Wanna Connect?

Out of the all the social networks, LinkedIn is the one that feels safest for most small business owners. You are on LinkedIn to talk business and do business. There is none of this confusing funny cat video sharing or having conversations about what you’ve had for lunch.

You turn up on LinkedIn suited and booted, ready to connect with other business people. But when it comes to sending out invitations to connect on LinkedIn, how personal do you get?

The problem with sites such as LinkedIn is that it’s easy to click the links and send stuff out. To most of you, this may not be a problem. You want everything to be made easy. But when you get a message in your inbox like this, how does it make you feel?

Ummmm, I’m not a colleague of yours. I don’t work in the same company as you!

Or what about this one?

A friend? Nope, don’t know you! Don’t believe I send you a Christmas card!

There are limitations to the invitations you send out on LinkedIn. Absolutely. You have the choice of adding someone to your network by adding that they are colleague, classmate, friend or you’ve done business together. If you choose the “other” option, you have to add their email address here and hope it matches the one that they use on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn give you these options because they want to connect with people you know. It’s not a site you dive in to “collect” email addresses (although lots of people seem to!!).

So rather than just click a box and hit the send button, why don’t you take a moment to add a personal message.

Yup, this takes time. Yup, you have to think about why you want to connect with the person. But how much better is it for the person receiving your invitation to have something like this arrive in their inbox:

Or what about this:

You don’t need to write war and peace. Nor do you have to try to be clever, witty or intelligent. Just make it personal!

You should be able to guess why I would respond to these type of messages and quite often ignore the first ones.  And if you are just clicking and sending, you are probably getting lots of connections … but how many of those connections are likely to turn in to potential leads and a referral network for you and your business?

Make the effort and get your LinkedIn connections working harder for you.

By the way – the number one place this lack of message adding seems to happen is on the LinkedIn phone apps. It’s too easy to be on your iPhone LinkedIn app, cruising around and clicking the connect button! Stop – think before you click!

For more top LinkedIn tips and ways of getting LinkedIn working harder for you, join me this week on this month’s Web Tech Training Session. Click here for more details.

OMG! What did you just tweet about?

Whether you have started using social media in your marketing or not, there’s not a day that goes past without some celeb or footballer getting in trouble from one of their tweets or Facebook updates.

It seems that when it’s just us and our iPhones, it’s easy to forget that the messages we send out on Twitter or Facebook can reach anyone, anywhere in the world.  A drunken Friday night tweet seems funny at the time … but what if one of your clients sees it whilst sitting on their sofa at home?

Ignoring emails from a customer who is complaining about one of your products, whilst glibly updating your Facebook status with a “Don’t you just hate it when someone moans all the time and is not happy with what they get” is just going to set you up for a fall.

We’ve all seen this kind of stuff somewhere on the internet – or even in the headlines of the tabloids.

But does this mean you should be afraid of sharing too much private stuff on your public profiles?

If you just stick to business all the time, the “social” side of social media ignores you.  They turn their back on you and report you for spamming.

So, how public do you need to be about your private stuff to make social media work for your business?

There are 3 categories that I think most of your thoughts, feelings and ideas fit in to:

1. Public: this all the stuff that is about your business, your events, your products.  This includes launches of new programmes or workshops, appointments of new staff, winning new projects or new articles on your blog.  It’s all the stuff you really want potential clients reading about you and your business.

It tends to be the positive news you want to share, although every cloud usually has a silver lining so don’t be afraid of sharing bad news if you can find a way to add value from it.  Avoid the doom and gloom, but sometimes a honest bit of commentary makes you a “real” business.

2.  Public Private: the stuff you what you want to share with the world about you as a person.  This includes your personal thoughts about the latest industry developments, conferences or events you go to and what you had for lunch.

Yes, that’s right – what you had for lunch!

To make social marketing work, you have to be social.  And if you think about what you talk about when having “small talk” with someone you’ve just met, the topics usually focus on the weather (well, for Brits!), where you’re off on your hols this summer and what drink or food you are currently consuming.  So when people who just don’t get Twitter and wonder why anyone is interested in whether you had a bacon sandwich or a bowl of soup today, it’s because you are doing “small talk”.

Do it all day and every day, and it is very boring.  But make your public profiles a little private – share a “secret” or a personal fact about yourself – and you are able to show you are a human being and a very nice person to be doing business with!

3.  Private: stuff your customers really don’t need to know about you. This includes your kids’ names, your car registration number plate, your home number and the name of your bank.  Some of you, I know, do share stuff like your kids’ names.  And that’s OK as long as you consider this to be Public Private stuff and you don’t mind the whole world knowing this.

