LinkedIn is the most popular professional as well as business networking website. It is one of the businesses social networking website being used by numerous professionals to share useful information and also for the purpose of networking. Every day the participation at LinkedIn is increasing exponentially.
The excelling features of LinkedIn like listing your professional experience in your public profile and recommendations from previous and current employers, coworkers, clients, and other professional connections make it a quite good platform for building professional network. It is populated by a various types of individuals, including professionals and many entrepreneurs also. These people can become ideal prospects for your business. The profile may be used by the employers and even clients to locate the best available resources. Also, group discussion and Question-Answers sharing at LinkedIn: LinkedIn Groups facilitates discussion and information sharing in areas of common interest. The discussions are focused on specific domain areas and are quite helpful to specialized business needs.
You may find some workable methods for using LinkedIn as below:
a) Establish a credible profile, make it public - Your professional experience matters a lot and the recommendations on your profile make it more credible in order to be taken seriously. To have recommendations means a lot to enhance and in verification of your profile content.
b) LinkedIn Groups - The groups are monitored and administered by owner of that Group like in Facebook. To join a Group at LinkedIn, an application needs to be sent to the Group owner, who validates your profile and checks for your knowledge about the Group’s overall interest area. Do not abuse your membership. Your postings’ gets removed by Group owners in such a case. If they gauge that you are doing self-promotion then its assured you would be deleted from that particular Group.
c) LinkedIn Groups could be an effective feature to be leveraged for your business. If you contribute in group discussions effectively, and provide helpful information to a community, this helps to develop good professional relationships, and eventually establish sound contacts. These contacts could professionally help in future.
d) The views you share and your participation in a Group, determine your effectiveness in making connections and eventually helps to turn these connections into leads for your business.
e) You may use the professional contacts made via LinkedIn to be used otherwise. In case you find some person really interested in your offerings, you may contact them through their personal emails for further communication.
In short, try and focus on the techniques mentioned above and see how fast it could help to build up strong and huge workable professional network.
Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts
February 9, 2010
How “Social Media” being quoted by the professionals in Online Media industry.
It is well said "Content is king but marketing is queen, and the queen rules the household". Or we can say “Great Content Market Itself”.This is very true for Social Media. It is all about Word of Mouth. You have to be very communicative and interactive with your networks to keep them engaged with you. They will stay tuned and remain hooked with you unless and until they will find value in the engagements with you.
Its presence in a business today is increasing day by day. According to Forrester Research, it will be rising exponentially by 2014. Here is how “Social Media” being quoted by some of the professionals in Online Media industry.
“It is the future of everything on Web. There will be social networking sites for everything you could imagine. Instead of this, stumble upon mentality, it will focus and more demographically delineated. It will still be wide open but it will have an organized chaos mentality to it”.
“Where Time, Network, and Trust (TNT) intersects.”
“The Wild, Wild West... it's certainly evolving by the minute though. Refinement is coming and several players will emerge as leaders of their particular genres; genre being social, and professional. It's here to stay, no doubt. Jump on board or get run over!”
“To individuals, it is friendship and communication. To groups with a message, it is a way to get the message out. To businesses is it a way to obtain exposure and establish credibility. All together, this is so powerful that it will continue to grow and become major use of the internet”.
"At times remarkable because of its ease of use and ability to connect to a single person or masses, and at times scary because of its immenseness."
"It is not really a new concept. Today we see many different forums and communities for virtually any human need, personality and interest. The one common trait for all of the successful communities (past to present) are that they built value to sustain and then monetize their members."
"SM is marketing nirvana for those that are truly invested in managing customer relationships. The long term focus on Relationship Marketing is back in vogue and illustrates that corporate focus needs to be on a 12-36 month timeline, not a 3 month ROI on tactical ad campaigns. Really depends if the organization has the appetite to go that long."
"It is a tool for broadening conversation and creating community that, if used intelligently, can be valuable for sharing of knowledge and building relationships
It is easy, enjoyable, effective and economical. It seems like a day will come when social networking tools will become fee-based."
"SM is Business. It's the direction that all media is moving. It's not a fad or a temporary thing. In 2008 we called it Web 2.0; early 2009 we called it Social Media. Now, in late 2009 people are referring to it as Media and Advertising.
