Earlier this week I was one of three presenters at an Edmond Chamber of Commerce Lunch and Learn. I talked about the actual tools available on four popular social networking websites: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. I thought I would share my handout, so here it is as a viewable image, and below that as a downloadable PDF.
For a long time, search engine optimization has been a feat that required a certain level of experience and technical skills. And it still is. Fortunately for the average business owner and freelancer, you can increase your search engine visibility using just social networking websites. Since they’re the most effective, I’ll specifically talk about Facebook and LinkedIn.
Make sure that you actually go through a complete your profile on both of the websites. On LinkedIn, put mostly professional information, with just a tiny bit of personal mixed in there. On Facebook, it should be a healthy mix of personal and business.
On both, use some form of your actual name for your username. On LinkedIn specifically, make sure you take a look at your profile and customize your Public Profile address. It will generally start out as something generic like www.linkedin.com/pub/12/62a/4a3. Simply click edit next to the link, and you can change it to something like www.linkedin.com/in/yourname
Once you have those social networking websites filled out, make sure you link to your website!
Naturally, you should do similar things on MySpace, Plaxo and Twitter. But Facebook and LinkedIn have been proven to have a good effect on your search engine rankings, and should definitely be taken care of first thing.
Need proof that this works? Just Google my name, Tim Priebe, and you’ll see both Facebook and LinkedIn on page one out of 80,000+ results.
Are you wanting to get more (or any) recommendations on your LinkedIn account? Here’s how…
That’s it! Be honest and complimentary, and many of the people you recommend will recommend you right back.
It works! I have more recommendations than the average LinkedIn user. Check my public profile.
T&S is offering workshops for Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. There are a couple of things that differentiate us from others offering similar workshops:
Our workshops are set in actual computer labs. You’ll actually set up your social networking website accounts right then and there during the workshops, if you haven’t already. Rather than taking notes and wondering later exactly we did everything, you can try it out and ask us questions immediately.
As with many of our endeavors, we’re focusing on small business owners. And if you’re a small business owner, you don’t have a lot of spare time. You may have seen your children or grandchildren spending hours and hours weekly (or even daily) on MySpace or Facebook.
Well, the good news is that you can get a lot of cheap marketing out of those websites without spending tons of time on them. We’ll teach you how to spend just an hour or two a week on the social networking websites and get some great use out of them.
Here at T&S, we’ve been beefing up recently on our expertise in social networking websites. Specifically, we’ve been focusing on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Wikipedia’s list of “popular” social networking sites lists well over fifty different websites. So why did we choose those four to focus on?
Let’s take a look at a graph comparing three of the top social networking sites that are intended for a general audience. In other words, these are not aimed at business professionals or any other niche.
So here we’re looking at MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. You can see from the graph that while MySpace has declined in popularity quite a bit in the past six months and Facebook has skyrocketed (It was actually April 2008 when the lines crossed), Friendster is barely on the radar.
Let’s take a look a couple of social networking websites geared towards business professionals.
Here we’re comparing LinkedIn and Plaxo. You can see that while LinkedIn’s traffic looks relatively volatile, it’s still consistently well above Plaxo.
Within these individual groups, the relative popularity is what led us to choose the websites we did. Facebook is obviously much more popular, so it’s been our primary focus. While MySpace has far less reach than Facebook currently, Their Alexa.com rating still has them right below Facebook in the list of all sites on the internet. Not only that, but they currently have about twice the registered users as Facebook.
With LinkedIn and Plaxo as the two most popular and well-known networking sites for professionals, you can see that LinkedIn is the most popular of the two. However, it pays not to totally ignore Plaxo, so we recommend getting an account on there as well.
Although the focus of Twitter is very different than these other sites, let’s take a look at a graph comparing Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
You can see there that compared to Facebook, the other two barely register. However, that’s like comparing the traffic through a mall to the traffic through a chamber of commerce. The goals and target markets of the two are completely different.
Twitter is even further removed from the others, with the sole purpose of what’s referred to micro-blogging. While the impact of your business using Twitter generally isn’t huge, the time investment is so small that it’s well worth using.
So which social networking websites should you use for marketing? The most popular and the easiest to use. Everyone should be using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. If you are in a professional or business to business industry, you should use LinkedIn, and, to a lesser degree, Plaxo.
When we’re in the website planning stage with a new client and they ask us about a blog, we always tell them to only get one if they can commit to blog at least weekly. Of course, it’s been over a week since we here at T&S have blogged. Shame on us. But we have had some exciting things going on lately.
First off, we just finished our first Webifiable workshop this past week. We turned the first two thirds of my book into an interactive workshop, and conducted this first experimental version of the workshop. The feedback was great. We even met with our partners in crime, PMS, earlier today to discuss the minor tweaks we are making before our next workshop on March 26. So if you’re interested in the next one, contact us.
Second, we’re moving T&S out of my home office and into its own office. Starting just as soon as we can get internet up and running, we’ll be in downtown Edmond on Broadway across from the post office. We’ll be at 247 N Broadway, suite #104. It’s not much bigger than our current office, but we’ll be able to get a lot more work done without the distractions that come with a home office.
Third, after getting our feet wet by starting our Webifiable workshop, we’re getting ready to offer workshops for MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. There will be an hour and a half workshop for each of those three sites, and the sessions will have hands-on setting up of accounts for the sites, as well as guidelines for businesses to make the most use of the sites without spending hours and hours on them every week. We are days away from setting a date for these workshops, but if you are interested, go ahead and contact us.
Finally, we’re giving away a free custom website to a different non-profit group every month in 2009. The lucky January recipient was Edmond Mobile Meals, and we’re continuing to look in the Edmond and Oklahoma City area for additional non-profits to help. If you are involved in or know of a non-profit group that could benefit, fill out our form and let us know.
It’s been an exciting first month of the year, and it’s only getting better from here!