3 Simple Ways to Measure Your Social Media Results

#1: Quantify Your Social Media Listening

“What you’re doing [on social media] needs to have impact. It needs to actually have revenue. And often times we try to make it fuzzy about that.” – Frank Eliason, Citi’s Director, Global Social Media (@FrankEliason)

Listening is one of the most often overlooked uses of social media, yet it’s probably the most important. If you’re not listening to your customers, you’re missing the point of social media.

But how do you measure listening and how does it impact your revenue?

In this example, we’re going to look at using Twitter to answer that question.

• In Twitter’s search field, enter your business name.
  

  Twitter’s search field.
• You can then select whether you want to view Twitter’s “top” tweets about your business, “all” tweets containing your business name or tweets that contain your business name from only those people you follow.
  

  Twitter search.
• As you filter the tweets, look through them and decide whom you’d like to follow. These are likely either potential customers or your current customers.
• Monitor their tweets on a daily basis. Engage with them, answering their questions, adding value and helping them whenever possible.

Twitter’s Advanced Search is powerful too, especially if you’re a local business. You can use it to search specific terms related to your business that people who are near your location are talking about.

Twitter is an amazing tool for providing real-time customer service. You can learn things like:

• Exactly how many people you’re helping
• If you’re growing that number of people
• The issues customers are experiencing with your business
• What’s broken in your business

At the end of the measurement period, prioritize the problems you identify and use that intelligence to implement fixes and improvements within your business. You canmeasure the direct impact on your business by looking at the additional revenue or cost savings that these new fixes give you.

#2: Create a Rating System for Your Social Engagement

“Put a [tiered point system] in place rather than looking at how many likes you have.” – Scott Monty, Ford’s global head of social media (@scottmonty)

This is a simple yet effective strategy to use when you’re trying to generate awareness and buzz. It’s a smart way to measure the response to your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social channel you’re using.

Here’s how it works.

Say you’re launching a product or service and want to build buzz about it on Facebook. You post an update to your Page about your launch and you get a bunch of likes on it. The next day, you post a different type of update. You get some likes on it, but you also see that people are engaging more with the second update by sharing the post and commenting on it.

Likes show support and comments indicate a deeper interest but shares are most valuable because they move the update beyond your page.

At the beginning of the campaign, translate your objective to a numeric goal. Then,use a tiered point system to weight different types of engagement according to which is most valuable to you.

Here’s an example of a tiered point system for Facebook:

• Likes: 1 point each
• Comments: 5 points each
• Shares: 10 points each

During the campaign, a quick sum of values will help you determine if your efforts on Facebook are moving you closer towards your goal or not.

Assign a point system to likes, shares and comments.

You can create similar point systems on any of the social channels you use. For example, on Twitter, 5 points for a reply and 10 points for a retweet.

#3: Add Tons of Value, Then Sell and Measure

“Jab, jab, jab, right hook.” – Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

This strategy is the concept behind Gary V.’s upcoming book and it’s based on providing great content that adds tons of value for your customers before asking for the sale.

The Corcoran Group, a NYC real estate firm, adds value via their social media outlets.

For example, say your restaurant is rolling out a new healthy menu. Your goal is to get 300 customers into your restaurant to try the new menu over an upcoming weekend.

Since your food is visually appealing, you develop a Facebook or Instagram strategy. You post pictures of your food, create content around the importance of healthy eating and curate information on your Facebook Page about farmers’ markets in your area.

Offer this valuable content to build trust with people.

Then offer a coupon for your restaurant on your Facebook Page. The number of people who claim and redeem your coupon is a result you can quantify.

Here’s how to measure your efforts when using this strategy:

• Use the tiered point system described in strategy #2 to determine if your content is moving you closer to your goal.
• Use coupons that are specific to your social media campaign, thus making the return on your investment easy to track and measure.
• Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns where your customers can download or purchase what you are promoting. Since the landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow you to clearly see how successful your campaign is.

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Infectious Social Media: What Advertisers Can Learn from "The Walking Dead"

Social media is like a zombie outbreak: you start with one person who spreads or promotes something, and that one person can end up turning into thousands.

The season finale of The Walking Dead was this past weekend, and the hit show, which only has three seasons under its belt, managed to come out on top of last week’s social TV rankings. People across all different social channels are talking and promoting the show, and it’s helped make it one of the most-watched series on TV.