It's a platform for having a (meaningful) conversation, in my opinion, through which one may be able to build the authority and influence."
"LinkedIn is the business meeting, FB is the hallway conversation, and Twitter is the cocktail party.
It’s a big honking' volume. Customers share recommendations (good and bad) with their friends. Humans have always wanted to be heard and to connect.
It is taking over as the best way to get the word out and target your message. I've found it very productive already. Work is flying in!"
"Social Media is an Opportunity and a Blessing too, a tool for sharing, collaborating and marketing"
"It is a communication channel to converse and engage directly with your customers, friends, fans, opponents, decision-makers, and thought-leaders.
It is literally changing the way individuals, businesses, governments, etc communicate. The one to one marketing model is over. It is now many to many, there is no turning back."
Some neural or negative quotes are as :
"Social media is expanding our ability to connect and share corporate as well as personal information in ways that weren't available in the past. This presents new challenges and opportunities, but we cannot forget that authenticity and quality are still much more important than quantity when it comes to true and viable business relationships."
"It will ultimately fail since the number of "people" who want to know you for selfish reasons far out-weighs the number of people you know or will ever want to know you for "personal" reasons. This ratio dictates the security platforms that surround all SM's, thus draining their lifeblood (connectivity) before they even get started!"
"When you put thoughts or ads in newspaper, it might reach 1 Lac people and might interest 5K people (5%). But on FB, it will reach approx. 5 crores and will interest only 5 Lac (1%)."
"SM may give reach to mass audience but it makes difficult for business to pull right kind of people to turn them into customers compare to other media. Other media allow you to reach targeted audience, whereas it lets you to connect with the entire pool of users in any network."
"Finding customers through SM is like finding water in desert. It is a try to filter the 10% valuable information vs. 90% waffle. Just like a black hole that sucks you in."
Last but not the least:
"The problem is that so many people still operate in a Web 2.0 mindset! Those days are gone. The two worlds are no longer independent of each other. The relationships we make in real life carry over into the virtual realm, and vice-versa. It’s a marriage and the strength of each will sustain the other. Social Media isn't going anywhere. In fact, there is only growth in the future."
Its presence in a business today is increasing day by day. According to Forrester Research, it will be rising exponentially by 2014. Here is how “Social Media” being quoted by some of the professionals in Online Media industry.
“It is the future of everything on Web. There will be social networking sites for everything you could imagine. Instead of this, stumble upon mentality, it will focus and more demographically delineated. It will still be wide open but it will have an organized chaos mentality to it”.
“Where Time, Network, and Trust (TNT) intersects.”
“The Wild, Wild West... it's certainly evolving by the minute though. Refinement is coming and several players will emerge as leaders of their particular genres; genre being social, and professional. It's here to stay, no doubt. Jump on board or get run over!”
“To individuals, it is friendship and communication. To groups with a message, it is a way to get the message out. To businesses is it a way to obtain exposure and establish credibility. All together, this is so powerful that it will continue to grow and become major use of the internet”.
"At times remarkable because of its ease of use and ability to connect to a single person or masses, and at times scary because of its immenseness."
"It is not really a new concept. Today we see many different forums and communities for virtually any human need, personality and interest. The one common trait for all of the successful communities (past to present) are that they built value to sustain and then monetize their members."
"SM is marketing nirvana for those that are truly invested in managing customer relationships. The long term focus on Relationship Marketing is back in vogue and illustrates that corporate focus needs to be on a 12-36 month timeline, not a 3 month ROI on tactical ad campaigns. Really depends if the organization has the appetite to go that long."
"It is a tool for broadening conversation and creating community that, if used intelligently, can be valuable for sharing of knowledge and building relationships
It is easy, enjoyable, effective and economical. It seems like a day will come when social networking tools will become fee-based."
"SM is Business. It's the direction that all media is moving. It's not a fad or a temporary thing. In 2008 we called it Web 2.0; early 2009 we called it Social Media. Now, in late 2009 people are referring to it as Media and Advertising.
It's a platform for having a (meaningful) conversation, in my opinion, through which one may be able to build the authority and influence."
"LinkedIn is the business meeting, FB is the hallway conversation, and Twitter is the cocktail party.
It’s a big honking' volume. Customers share recommendations (good and bad) with their friends. Humans have always wanted to be heard and to connect.
