LinkedIn (connecting with high-level networkers)

Mainly used as a social network for business professionals and high-level networking, you can potentially engage customers by encouraging your team members to answer industry-related questions that people post, and become known as an expert in the field. LinkedIn is great for personal branding as well as showing your organization’s portfolio. To make your company profile even more powerful, have your team members maintain complete profiles to show off how amazing and talented your team is. LinkedIn has been excellent in helping with search engine optimization, pushing individual, personal names of people with active profiles to the top ranks of search results. As far as site traffic goes, it isn’t as consistent as Facebook or as viral as Digg or Twitter, but it’s getting better.

You will love how you can utilize LinkedIn to get a hold of people in companies that you’d like to do business with. It’s far easier to have a way in when you both know someone in common. You can also keep track of colleagues and clients that change companies. If they change companies or location, your obsolete business card can’t match LinkedIn’s ability to let you see where they have gone, and keep you in contact—especially if you want to continue to do business with them.

LinkedIn isn’t a dynamic site like Facebook where it’s easy to have casual conversations with people, or send them quirky links on the spur of the moment. Rather, it’s a fairly static site that mainly allows you to:

• host a resume-like profile for yourself;

• have access to similar information about other people;

• show off the fact that you’re networking with other people in such-and-such a field.

Another great benefit, of course, is the recommendation feature, where you can have someone write a recommendation for you, so if a prospective employer Googles your name, they’ll go to your LinkedIn profile and find your friend’s comment about how you are so amazing to work with.

To make it easy for people to message you via LinkedIn, include your email in parentheses next to your username—for instance, Suzie@ suziescompany.com. This way, someone that finds you on LinkedIn and genuinely wants to talk to you doesn’t need to worry about how to send you a LinkedIn message—they can just send you a regular email. It is just another way to use LinkedIn as a way to initiate spontaneous conversations. LinkedIn is a really well-focused site if you are of the mind that networking is an important key to your professional/ business success, it’s pretty-much becomes the place to be.

A few features to ♥ about LinkedIn

• The “Recommendations” section is an excellent way to build your social proof

• The “Groups” offer a world of opportunity for any business

• The ability to see how connected a profile is so you can link up with high level networkers.

Twitter (engaging with prospects and customers)

Twitter is an excellent communications tool allowing for quick, simple, and to-the-point conversations with prospects and customers. It is a great monitoring site and works well for management of conversations. Twitter is not all about what you have to say; it is more about what you can get others to say about you, or do what is called ReTweet (RT), or “forward” your posts and content. Getting RTs and having ongoing interactions can do more for brand exposure than any other social site. Twitter is an exceptional tool for assisting with traffic generation from other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. As with Facebook, Twitter isn’t very high up there when it comes to search engine optimization and helping with your page ranking.

Twitter really is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives; yep, that pretty much sums it up. Curious people can make friends, bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool, developers can use Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to make Twitter tools of their own—the possibilities are endless! So how does this all translate into business? Not only can you use it as a place to have live, interactive conversations, you can also use it as a research and development tool. For example, if you are looking for paid speaking engagements, you can look up keyword conversations using Twitter’s advanced search tool to locate meeting planners, corporate events, marketing events, etc.—to find and connect with people who are either in the meeting planning industry, or maybe talking about an upcoming marketing event. You can find dozens of speaking opportunities this way. Think of Twitter like an active, ongoing business mixer that you can jump in and out of at any time and have a conversation with any of the people who are following you or that you are following.

A few things to ♥ about Twitter

• Creating lists so you can view Tweets by certain people in your news feed

• It is a great monitoring tool to stay informed about what people are saying about you or your industry online

• It’s an amazing research tool, with advanced search options that will help you find any opportunity you want, whenever you want.