Trenderr, a tool for measuring social media activity related to specific TV shows, has The Walking Deadbeating out Game of Thrones, the NCAA Basketball tournament, and NBA basketball: Heat at the Bulls, which was one of the biggest games in recent NBA history (thanks to the undefeated streak the Heat had heading into Chicago).

The Walking Dead had a weekly activity of 2,263,258, which made it the most talked about show on social media last week.

So what can social media agencies learn from a show filled with zombies -- one that wasn’t even sure it would see a second season?

1. Advertising on TV is slowly losing importance. When we take a look at the success of The Walking Dead, part comes from the solid fan following of the comics, while another part is from people who love the zombie craze.  Still, the show might not have made it out of its first season without the help of social media.  Other shows like The Event (11.19 million viewers during the season premiere) or The River (8.35 million) didn’t make it past season one, even though both were on major networks and had a strong television backing. The Walking Dead has been more successful (12.3 million viewers for the premiere of season three) on a lesser known channel, and with smaller television backing because of how social media has played a role in getting people to talk about the hit series.
2. Word of mouth is still social king. The key to using Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media is clearly word of mouth.  In the case of The Walking Dead, part of the show’s popularity clearly comes from how many people talk about it online, and if your friends are talking about it, not only is there a stronger chance an advertisement will end up on your social media wall, but you’ll be more inclined to watch it for yourself.
3. Social media is both the judge and jury. If there’s anything to take away from the social media buzz of The Walking Dead, it’s that social media can play both the judge and jury. How successful something is can easily be judged by how many people are talking about it on social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter.  If people are talking about your product on social media sites than you know you’re advertising the right way.  If you’re still struggling to generate buzz, it may be time to shift gears and move in another direction.

The Walking Dead has managed to capture the attention of fans, and the benefits are clearly showing on social media platforms.  The series has used social media to help push itself into the spotlight, and as their fan base continues to grow, the show doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. 

The Walking Dead proves that like a herd of zombies, a good product can be infectious on social media.

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Facebook: Understanding the Business Benefits

Introduction to Facebook pages for business

Facebook is the king of social networks and as such, almost doesn’t need an introduction.  It is likely that you are already familiar with Facebook and probably have your own profile. With over a billion users, it’s the biggest social network with a user base that is still growing.

As with other social media platforms, Facebook allows businesses to build a community with the potential of turning a proportion of those community members into customers. By clearly showcasing a combination of the attractiveness of your goods and services, your customer service and your brands personality and/or USPs, you can use Facebook to attract new customers to you and foster brand loyalty in your existing customers.  Just like on your website, your aim is to make people stick around long enough that you get the opportunity to persuade them to buy in to your brand  and become a customer.

Don’t make the mistake of using Facebook like a one-way sales channel. Bombard your Facebook fans with offer after offer, and you’ll find this is the quickest way to lose potential customers (unless you have a deal based business model such as Groupon or Wowcher).  As a rule, no one wants constant hard sell filling up their timeline. The key to successful use of Facebook for businesses lies in your ability to engage followers, listen to them and to balance the content you are publishing.

What’s the point of Facebook?

Facebook provides businesses with the ability to create and grow an engaged community of customers and potential sales leads.

Building communities and individual relationships

Facebook provides an excellent means by which a company can not only demonstrate their expertise in any given area, but they can actively create a brand personality, in keeping with brand values and marketing strategy and promote their unique selling points.

Facebook is all about engagement and adding value. As a result of reaching out to your customers, you’ll obtain highly valuable insights that will shape your communications (extending to other social networks and even transferable to your traditional marketing channels), making them even more effective.

Successful use of Facebook relies upon effective engagement and in your ability publish fresh and interesting content.

Building a community doesn’t come easily and it certainly won’t happen overnight.  You will need to commit to and invest in a long-term strategy that will underpin all of your social media activities.  If you are after a quick win or instant results, then social media is not going to provide that, unless you are using paid advertising.

Whilst this introduction to Facebook deals primarily with the free page all businesses can set up, you do have the option of enhancing your presence further by taking advantage of promoted posts and Facebook ads. Similarly enhancing your page with free or paid-for Facebook apps, can help to improve the quality of your content and help you to attract more visitors.

Facebook pitfalls to avoid

Ignore your Facebook Wall at your own peril

Checking your social media pages every now and again just isn’t enough, and for any page with more than a few hundred Likes or followers, it is critical that you are regularly monitoring interactions.

