?
Keep reading for five tips on how to better manage LinkedIn groups.
Why Start a LinkedIn Group?
Building a LinkedIn group around a specific cause or niche topic can provide many business benefits. You could:
- Build more awareness with your target markets
- Position you and/or your company as an industry thought leader
- Nurture valuable industry relationships
- Showcase and highlight your own thought leadership content
- Generate interest and inquiries for your company
- Convert group members to subscribers and advocates for your brand
As you can see, there are many good reasons to start a LinkedIn group, but it can be very helpful to have some guidelines for managing a successful group after you launch.
How to Triple Your YouTube Video Views With Facebook
Do you want more people to watch your YouTube videos?
Are you looking for an easy way to improve the quality of the content you share on Facebook?
All you need is some great content and a cool Facebook technique that I recently discovered.
A Quick Overview
This technique lets you automatically attach your videos to the updates that appear on Facebook after someone likes content on your website.
By leveraging Facebook’s Open Graph and using this technique, I’ve seen phenomenal results!
I shared this tactic with a brand operating in the travel industry and they generated more than one million aggregated views of their product videos on YouTube (and significant website traffic) in a matter of weeks.
By integrating this Open Graph tactic, Marmara, a French travel company, generated 93K likes on its website, which in turn generated 13 million impressions of their videos in the Facebook newsfeed! Not to mention the 16K clicks they got back to their website. All in just 2 weeks and for free.