YouTube (exposure and brand control)

YouTube is still one of the hottest video sites on the internet and is now known as a top search engine online. People are starting to research companies’ reputations by visiting YouTube to check their channel and/or videos. Make sure that your videos and messaging are consistent and in line with your brand when posting on YouTube or any video channel. When you tag your videos with powerful keywords concentrate on your branding and industry focus, YouTube is an excellent source for search engine ranking. Video is widely becoming known as a great tool to use to do reputation repair, as well as to do question-and-answer quick clips or respond to customer complaints.

Seeing an adorable baby saying things that even adults shouldn’t be saying on YouTube.com has its giggle value. But what some people don’t realize are the practical reasons to utilize one of the greatest resources available to the public. Need to know how to tie a tie, right now? YouTube is an excellent and quick resource when you need to get this right, and fast. Thanks to the advent of YouTube, late-bloomers who never learned this skill can go online and see a step-by-step video tutorial on how to tie a plethora of different types of knots. The person who posted the video had made it part of his branding, which he promoted by offering a valuable how-to for his customers and potential buyers.

YouTube is also an exposure outlet. Think about how many people have become famous for doing idiotic things and posting them on the internet, as compared to legitimately trained actors and actresses who have based their lives on trying to become famous. It’s coming to a point where being famous is as easy as catching a candid moment on tape, and not being embarrassed of your boss or prospects possibly seeing it.

A few things to ♥ about YouTube

• The feature that allows videos to be embedded directly onto a website

• Setting options to make videos public or private

• You can assign a vanity name as your own channel user name for more powerful branding

StumbleUpon (content recommendation engine)

StumbleUpon is not a communications social site; it is more of a content engine. The “Paid Discovery” option can be good for brand awareness because you can target your message very accurately, but keep in mind you will pay $.05 per visit ($50 CPM—cost per 1,000 impressions). It is a good thing if your story makes it to the top page for its tag, and when that happens, you might get hundreds of thousands, even millions, of visitors. Due to StumbleUpon’s large user base, many people can find your stories and link to them. Stumbleupon is getting better for search engine ranking, especially when your site or story gets main stage.

StumbleUpon, hereafter referred to as SU, is one of the social websites that was started with a vision of allowing users to find what they are looking for with the help of ratings provided by scores of other users. Based on the recommendations of users, SU helps you find the right content, be it web pages, videos, photos, or sites which otherwise could have been difficult using a search engine. In the internet lingo, it is best known as a recommendation engine as opposed to a search engine.

If used effectively, SU is an excellent internet marketing tool that can assist an individual or a company in growing their business. A few benefits of SU are increased traffic by helping you increase the footprint of your site to the entire world. In order to make this happen, you have to get your site in the SU system by listing it and encourage readers/ visitors to start rating it. The more thumbs up you get, the better, because it means users like your site, posts, videos, photos, etc., which attracts others and translates into increased traffic to your site.

SU can also help you boost your page rank. This is done through backlinks. When you have many visitors providing links to your site from their own site, it adds a point to increase your site’s page rank. With increased page rank, your site now becomes visible to the world when users enter keywords that match your site’s contents into the search engine. This ultimately will help you bring more traffic to your site, which leads to greater exposure for your products and/or services to the masses.

One of the greatest features of SU is that it allows you to analyze and visualize your site’s incoming traffic. This information is crucial to any marketer, because it helps in understanding visitors’ surfing habits on the site. Research shown via SU has the lowest bounce rate, meaning few users leave immediately after landing on your site. Because SU is a recommendation engine that is virtually run by its massive user base, SU is just like word of mouth.

A few things to ♥ about StumbleUpon

• You can choose to have SU email you top sites, content, videos, etc., related to your keywords and industry.

• It is a great word-of-mouth tool for valuable content.

• The possibilities of one of your content pieces becoming viral via this site’s traffic are awesome.