Consider this scenario.  An irate customer posts on your Facebook wall complaining about a customer service issue.  Respond to such a post quickly, providing an apology, reason and resolution and you can effectively turn the situation into a positive PR opportunity.  Consider that same irate post on your Facebook wall left un-answered for several days.  This makes it look like you don’t care about customer service and also shows that you don’t pay attention to your Facebook wall, sending a very negative message to anyone visiting your page and it certainly won’t help you convert new customers.

Once set up, the single most important thing to remember is to monitor your Facebook wall.  Whilst daily monitoring is acceptable, for active Facebook communities, then you are going to want to check your wall for any mentions, pre-sales questions or customer service issues several times a day.  

Fake likes are largely worthless to you

You are likely to come across companies offering to sell you ‘Likes’ and for a new page, this can certainly be tempting.  Consider this though – why do you want to buy likes?  What benefit do you get from appearing to have more likes? The real value of Facebook comes in the form of genuine fans, which should largely be made up of existing and potential customers – these fans are receptive sales leads and so have an intrinsic value, making it worthwhile to invest your time into engaging them.

Buy likes and your new fans will have no real interest in your brand and as such can’t be categorised as potential sales leads, in which case they are of little or no value to you.

Failing to engage sends out negative signals

To make Facebook work you need to give people a reason to come to your Facebook page; when they are on your page, your goal is to ensure that they see something they are interested in, resulting in a desirable action, such as clicking through to your website.  If you rarely update your wall you aren’t giving people a reason to come back.  If however your content is interesting and fresh, then people will like your page and will keep coming back.

Facebook and all social media, is about crafting two-way conversations.  Engaging fans isn’t about constantly pushing out content; it’s about publishing content and then pausing to listen to your fans responses.  This way you will learn what they like and will be more able to understand how to reach your target audience.  When a fan is actively engaging via activities on your wall, they are highly receptive.  Give them what they want and engaged fans can turn into customers.

Controversy can increase the viral potential of content but is unlikely to win you customers

Some believe that posting controversial content will help that content spread and go viral.  Whilst this can be an effective strategy for achieving viral spread, it isn’t recommended.  Controversy often stirs up strong emotions which can have very negative implications.

Stay away from being too controversial, you don’t want to polarise or alienate people; you might have strong political or personally held views, your business’s Facebook wall however is not the right place for you to express them.

Beware of the Facebook Troll

Lurking online is a special breed of person, known as a Troll.  Simply put, a Troll is someone who is purposely antagonistic, argumentative and/or offensive.  They will often respond to posts just to create an argument or cause a reaction and will frequently use abusive or offensive language.

Depending on your point of view, you might see them as a harmless nuisance or you might see them as anarchistic trouble makers.  Once identified as a Troll, my own stance is to block the offender from posting.  Blocking or banning should not be taken lightly though – if someone has a real customer service issue or complaint to air, it is always advisable to deal with it rather than simply removing the post and banning the user.

Don’t be tempted to deal with the potential threat of the Troll by locking your profile down and stopping people from posting on your wall altogether though. If you do that, you will no longer see any of the true benefit that social media provides, as you will no longer be inviting two-way conversation, turning Facebook into just another one-way marketing channel.

Part two of this introduction to Facebook will be published later this week and will provide you with some facts and tips that will help you get the most out of your Facebook activities, as well as some suggestions for engagement activities that you can take away and implement.

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Vine App: The Ultimate Guide to More Likes and Followers

Ever since Twitter relaunched Vine a few weeks ago, I've been testing it out on my own and with a handful of client accounts. Since Vine is still so new, I thought you might find my notes on how to get the most out of your time on Vine useful, so I reworked them into this guide. I hope you find it helpful! 

Update Your Profile 

When I joined Vine my profile was imported from Twitter. This was a great start, but due to the unique nature of Vine that might not be ideal for you and could reduce your chances for success.

In my case, my Twitter bio didn't make sense because it talks about my web marketing experience but I have no intention at the moment of posting web marketing related videos to Vine. Ideally your profile should convey who you are and what you'll be sharing on Vine - I updated my profile to mention dog videos since that is what I'm currently posting most often.

This is important because one way people discover others to follow is though the people search function. Previously, I would have been found for searches related to WordPress and SEO which have nothing to with what I'm currently sharing on Vine. I may have picked up a few followers because of those terms, but they would not be my ideal Vine audience since I don't post videos on those topics.

