Maximizing your Social Networking

Slidedeck of the Webinar

Today I attended a free webinar on social networking (click above to see slides w/o voice).  The webinar was like many I've attended (an infomercial to buy their service).  If I were an entrepreneur or self employed, it would have been helpful to pay for the program (appr. $200 if purchased outside of the webinar; $100 if purchased during the webinar). 

Some of the key learnings included:  Facebook has 60 million updates daily and Twitter has 80 million per day.  Approximately 40% of businesses find value in both Facebook and Twitter for growing their businesses. Approximately 80% of the private sector professional jobs are be sourced via LinkedIn.   Some of the reasons to use social media are to identify new prospects, leads, etc.  LinkedIn also provides similar results including leads, jobs, business intelligence, etc.  As long as LinkedIn offers a free service, it will continue to be the professional social media site for jobs and products.  There is a new application on the LinkedIn jobs link where you can do an advanced search on your keywords and locale and save up to 10 searches.  You can get updates on these searches weekly or daily.  This is big!!

For those trying to ensure that they have their name/logo secure on the social media sites go to http://www.namechk.com/ to check and reserve.  One of the key messages about sending updates is that one should follow the 12 to 1 rule; for every advertizement you should have 12 posts or messages that are informative to gain a loyal following.  The second point is to be consistent in the timing of your feeds.  Don't message daily and then forget for a week to message.

Relative to LinkedIn optimization, key words are important as is one's tagline.  Regarding ROI for social media there are various programs to track traffic to one's website or blog.  This presenter also indicated for those trying to market themselves or their product, the key is to get a larger network.  The 2nd connections are the key purchasors or buyers of you or your services.  A final point he covered was using bit.ly to shrink your URL message to 120 characters so it can be posted on various social media.  I'm not familiar with bit.ly so will test it and report back re: it's application/utility.