Announcing when you plan to go away on holiday is a common crime, especially if you work from home.  Why not just tell the local thief network when your house if going to be vacant?!

You want to avoid sharing anything that may cause clients to leave you in droves.  Remember the comment Gerald Ratner made about his jewellery in 1991?  It caused the company to go from a £112 million profit to a a £122 million loss a year later!  And that was all before the share-ability of social media.

I have a little rule when it comes to sharing stuff:  If it ends up on the front page of the Sun or the Times, I wouldn’t be worried my mum were to see it.

You can be as public or as private as you want to be on social media – the choice is yours.  As much as people moan and complain about Facebook and the default setting of “share everything with everyone”, you can tighten up your privacy settings as tight as you like.  You don’t have to be found if you don’t want to.

But just be prepared if what you share does get found.

If you want it kept private, then avoid those drunken Friday tweets and early morning Facebook rants!

Take your time over the company set up form

LinkedIn have been releasing some lovely new features to their company profiles over the past couple of months.

Competing alongside Facebook Pages, you can now add banners, videos and testimonials buttons which synch up with your website. Rather nifty!

But before you go dashing off creating your own company page, here 5 important things to consider:

1.  How do your clients think of you? LinkedIn is a valuable online professional network, but the reason is works so well is because it’s “you” that potential clients see.  They can check out your credentials, your previous career history and see what you look like – if you have a decent photo, of course!

If you are your business, do you really want to start acting like a company?

Of course there will be some of you who really can’t promote yourselves as a table-top business because that’s not the image your clients expect from someone in your industry.  But for most of you reading this, you probably pride yourself for being a home-working entrepreneur.  As soon as you create that company profile on LinkedIn, you have to back up that company brand.  And if your clients are looking for a “company” to work with, it could be diluting your efforts.

2.  How many profiles can you maintain … effectively? Your online branding and social media results are far more effective when you focus on a smaller number of profiles.  Leaving your digital footprint everywhere may create lots of links to your site, but if those footprints look dusty and out of date, the potential clients who find them may will be put off.

3.  Once created, almost impossible to delete. Once you have set up a company profile on LinkedIn it is almost impossible to get rid of it if you don’t want it any more.  So if your business evolves over the years and even changes it name and focus (and I know my business has certainly done that over the past 6 years!), then you may be stuck with a company profile floating around that you don’t want.

Yes, you can remove yourself from that company as an employee – but you have to go through the LinkedIn powers to get it deleted.

4.  How does that company look on your profile? Once you have created your company, LinkedIn asks what type of company you are – sole proprietorship, limited company, etc.  This will appear on your profile, next to your employer name on your CV.  So if you are branding yourself as a “company”, having the tag “Sole proprietorship” on your CV, kinda defeats the object.

So if you decide to create a company profile, don’t rush through that form.

5.  Which profile do your clients follow? If you are your business, then creating two different ways of potential clients to connect with you may cause confusion.  I know I experience this with Facebook – some people like to be my Friend but I try to keep my personal profile for “real” friends, family and people I have met physically or virtually elsewhere.  And others find me on my Page.  If someone I don’t recogonise sends me a friend request, I often point them in the direction of my Page instead.

After all, you have to be aware of your personal privacy and what you are sharing with the world.

As Facebook is more of a social network than LinkedIn  - it’s about connecting with friends and family on Facebook whereas LinkedIn is a suited and booted career and business platform – it makes sense to seperate out the business side of you if you use your Facebook profile for personal use.

But LinkedIn is all about business so there is less of a need to separate these two personas.  Why confuse your potential clients with multiple points of contact?

Creating a LinkedIn company profile may be the right thing for your business.  And if so, have some fun with these great new features.

But don’t get caught up with competing with your neighbours.  Just because him-over-the-road is polishing a new car, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go out and get one too!

If you knew you were expecting visitors at your home, would you leave your pots and pans stacking up in the kitchen sink and your washing hung up to dry in the front hall?

So why would you leave your website in a mess when you go out and invite interested clients in from social networks?

It’s great that you want to use tools such as Twitter and Facebook to drive traffic to your website.  It’s wonderful that you want people to find you from your tweets and updates.

But if your website is out of date or even looking a little bit shabby, then all your good work in providing links back to your website will be wasted.

Any clicks through to your website, will be quickly followed by the back button or delete page key.

Your website is your home.  And your social networking profiles are your doormats to your business.

And I see too many business owners getting carried away trying to get Twitter and Facebook to work for them, only to have their websites in a mess.  And it is usually these business owners who then claim to find that social media just doesn’t work.