This simple step will greatly improve the interaction you recieve on Vine since you'll be attracting the most appropriate audience for your content.

Connect Twitter & Facebook

I connected both accounts, but I don't share every video with each one. If you'll be sharing Vine videos that your existing followers on Twitter or Facebook will be interested in then you'll definitely want to connect since the larger audience you reach with your posts, the more likely you are to grow your connections on Vine.

To connect your accounts from the main Vine menu go to Profile > Settings and then scroll down a bit and you'll see the SOCIAL NETWORKS section.

It is especially important to consider connecting and sharing to Twitter.

Since Vine is a Twitter product you'll find the largest number of Vine users there which means great exposure for your videos when you tweet your Vine videos.

Another reason to connect Twitter is to find existing contacts you may have that you'd like to connect with on Vine. In my case, quite a few of my Twitter followers were already on Vine and followed me on Vine as well as soon as I added them using this method. To do this, first connect Twitter, then go toProfile > Settings and scroll down a bit and you'll see the FRIENDS section, click the Find Peopleoption.

Unfortunately, Facebook blocked similar functionality right after Vine launched. However, you can still let your Facebook followers know you are on Vine by regularly sharing videos or even posting an image of your profile to Instagram.

Before You Record Your Video

A large number of people on Vine are just creating videos just to experiment with the app (myself included), don't get distracted by all that noise. If you are looking tocreate videos that get attention you should make videos that fit what has already been proven to work well on Vine. Here's a few good ways to get a feel for which videos are working best:

1. Regularly browse the Editor's Picks, and Popularsections within the Vine app. You can access these under Explore on the main menu.
2. Use the Search by Tag feature to review the types of videos that are being posted by others in your niche. You access Search by Tag at the top of the Explore menu.
3. Use a Google site: search to locate videos by keyword. Here's an example using the keyword 'dogs', just replace 'dogs' with your own keyword to find videos on your topic of choice.
4. Browse a few of the 3rd party sites that display Vine videos. I recommend:
   • All Around The Vines, Vine Peek, Vine Fav - Each of these sites provides a slightly different view of the latest videos posted to Vine.
   • Vines Map - Provides a nice map view of videos by location
   • VineRoulette - Offers a full screen visualization of Vine videos that you can view by tag.
5. Review what other brands are doing on Vine already. Megan Sullivan covers 7 brands, Tim Grimes covers 10, and Nick Cicero covers 15 brands using Vine.

Use Popular Hashtags

When using the Vine app hashtags are highlighted in the Explore section as one of the main methods of navigating videos.

This means you should use tags in your poststo get your videos noticed. Using hashtags will also help your video get noticed on other tag friendly services like Twitter.

Currently the most popular tags on Vine are:

1. #firstpost
2. #vineportaits
3. #remake
4. #cute
5. #loop
6. #magic
7. #pets
8. #travel
9. #sports
10. #food
11. #nature
12. #howto
13. #fashion
14. #vinefavs

While it is important to use the relevant popular hashtags when posting to Vine, don't be afraid to add others that are even more directly related to your post.

Since people can search by tag from within the app, you improve your chances of being found even when you use tags that are not on the Explore page.

How-to Share Your Vine Videos

Sharing your Vine videos on other networks is a great way to increase your exposure and attract new followers.

You can share directly to Twitter and Facebook from within the Vine app, but what about all the other networks, or your blog?

To share to these other locations you'll need to have the url (web address) of the video you would like to share. Since Vine doesn’t currently provide the url to your own posts directly you will have to share your video to Facebook or Twitter first. For example, you can see the url in my share to Twitter.

Once you have the url you can then share your video wherever you like - here are some of the more common methods.

• Embed Vine Videos in a Blog Post -There are a variety methods you can use to add your videos to a blog post. If you would like to do that, Jesse Luna has a good post covering each option right here.
• Upload Vine Videos to YouTube - Vine saves each video you create to your iOS Photo Library so all you have to do is select the video and upload it to YouTube.
• Share Vine Videos on Google+ - On G+ if you have instant upload enabled the your Vine videos will upload automatically, or you can upload them manually to your account. Once uploaded you can share the videos as normal. Mark Traphagen covers this process in-depth in this post if you need more details.
• Pin Vine Videos on Pinterest - The most effective way to post a Vine video to Pinterest is to upload the video to YouTube first (instructions above). By doing this the video will be playable on Pinterest. Once that is done just pin YouTube's share url to Pinterest.
• Post Vine Videos to Tumblr -See the Blog Post tips above and/or check out the other options that Emily Price covers in her post.
• Convert Vine Videos to GIFs - Due to their short nature Vine videos are very well suited to be converted to animated GIFs. Since animated GIFs are one of the most shared forms of content on the web, converting your videos to GIF could be a great way to reach audiences that might not otherwise watch your video. To do this, you simply add ‘gif’ in front of any Vine url like this:http://www.gifvine.co/v/bnIZDFL36zn_, or if you are a Mac user you can also use the VineGifR app to convert the video in a similar manner.