It is taking over as the best way to get the word out and target your message. I've found it very productive already. Work is flying in!"
"Social Media is an Opportunity and a Blessing too, a tool for sharing, collaborating and marketing"
"It is a communication channel to converse and engage directly with your customers, friends, fans, opponents, decision-makers, and thought-leaders.
It is literally changing the way individuals, businesses, governments, etc communicate. The one to one marketing model is over. It is now many to many, there is no turning back."
Some neural or negative quotes are as :
"Social media is expanding our ability to connect and share corporate as well as personal information in ways that weren't available in the past. This presents new challenges and opportunities, but we cannot forget that authenticity and quality are still much more important than quantity when it comes to true and viable business relationships."
"It will ultimately fail since the number of "people" who want to know you for selfish reasons far out-weighs the number of people you know or will ever want to know you for "personal" reasons. This ratio dictates the security platforms that surround all SM's, thus draining their lifeblood (connectivity) before they even get started!"
"When you put thoughts or ads in newspaper, it might reach 1 Lac people and might interest 5K people (5%). But on FB, it will reach approx. 5 crores and will interest only 5 Lac (1%)."
"SM may give reach to mass audience but it makes difficult for business to pull right kind of people to turn them into customers compare to other media. Other media allow you to reach targeted audience, whereas it lets you to connect with the entire pool of users in any network."
"Finding customers through SM is like finding water in desert. It is a try to filter the 10% valuable information vs. 90% waffle. Just like a black hole that sucks you in."
Last but not the least:
"The problem is that so many people still operate in a Web 2.0 mindset! Those days are gone. The two worlds are no longer independent of each other. The relationships we make in real life carry over into the virtual realm, and vice-versa. It’s a marriage and the strength of each will sustain the other. Social Media isn't going anywhere. In fact, there is only growth in the future."
February 8, 2010
Transparency in Business
There is hardly a conversation about social media today without discussing the concept of transparency. Customers and stakeholders increasingly expect it as the new operating standard.
Transparency is to be open, honest, and accountable and about responsibility. People listen and make evaluations and decisions based upon what you say. To make your business more transparent:
a) Be Real — Spread Awareness about What You Know
Talk about the things that you are aware of. Just stick to this. Then make sure to specialize in specific related areas.
b) Share Opinion, But Listen as well Stay Open to Other Views
You are fully responsible about the information you share. If you find someone else’s views good, then do appreciate. That kind of openness earns respect. Sharing your opinion is actually a part of marketing strategy.
c) Be Honest
Put all the appropriate details. Do not neglect anything that could be important for anybody else, it might affect your online credibility.
d) Be Well-timed and Responsive
Respond instantly. Being a part of social media, remember that timeliness impacts your success and failure. At the moments of controversy, timeliness plays significant role.
e) Consider Grouping
None of us can work as an island in social media world. Transparency means creating groups and communities. Educate customers and generate ideas for new products and services. Targeting right audiences makes lot of difference.
Sometimes, it’s hard to share the truth openly. But adopting transparency would definitely help to be more real, honest, and creditworthy and connects better with customers makes lot of difference.
Transparency is to be open, honest, and accountable and about responsibility. People listen and make evaluations and decisions based upon what you say. To make your business more transparent:
a) Be Real — Spread Awareness about What You Know
Talk about the things that you are aware of. Just stick to this. Then make sure to specialize in specific related areas.
b) Share Opinion, But Listen as well Stay Open to Other Views
You are fully responsible about the information you share. If you find someone else’s views good, then do appreciate. That kind of openness earns respect. Sharing your opinion is actually a part of marketing strategy.
c) Be Honest
Put all the appropriate details. Do not neglect anything that could be important for anybody else, it might affect your online credibility.
d) Be Well-timed and Responsive
Respond instantly. Being a part of social media, remember that timeliness impacts your success and failure. At the moments of controversy, timeliness plays significant role.
e) Consider Grouping
None of us can work as an island in social media world. Transparency means creating groups and communities. Educate customers and generate ideas for new products and services. Targeting right audiences makes lot of difference.
Sometimes, it’s hard to share the truth openly. But adopting transparency would definitely help to be more real, honest, and creditworthy and connects better with customers makes lot of difference.