Here’s what you need to your website to be to make sure your social media activity does work:

1. A website with a purpose.  If there is a no call to action when someone visits your site, then they will drift off again.  Give them a report to sign up to.  Offer something for free in exchange for their email address.  It’s absolutely critical you do this for your long term success as a small business.
2. A website that is focused to your target audience.  Too often a website is trying to be everything to everyone one.  If you are trying to engage with finance professionals on Twitter, then make sure your website is all about working with finance professionals.
3. A website that speaks the right language. Twitter and Facebook are very social networks.  They are relaxed and friendly.  If your links send them through to a stiff, corporate website, it may present a too big leap for someone to feel they have found what they are looking for.  Your copy and style certainly doesn’t need to be 140 character based tweets!  But you if step out of a warm hot bath in to a cold shower, then you are going jump out again very quickly :O)
4. A website that is about you. You are you on social networks.  Going from someone’s twitter feed who tweets about life as a solopreneur or a mum from working from home, in to a website that talks about the “royal we” and avoids any mention of being a small business, is just not going to be congruent to your online brand.  Decide to be one of the other – but don’t be both on different platforms.
5. A website needs to be up to date. An events page with workshops listed from 4 months ago just looks bad.  A “latest news” page with a press release from 2009 is lazy.  Get your events updated … or take the page down.

So get your house in order before you invite people in.  Get your website working for you.  You will find your social media results improve dramatically if you do.

Image walking in to a room full of Italian people and start a conversation in English.  There may well be a few people who would be able to switch over very easily from their Italian conversation, naturally in to yours.

But for most, it will probably be a challenge to switch languages mid conversation and, for some, they will have no idea what you are saying.

This is what happens when you try to speak one language in all your social networks – particularly when it comes to Twitter.

It’s really easy to get your Twitter account hooked up to automatically update your Facebook or Linkedn status every time you tweet.  Just use a tool such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and with a couple of clicks, you are able to synch up your accounts quicker than you can whistle.

But just because something is easy, it doesn’t mean you should do it.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook may get put in to the same social networking chapter of a marketing book, but they are actually very different communication platforms.  And with these three platforms comes three different languages.

LinkedIn is professional and business like.  Facebook is personal and fun.  Twitter is full of #, @, RT and text lingo.

On Twitter, the #, @, RT and acronyms work.  But use this language on your Facebook and LinkedIn account, it’s as if you are walking in to that room full of Italians without speaking Italian.

Some people will know exactly what you mean – they use Twitter, too.  But for most, they won’t know what on earth you are on about.  Potential clients, and certainly Robert De Diro, won’t be waiting for you if you do.

When businesses first started going online and creating websites to promote themselves, it seemed appropriate to replicate exactly what they did offline – create online versions of the brochures they sent out by mail or gave directly to clients.

But what worked in the 90’s and early part of this decade just doesn’t cut it in today’s web world.

Today’s web world is driven by the consumer. It’s no longer ruled by the corporates. Today, every consumer, no matter how influential, is able to have their say and control over what content they want to consume on the Internet.

And when you, as a business entity, start embracing social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, you start to lose control over how and where potential clients come to click through to your website.

Your website home page used to be THE page to get right on your website. It was the entrance, the grand opening, the doorway to how your business was portrayed on the web.

I know I have advised many clients over the years about how to create a home page that converts, engages and turns website visitors into potential customers.

But how many of your website visitors now come via this front door?

Two years ago, before I started using sites such as Twitter and Facebook as engagement tools, more than 55% of visitors came via my home page. Over the past few months, that figure has dropped to 32%.

My blog became incorporated into my main site in Spring 2009. Over the past year, Twitter and Facebook have been fuelling my blog articles. 31 different landing pages (the first page a website visitor is logged as visiting) in one month last autumn have now become 134 in the past month this year.

Now, I know that some of you reading this will have not started a blog yet. You may have only just started to dip your toe in the social media waters. So, yes – your home page may well still be that main front door where people find you.

But you’ve found me to learn more about this stuff haven’t you? When you start to embrace and turn up the volume of your online marketing, you will have to start thinking about the many doors to your website. And every page on your website needs to be prepared for your new visitors.

You need to get your house in order before you start laying out the welcome mats.