Like, Follow & Comment

As with any other social network, it is very important to participate and socialize with other users in order to get noticed.

Start by using the search feature to search for tags (or people) to find people that consistently post the types of videos you enjoy and follow them.

If you are interesting to them as well, they will often follow you right back. Make sure you've posted a video or two and filled out your profile completely for this to be as effective as possible.

Like and comment on all the videos that you enjoy.

When you like or comment on a post it will automatically be shown in the Activity feed of the all the other people that have also either commented or liked the post. This can attract a lot of new followers quickly if you approach this properly.

Avoid being spammy, but be smart about your likes and comments - there is nothing wrong with ensuring you always comment on posts you enjoyed and happen to notice have a lot of comments or likes already.

Also, try a little strategy, don’t just follow the crowd and cross your fingers! Something like this:

1. Post a video on a specific topic, for example ‘dogs’. Don’t forget to share it to Twitter and Facebook if relevant.
2. Immediately after posting your video, explore the related tags on Vine (#dogs, #dog, #puppies, #pets, #cute, etc) looking to videos that you enjoy. Like and comment on those videos and follow anyone that you really like.
3. Rinse and Repeat

What will happen following a simple posting strategy like that is you’ll get attention from an audience that is perfectly targeted to the video you just posted. Since they'll see a similar video on your profile to what they have also been posting they are more likely to like your videos and follow you as well.

Quick Recap

• Update your profile to better reflect what you'll be posting on Vine
• Connect and share to Twitter and Facebook if those audiences will like your videos
• Review the videos created by others to gain an understanding of what to post
• Use relevant hashtags in every post. Don't forget the most popular tags if they are relevant
• Share your videos on other networks and sites when possible
• Use a little strategy when you Like, Comment, and Follow

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Creating a Social Engagement Plan in 4 Steps

There’s no doubt that almost every business is (or at least trying to be) active on social media. But more often than not, you’ll find companies trying to engage with their audience on social channels with no plan or strategy. This post will walk you through a simple four-step social engagement plan to get you started.

Before diving into the plan, it’s important to take a step back and define the purpose of engagement. The purpose of engaging in social media is to create a genuine and meaningful two-way conversation. Once that’s established, other business goals such as brand awareness and lead generation will follow naturally.

Now, onto the fun stuff. The four steps of this social engagement plan are listening, engaging, measuring, and learning. You’ll want to think of this plan as being continuous or cyclical, so you can repeat it once you’re done with the fourth step.

1. Listen

Ever heard the saying “think twice before you speak?” Well, I say “listen twice before you tweet!”. When you start your listening exercise, you’ll want to identify things like:

• What are my audience’s main pain points?
• What type of content does my audience find appealing?
• What format of content is best consumed, engaged with, and shared by my audience?

Remember that listening doesn’t have to be passive. Feel free to engage in active listening by soliciting the information you’re looking for through testing different content formats and lengths, using online listening tools like surveys, or even researching what people are interested in or looking for on forums, etc.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a company providing PPC management services. You can look through the AdWords community to identify the most popular topics or issues people are discussing, then create content around how you can address or solve it.

2. Engage

Engaging consists of not only creating specific content based on the areas or topics of interest identified in the listening phase, but being available to engage back as well.

In the initial engagement phase, you might want to explore as many channels as possible to get a sense of where your audience spends the most time and consumes your content.

3. Measure

In this step, you’ll want to start by defining what your success metrics are. It’s important to take the time to set this measuring framework first, so you can easily determine success, failure, or areas of improvement.

Take a look at Angie Schottmuller’s post for great insights about how to set up goals to measure your social media ROI.

4. Learn

Measuring is useless if we don’t learn from it. The goal of measurement is not just to understand what happened in the past, but to determine our future actions as well.

