In the years since I started using Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with loved ones, promote my clients, share my interests and writing as well as engage in conversations with industries I am passionate about (interior design and tourism, being two of them); I’ve always wondered where I would be able to get valuable and concrete information on how to improve my presence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, without resorting to outsourcing my social media presence to companies or individuals.
Seminars on social media I’d attended in the past yielded little results; save for a few different portals such as ping.fm that I could use to schedule updates. Certainly, these sites are useful, but these seminars didn’t give me tools or tips that I could use on the actual platforms themselves, like the LinkedIn website.
As someone who already has their hands full engaging in discussions on LinkedIn, connecting on Twitter and currently working on building a Facebook business page; I wanted something-a workshop or seminar that could give me tips to utilize the existing websites better.
Enter the Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies Webinar hosted by Sean Malarkey and Lewis Howes that I attended last week.
What made this webinar different from the other seminars? Well, for starters, Sean has over 10 years of experience as a real estate investor and was the first in his industry in his hometown in Ohio to use Twitter to increase real estate sales. He created Twixplode, an e-book with tips and tricks on how to make Twitter work for you. Lewis wrote an e-book called LinkedWorking on how to make LinkedIn do the work and establish connections for you.
Here are some of the tips they shared with me to help maximize the potential for connections, jobs and sales on the 5 major social media platforms:
5 Step LinkedIn SEO Challenge
1. Search for relevant keywords (ie. If your business specializes in marketing, search ‘marketing’) to see if you are first in the search results.
2. Add the keyword(s) in your profile headline
3. Add the keyword(s) in your current and past work experience
4. Add the keyword(s) in your summary
5. Add the keyword(s) in your specialties, raising your profile in the LinkedIn search rankings for that specialty
1. Build a network of targeted people (ie. if you’re an interior designer, target architects & real estate agents)
2. Save time by using tools available (ie. HootSuite & TweetDeck to monitor tweets/conversations and publish tweets for several profiles at once)
1. Take anything off of your Facebook profile with no value (ie. ‘Likes’, notifications of comments on other peoples’ pages)
2. Keep conversations on your page
Blog
1. Content !! (Could be daily or weekly, even reposts of blog posts you liked, but must publish often)
2. Add an E-mail Capture feature on the blog as a call to action
3. Social Sharing (Easy, Accessible links for people to share on Facebook, Twitter etc.)
Maximizing YouTube
1. Make Your Video Title Keyword Rich in Your Niche (ie. Top Color Trends in Interior Design) (Use Adwords to search for keywords with high search traffic and low competition)
2. Add Your Video Description First
3. Make sure your website link is the first part of the video description.
4. Have tags and annotations for your video
For further information, Sean and Lewis have created a comprehensive social media marketing course called 500 million strong.