Here’s what you need to do to ensure every page on your website is a home page:

• Opt-in offer in your static margin – by having your navigation across the top of your website, you can make room for a static left or hand margin to offer your newsletter, opt-in report or what ever it is you use to build your subscriber list.  This static margin is automatically added to all new pages which means you don’t have to worry about remembering to add it.  Consistency and constant placement of your offerings will encourage familiarity with your website visitor and increase your opt-in conversions.
• Quality copy writing on every page – don’t loss steam and write throw away copy.  Your about page is a great example of this.  Often left to the end and put together in a hurry because you want your site to go live and you’ve had enough of all the tooing and froing, but if your name is mentioned on this page, then it’s probably this page that will come up on a Google search for your name.
• Make every page count – don’t create pages for the sake of creating content.  The same goes for your blog articles.  Post throw-away “cheap” articles just to keep the search engines happy because you think that’s what’s needed to get your website high up on the search listing, is a waste of time.  You will soon be the loser when the potential clients who find this content, click away because the content is dross.
• Contact details less than one click away – If you make it difficult for potential clients to speak to a human being, you are going to lose business.  One of the easiest ways of ensuring your contact details are easy to find is to make it part of your website banner design.

How would you feel if you got this message below?

“hi. I came across you when i was searching for a friend.Your beauty certainly have gotten me so hypnotized and I couldn’t look further,You have got cute looks probably that got me attracted to you.i will like to know you if you don’t mind,this is my email(XXXX@yahoo.com) and i will like to have your email too so we can get to know each other much more better.thank you and hoping to hear from you soon.bye.please send reply to my private email(XXXX@yahoo.com)”

This appeared in my Facebook messages this weekend.  I haven’t had anything like this for some while but the spammers where obviously busy this weekend and I got hit.

If you’ve just started using one of the social media networks, an inappropriate message can be disturbing and I would totally understand if the toe you’ve just dipped in to the water, gets hastily retracted.  There’s nothing like a creepy message from a total stranger to put you off from using sites such as Facebook and Twitter for life.

But don’t get put off – here’s how to deal with it.

1. Don’t take it personally. If this is the first time you have had an inappropriate message from this person, then you were probably not the only one to receive it.  So don’t take it personally – you and a few thousand of accounts have probably been hit with the same message.
2. Don’t reply. I know this may sound obvious because why would you want to reply to them.  But if the message makes you angry, don’t respond with an angry “get lost” (or words to that effect!) message back.  Giving attention to the person (or bot – remember it may not be a human being, but a computer programme doing this) will only alert them that you’re account is live and could encourage more messages.
3. Report them. All good social media networks will have a “report for spam” button.  In the case of Facebook, you will be able to find this link on their profile and the report will block their account from accessing yours.  Twitter give you this option, again on the profile of the person.  And although LinkedIn won’t allow to you totally block someone from viewing your account, you can de-connect with them from your contacts page.  The more people who block a particular account, the more likely the network will pick up these notifications and disable the account.

On Facebook, you are able to set your privacy settings so that you can’t receive messages from people who are not your friend.  However, if you are using Facebook to help promote yourself online, do remember you could be blocking off potential clients from getting in touch.  Decide how private you want to be on Facebook.

Very occasionally, an inappropriate message may lead to another.  And to another.  If you feel you are being stalked, then take steps to deal with it.  There is some very good advice in this article from the e-victims.org website.

But for most of you, these inappropriate messages are nothing more than a hit from spammers.  And I hope this advice helps.

What experiences have you had?  And what advice would you give?

When checking someone out on Twitter, do you check out their follower to following ratio?  Do you make assumptions about someone who has only a few hundred followers?  And do you think someone is a Twitter scammer if the ratio is heavily skewed one way or another.

Or don’t you really care?

I attended one of The Social Media Guys’ roadshow events yesterday at Reading where Graham Jones, Nigel Morgan and Ant Hodges ran a fab introduction session to the world of Social Media.  And in the session that Ant Hodges ran, he talked us through a few “don’ts” to help get people started.

One of the big “don’ts” was not to follow some of the scammer-type Twitter advice of artifically inflating following numbers.  He went on to describe someone on Twitter who was only following a few hundred people but actually had several thousand following them back.

OMG!! That was me!! I am currently following just 295 people and yet I have 3,038 people following me back.  According to the picture Ant painted, I was perceived to be a quick-fix, “let-me-teach-you-how-to-earn-6-figures-in-just-one-month” kind of business.  Noooooooooo!!!

I was rather proud of the fact that, over the past two years, I have attracted targeted followers without having to subscribe to systems such as Tweetadder or follow such Twitter scammer schemes which Ant was suggesting.

I actually had the opposite perception – people who had thousands of people following them but where following thouands of people back were the Twitter scammers.  They were only following those thousands of people to get people to follow back, and inflate their follower numbers.  Even if this was based on targeted searching, they weren’t “real” followers.  They were only people who had their auto-follow switched on and the systems where creating the follow lists – not the individual.