So when you’re analyzing your success metrics, you might find, for example, that you have a low level of engagement on Twitter.

But a much higher one on YouTube

But take that a step further, and you might find that what this really means is that you have a high viewership but low engagement on that channel.

Use this type of insight to revise your next iteration. If you have the views but little to no engagement, solicit it.

Google’s Web Analytics TV gets a lot of engagement not only because Avinash is kind of cute, but because they clearly and specifically ask their audience to ask and rate questions.

Analyzing your metrics this way turns them into more actionable insights, allowing you to repeat the process again, knowing specific things like:

• The need to deliver more quality content.
• Understanding different content consumption levels across channels.
• Segmenting your your target audience to cater to them differently.
• How to coordinate similar efforts across your social media team.
• Uncovering opportunities to convert prospects.

With this simple four-step plan to listen, engage, measure, and learn, what’s keeping you from getting started today?

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Related articles

• 3 Online Social Media Evaluation Tools to Measure Your Impact Online
• Transforming Noise to Signal: Strategy for Social Engagement & Monitoring
• 5 Tips for Avoiding Social Media Burnout
• ROI vs. Engagement: Quantifying Social Media

The Secret Benefit of LinkedIn Endorsements

A little while ago, LinkedIn began allowing members to endorse each other. Unlike recommendations, endorsements were simply a way for one member to confirm that another member has a particular skill. Because LinkedIn made it extremely easy to quickly endorse people for multiple skills, and because there is no verification required at all, many observers questioned the validity or use of the feature, myself among them.

Of course, it's nice to have a great list of skills on your profile, and having tons of endorsements for your skills is certainly more impressive than none at all. Furthermore, each time you endorse a potential partner or prospect, that person gets a nice email telling them that you thought they deserved to be endorsed for some skill.

If you thought that was all there was to LinkedIn Endorsements, then you might not have noticed the Skills & Expertise section.

Skills & Expertise

Like the old LinkedIn Answers, Skills & Expertise is hidden within the More drop down. If you can find it, you'll be rewarded with a great-looking landing page that announces that Skills & Expertise is there to help you "Discover the skills you need to succeed. Learn what you need to know from the thousands of hot, up-and-coming skills we're tracking." According to LinkedIn, this feature is still in beta.

The top of the page features a search bar where you can begin typing in a skill. It can be for someone you wish to hire, or something you want to learn about and are looking for someone whose blogs you might want to read. Or, more interesting, do a search on one of your own skills to see where you stack up.

Below is a summary of a couple of specific skills. For me, iPhone was the first "skill" listed, and the summary included cities, related skills, and featured professionals.

Skill Details

If you search on a skill and select it, you'll see the full Skill Details page. The left side lets you search for a different skill or take a look at related skills. We'll get back to the importance of related skills in a moment.

In the middle, you'll see your selected skill and a nice box that details the industry the skill is typically associated with, whether or not you current list that skill, and a button to see suggested skills. You'll also see a percentage followed by y/y, which stands for year over year. We'll talk about the importance of this metric as well in a moment.

Below the info box will be a list of professionals who list that skill. You might think that these professionals are ranked according to the number of times they've been endorsed for that skill, but that isn't the case. The top ranked professional for "Social MediaMarketing" only has 33 endorsements for that skill, while the #2 individual had 99+. So getting ranked isn't solely based on the sheer number of endorsements.

At the bottom is a list of LinkedIn Groups that are associated with that skill.

Along the right side you'll find buttons to share the skill, charts for relative growth, size and age, related companies, related jobs, and related locations.

Using Skills & Expertise

First of all, getting yourself listed as a Featured Professional within a specific skill could potentially result in a significant number of new leads. If LinkedIn members begin using this feature to contact and hire professionals, you're definitely going to want to be listed.

Or, on the other hand, if you're looking for an expert in a particular field or industry, this might be a great place to start looking!

One of the suggestions I've given people in the past is to seek out leaders and mentors in their field and learn from them. What better way to find an industry leader than to check on LinkedIn's Skills & Expertise? You can identify one or more individuals you might be interested in learning from and take a look at their profile, follow their updates, and subscribe to their blog.

Those are all fun, but there's one more use for Skills & Expertise that could be a game changer for you.