January 12, 2010
Popular Online Marketing Tools
Every individual or a company has their own modes to market their product. Everyone prefers distinct modes and methods of marketing their product or services. Here I am collating some of the online marketing channels with high success rates viz. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Email Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, Mobile Marketing, and Video Marketing.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Most of the companies, big or small, focus on maximizing clicks and conversions from organic searches. With SEO, it is easy to increase rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. But with search ranking, it is only half won story. One should target the potential visitors from all the specific locations, simultaneously focusing on ranking. Examine the metrics of your online marketing campaigns to extract maximum results. Try and focus to resolve the questions like:
Are search results targeting yours potential customers? Work upon title tags and meta descriptions looking at the ones used by your competitors. Pay attention towards their offers of free case study, flattering product sample or discounts.
Does your live content address your target audience’s needs? Think from customer’s perspective e.g. whether your customer finds your content relevant or not. Customers prefer solution instead of surprises.
Besides optimizing titles and meta descriptions, organic search increases CTR, thereby influencing subsequent search rankings.
2. Social Media
No doubt social media is not that justifiable in terms of ROI when compared to other online marketing tools. To measure success, define certain goals. Social media participation definitely brings loyalty to your brand. To track and measure results, use certain online tools to gauge traffic from social media channels. You can check whether it meets its potential targets like:
• Increase brand awareness
• Relevant traffic
• Improvement in trust and confidence among customers
• Valuable feedback from potential customers
• Improve standard and social search engine visibility
• Build up database for email marketing
• Drive sales and increase matured leads
Focus on specific goals so that you can measure definite results of your social media efforts.
3. Email Marketing
Regardless of what the critics say, email marketing is not going to vanish in 2010 even. It’s as important as any other online marketing channels. Instead, integrating email with social media is going to be a popular thing for coming years.
Try to bring email marketing to the next level by encouraging email subscribers to not only forward content via mail, but also to get social with mail and share it via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and other social networking sites. Promote followers and readers to subscribe to your e-newsletter and tutorials for reaching defined results.
4. PPC
Generally companies get so busy with other online marketing activities that they simply forget to efficiently run PPC campaigns. PPC efforts could certainly increase conversion rate e.g. for betterment, you can try ideas like:
•Try several ad versions that provide different results of your product, service or company like one is cost-effective and other one emphasizes on convenience.
•Try different headlines on your landing page. Google Optimizer is a great tool for this.
•Try launching different ad campaigns all together like one with free case study and other with a product coupon.
5. Mobile Marketing
Make your website optimized for handheld devices too such as mobile phones.
Apart from net banking, purchasing commodities, downloading mobile ring tones, playing games, consumers are doing a lot more than this from their mobile devices. Now they have started their participation in social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, creating additional opportunities for engagements and traffic to the mobile version of your company web site. Consider few tips like:
•Keep basic font format
•Eliminate ads to conserve screen space
•Take out images unless they are necessary
•Remove Flash, Java or any plug-in content
6. Video Marketing
Google is pushing video as a larger component in search results. Properly formatted online video are getting more clicks than ever before. Do include closed captioning and alt tags in video formats. Live videos add value to business making your content and site more searchable.
These are the channels which I have seen committing approx. 80% assured results.
If you know any other online marketing channels that can increase success rates, do share with me.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Most of the companies, big or small, focus on maximizing clicks and conversions from organic searches. With SEO, it is easy to increase rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. But with search ranking, it is only half won story. One should target the potential visitors from all the specific locations, simultaneously focusing on ranking. Examine the metrics of your online marketing campaigns to extract maximum results. Try and focus to resolve the questions like:
Are search results targeting yours potential customers? Work upon title tags and meta descriptions looking at the ones used by your competitors. Pay attention towards their offers of free case study, flattering product sample or discounts.
Does your live content address your target audience’s needs? Think from customer’s perspective e.g. whether your customer finds your content relevant or not. Customers prefer solution instead of surprises.
Besides optimizing titles and meta descriptions, organic search increases CTR, thereby influencing subsequent search rankings.