And here lies the dilema.  Ant Hodges follows 5,016 people and has 5,265 people following him back.  He has the ratio that I perceive to be “wrong” – but he isn’t a Twitter scammer.  I’ve met him and (apart from being a very nice chap!) he obviously knows his stuff and shared some great insights in to Social Media mental mindsets during yesterday’s session.  He told me he follows anyone who engages with him and uses Twitter Lists to manage his Twitter feed.

So does the Twitter follow and follower ratio help you decide on who to follow?

Do high Twitter follower numbers along with a low Twitter following mean that a person is a Twitter Rock-God? Or are they are a Twitter scammer?

As Ant pointed out during the session, it’s easy to check on how authentic a Twitter account is.  You only have to check to see how long the account has been open for and to run the Twitter name check through systems such as Klout to check the quality of their Twitter numbers.  But do regular Twitter users really do this?

Or don’t you really care?

This has certainly made me re-think my perception of some Twitter accounts, as well as making me realise that other people do not always perceive things they way you do – no matter how “right” you think your perception is.

Personal perceptive is, at the end of the day, reality.

What do you think?  Is this something you take note of?  Or is really just a non-topic that you don’t really care about?

A question that comes up weekly is what on earth is Follow Friday on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have it’s own unique language and acronyms and it’s easy to get lost and confused trying to translate it.

So as it’s Friday and it is officially Follow Friday in the Twitterverse, here is a short video showing you what Follow Friday is all about.  And,   more importantly, how to use it constructively so that it adds value to your followers and stops you from looking like a spammer!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoBd3Op1PQ

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For more videos like these, check out the all new CanDoCanBe Web Tech Club

Up and down the country, there appears to be a domino effect.  Advertising agencies, marketing departments, web masters – they all seem to be bolting on “Like Me” Facebook buttons and “Follow Me on Twitter” links to websites.

People are being friended on Facebook by national carpet companies and major coffee chains. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be friends with these sorts of brands. And certainly don’t consider carpet companies or coffee chains to be on my Christmas card list this year.

Many of these campaigns seem to be knee jerk reactions to the media frenzy surrounding social networks and the CEO’s or Marketing Director’s demand to keep up with the times. If it’s there, we must use it!

There is no doubt that social media can be a very powerful communication channel. When used right, it can harness the power of raving fans who promote links to your latest promotions without you even having to ask them, let alone pay them.

And platforms such as Twitter provide an excellent way of searching and finding negative feedback about your products, giving you the opportunity to reach out and solve these problems.

So, are these new social networks critical new ways of communicating with your customers? Or are they the Emperor’s new clothes – the next new shiny thing to add to the marketing mix, that doesn’t really work?

Before jumping on the bandwagon, here are some essential points to consider:

1. Your Customers: Is social media an appropriate channel to communicate with them?  How are they using Facebook?  Are they signed up to Twitter? And are they using these platforms to connect with brands? It’s essential you do the right market research before embarking on a social media project, so start with your current customers. It will save you money and months of time and energy.

2. Your competitors: Just because your major competitors are doing it, doesn’t mean you have to. This “copy them” mentality is the reason why certain advertising media, such as The Yellow Pages, have survived as long as they have. Yes, innovation can make you stand out but do your market research first, rather than race to be one step ahead just to have the Twitter logo on your leaflets.

3. Your current marketing strategy: The danger of jumping in to social media unprepared is that it can be an all consuming activity. Many businesses will take resources out of one area of their marketing mix before starting something new. And if you take away resources from something that works already, only to get sucked in to the new technology hype – it could put you back even further. Add social media – don’t replace it with something that works already just because it’s “old hat”.

4. Your website: If you have a standard brochure-type website, bolting on the Twitter and Facebook logo on to the home page is just not going to cut it. Why would you want to direct traffic away from your own site, in the first place?! Take a step back and work out why your customers would want to “like” you on Facebook or go check out your Twitter feed. What value are you creating? And how can this add to your online visitor’s journey?

5. Your outcome: Have clear goals and objectives to your social media plan. What results are you expecting? And how are you going to measure them? Just because something looks cool or pretty, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s adding to your bottom line. Social media is not a place to do hard sales, but it’s got to have a return on your investment.

Social media is here to stay, so don’t continue to ignore it. Brands are no longer dominating the web and it’s the customers who are having their say (just check out sites like Trip Advisor or Amazon to realise how powerful customer testimonials and complaints can be).

But don’t have a knee jerk reaction to social media and just bolt on that Facebook page and Twitter account. Because if you do, it won’t work and you will end up with the Emporer’s new clothes!

Quick Plug - Stuck on how Twitter works?  If you want make sure Twitter doesn’t become a waste of time you, check out this month’s Web Tech Twitter Training.  Click here for more details.