Social SEO

I'm sure you know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to making your website as attractive to search engines and their users as possible. You identify keywords that your potential customers are using in searches and find ways to increase the frequency and prominence of those keywords in your site code and text. But what about social media? How do we help social network users find our profiles? That is where Social SEO comes in.

All of the major social networks include internal search capability, and that's a feature that is continuing to be refined and improved (like with Facebook's Graph Search). And while targeting keywords like we do in traditional SEO plays a role, optimizing your social media profile for social search has some differences.

On LinkedIn, for instance, your profile lists your previous jobs and job titles, and includes a summary. Many people fail to take advantage of those fields. LinkedIn allows you to be as descriptive as you want, so power users take advantage of that and go into detail about where they've worked and what they've accomplished.

Now, thanks to Skills & Expertise (and Endorsements), we have a great way to monitor, adjust and improve our Social SEO for LinkedIn. Here's how it works.

Go back to Skills & Expertise and look up one of the skills you already have on your profile. Take note of its Relative Growth, Size and Age. Also make sure that the skill is growing compared to last year, and how much. Now, check out some of the related skills. What you're looking for are potential skills that will be even better for you to list on your profile.

You're limited to 50 total skills, so add any that apply to your profession until you reach your max. At that point, it's time to prioritize. You will want to look for skills that are growing, but aren't used by absolutely everyone. Like a long-tail keyword, a more specialized and less-common skill will make you more competitive.

Once you've refined your skill list and you're happy with them, it's time to fill up your endorsements! I am not a big fan of emailing LinkedIn users and asking for endorsements. Instead, sift through your own connections and start endorsing the people you know. They will get a notification and many will reciprocate.

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Social Media vs. Social Engagement

As a social media practitioner, I know it is sometimes overwhelming to remember all of the day-to-day responsibilities we have.

Did I post an update on Facebook?

Did I listen to all of my customers on Twitter?

What the bleep should I do with Pinterest?

How is my new YouTube video performing?

Add to these internal questions all of the inquires from corporate stakeholders, the blogs you have to read to stay updated on the latest trends, and education you must provide as a social pioneer, and it can seem like you are drowning in a sea of post-it notes (or in my case digital alerts).

As we covered, there is a lot of noise on the social Web so once you’ve started to Listen Up, Social Managers!, you can start engaging and the real fun can begin.  Here are some strategies I’ve deployed at Jive to gain efficiencies and ensure I’m spending my time doing the things that really matter.

Content Calendar

The first step is to create a detailed content calendar that tracks all of our proactive and reactive social conversations.  From Tweets to detailed blog posts, we are strategic about the dialogue we were starting and joining.

Integrated Content Strategy

Additionally, we leverage our limited resources.  For example, when we launch a new white paper, we re-purpose it into a series of blog posts, interview the author for a YouTube video, and promote all of these assets on both social and traditional outlets. This helps ensure we have a steady flow of information

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Vary Types of Conversations

We also focus on having different types of content and ensuring the frequency of each is relevant to each social channel (based on our previous ecosystem and engagement analysis).

• Industry / Social Business: Industry Trends (content created internally and externally), Hot Topics, Internal Expertise
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• Customer: Case Studies, Testimonials, Interviews
• Brand Persona: Culture/Fun Questions/Images, Tactical Takeaways, Relate-able Office Banter
• Niche Topics: Community Management, Customer Service, Technical, etc.
• Promotion: Jive Company News (e.g., new executives, new partners, press releases), Product/Solution Offerings, Product Updates
• Events: Industry Events, JiveWorld, etc.

Curate

We set a goal to have 50% of our content on sites like Twitter come from outside sources.  We wanted to ensure we were engaging and not a mass marketing machine.

Promote Content

Our plan for paid social is to Build, Nurture, and Convert our target audience. The early emphasis is to build Jive’s opt-in audience while opportunistically pushing conversions.  As we mature in this area, the mix will gradually shift as the nurture campaigns prove successful. (We are currently still working on this aspect our program).

Bridge Online and Offline

A great example of this is our recent Office Hero campaign, which we launched to help support a free 30-day trial of Social Business Software.  While the Office Hero YouTube video was central to our strategy, we wanted to engage in offline activities too.  So, we did some larger than life activities in NYC Times Square and at relevant events like BlogWell Chicago. We had social media coordinators on the streets engaging audiences, going to Good Morning America, and capturing all of it on sites like Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

  

How do you ensure you are building an engaging Social Business? What has worked well (and not so well)? Let’s learn from each other!

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