2. Social Media
No doubt social media is not that justifiable in terms of ROI when compared to other online marketing tools. To measure success, define certain goals. Social media participation definitely brings loyalty to your brand. To track and measure results, use certain online tools to gauge traffic from social media channels. You can check whether it meets its potential targets like:
• Increase brand awareness
• Relevant traffic
• Improvement in trust and confidence among customers
• Valuable feedback from potential customers
• Improve standard and social search engine visibility
• Build up database for email marketing
• Drive sales and increase matured leads
Focus on specific goals so that you can measure definite results of your social media efforts.
3. Email Marketing
Regardless of what the critics say, email marketing is not going to vanish in 2010 even. It’s as important as any other online marketing channels. Instead, integrating email with social media is going to be a popular thing for coming years.
Try to bring email marketing to the next level by encouraging email subscribers to not only forward content via mail, but also to get social with mail and share it via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and other social networking sites. Promote followers and readers to subscribe to your e-newsletter and tutorials for reaching defined results.
4. PPC
Generally companies get so busy with other online marketing activities that they simply forget to efficiently run PPC campaigns. PPC efforts could certainly increase conversion rate e.g. for betterment, you can try ideas like:
•Try several ad versions that provide different results of your product, service or company like one is cost-effective and other one emphasizes on convenience.
•Try different headlines on your landing page. Google Optimizer is a great tool for this.
•Try launching different ad campaigns all together like one with free case study and other with a product coupon.
5. Mobile Marketing
Make your website optimized for handheld devices too such as mobile phones.
Apart from net banking, purchasing commodities, downloading mobile ring tones, playing games, consumers are doing a lot more than this from their mobile devices. Now they have started their participation in social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, creating additional opportunities for engagements and traffic to the mobile version of your company web site. Consider few tips like:
•Keep basic font format
•Eliminate ads to conserve screen space
•Take out images unless they are necessary
•Remove Flash, Java or any plug-in content
6. Video Marketing
Google is pushing video as a larger component in search results. Properly formatted online video are getting more clicks than ever before. Do include closed captioning and alt tags in video formats. Live videos add value to business making your content and site more searchable.
These are the channels which I have seen committing approx. 80% assured results.
If you know any other online marketing channels that can increase success rates, do share with me.
January 4, 2010
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is the type of marketing that is mainly focused on getting found by potential customers.
In traditional or outbound marketing, companies used to focus on searching for expected customers, using techniques with poor targets and most of times interrupting people. This type of marketing involves cold-calling, T.V. advertising, print advertising, junk mails, and trade shows. But these techniques are less effective and more expensive.
Today, Inbound Marketers flip outbound marketing completely. The most successful key components of an Inbound Marketing campaigns are:
a. Get Found
Create Content via Blogging – It mainly surrounds the content. The substantial content in any Inbound Marketing campaign is a tool that to attract potential customers to your website for your products or services. You must create web pages, write blogs, participate in the blogosphere and then publish this content to drive traffic to your website.
Optimize via Search Engine Optimization - SEO is the practice of building your website and the inbound links to your site to maximize its ranking in the search engines, where most of your customers generally begin their buying process. It eases the potential customers to find your content. You must do on-page as well as off-page SEO and use channels like Youtube, Twitter to optimize your remarkable content.
Promote via Social Media - Social media magnifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed over the network of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic, and is more likely to drive qualified and specific consumers to your website. You can even run PPC campaigns to promote the website.
b. Convert
Convert Visitors to Leads via Landing Pages - Convert a targeted stream of traffic into mature leads. Design a well-crafted offer on a landing page specifically for the audience you will be driving to the page.
Lead Tracking and Intelligence – After generating lots of traffic from myriad sources like Google, social media sites, the blogosphere, create a magnet that sucks in prospects from all over the web. Look into the conversion paths on your website. Use your intellect to gauge where might people land, and what paths through your content they might take. And then put right offers in front of a given visitor to maximize the chance of converting it into a lead.
Lead Management – Use the analytic traffic tracking tools to keep a track and then manage the matured leads. Identify the hot prospects to increase the total count of potential customers.
c. Analyze
Marketing Analytics – Regularly post and comment on articles, and check your traffic, leads and landing page conversion rates. Schedule properly to write, optimize, publish and promote your content.
Competitive Analysis – Keep a close eye on your competitor’s presence in the market. Analyze and identify their hot prospects closely.
Lead Scoring – You need to strategize for further gains. Generate marketing reports and make new offers and landing pages to enhance the substantial traffic on your website.
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