Digg (content discovery and delivery)

Digg is not a site used for customer interaction, but a content engine where you can post your stories, tips, videos, etc., and see if people “Digg” it. The more Diggs you get, the more exposure is possible. You might even end up on a Digg’s front page story. Brands have an opportunity to gain mass exposure on Digg, particularly through stories posted about your company. It is a site for content discovery and delivery. Digg seems to be one of the most consistent viral-traffic generation sites that can send tens of thousands of visitors to an individual post in a matter of hours. Even if your story doesn’t become popular, it will still get your page indexed very quickly. Also, if your story does become popular, this is likely the best site in terms of getting the attention of bloggers who will link to you—a great way to build blog partner relationships.

The long-term benefit is bigger and undervalued when it comes to sites like Digg. More people are starting to use alternatives to Google to find stuff on the web, hence the popularity of sites such as Digg and SU. According to a post on Digg, “61 percent of Digg visitors go to posts older than a month, 37 percent go to posts from this month, and 12 percent go to current news.

A few things to ♥ about Digg

• Using it as a research tool when looking for facts or statistics

• The content is often better in regard to being relevant and more recent, compared to what you find on Google

• It is easy to navigate and customize your account for an even better user experience

WordPress (website or blog base to use as your foundation online and post content)

WordPress is an open source content management system (CMS), which in English means you can openly and easily make changes to the site. Often used as a blog publishing application, it has many features including “themes,” a template system using a template processor. Users can re-arrange widgets without editing any code; they can also install and switch between themes. WordPress also features integrated link management, is search engine-friendly, and has supports for tagging posts and articles.

We’ll spend a little extra time here in the WordPress section because you will love its capabilities and easy-to-use features. First of all, the fact that WordPress is free to use just makes it rock all together. One need not be tech-savvy on codes in order to start blogging. The WordPress software does the coding for you so even a kid can start blogging. OK, maybe a kid isn’t a great reference, being that most kids can pass up adult html and technology skills in a matter of just a few minutes! The point is, all you have to do is write something down and hit the “publish” button. What makes it even more attractive is the fact that WordPress sites are pretty darn spam resistant. If spam bugs you, you need not worry, since WordPress has a strong system to combat it. It uses the well-known Askimet, the best spam blocker in the world today. In fact, it is so effective that it can block around a thousand spam comments on some WordPress bloggers daily. Should the system be infiltrated by spam, it can easily be reported to be kept away and off the system.

WordPress is amazing for search engine optimization and Google seems to love WordPress-powered sites. Time and again, they tend to rank easier quicker and stronger than other software platforms. Combining Worpdress with a great search engine optimization program increases your chances of having strong, natural rankings within the search engines. WordPress continues to offer new plug-ins that automate search engine optimization for your site. A favorite SEO is Scribe (scribeseo.com), where, for a minimal monthly fee, you can have your keywords automatically updated and incorporated onto your site.

The fact that WordPress is easy to install and customize makes switching to it a no-brainer. (Was that convincing enough to make you switch your website to a WordPress based site?) The themes used to present your content are easy to change and because it is open source software, users all over the globe are designing new themes every minute that can be used to put the color and creativity in your blog site to reflect your personality or the nature of your business. You can also categorize and even tag your posts at the time you are writing them. Your post can be categorized by date and category, which makes browsing your blog or site easier. Categorizing your blogs also improves search engine optimization results since the same topics are grouped together. It is also a good way to organize entries for easier management and archiving. To boost your posts even further, users in the WordPress community have engineered thousands of plug-ins that are also available for installing on your blog site. They are intended to customize the blog according to the desired purpose of the blogger, and some provide powerful business solutions such as ecommerce and subscription modules, usually free of charge.

A few things to ♥ about WordPress

• The privacy options: you can create a completely public blog site, or a private one that only members can access, or a per-post password option, which is an occasional private entry in a public blog. It is a wonderful membership-based tool as well.

• The Blog Talk feature—you get to receive comments and feedbacks automatically from the readers who, at their option, may post them to your blog. You also have the option to control who and who cannot comment in your blog.

• Thank goodness for the spell-check editor that makes writing easier. That is all that needs to be said here!