R.N. Johnson Creative Marketing

Best Way To Help Clients Get Underway

We’re introducing a new social media tool kit for clients, thanks to Tom McDunn and his LeptLikeABlog approach. We’ve been working for several months getting up to speed on a versatile way to introduce social media to companies who may be waiting in the wings to get started.

Let’s start by looking at our simple concept illustration, which is very much a work-in-progress. The large oval illustrates a blog centric approach to social media. This means your framework is built on blogging as the core tool. After all, without great content, especially with business-to-business or professional firms, you really don’t have much to be social about… unless, you’re actually demonstrating your expertise, knowledge and thought leadership. Visitors aren’t going to follow you on Twitter unless you have something interesting to say. A blog is the best place to start doing this.

You’ll note as well that above the centered oval you’ll find a smaller oval for “inbound links.” This represents people who comment on your blog. As you may know, Google loves blogs for this reason. Inbound links show people are interested in what your firm has has to say. The more comments on your posts, the better. The more highly ranked your blog becomes, the more authority it will have.

This in turn leads to feeding your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. These are the most popular and “proven” applications in the world of social media. Your blog becomes your content engine. Each post is Tweeted using the headline (with a shortened URL), or sent out to your Facebook presence. Additionally, your LinkedIn account is “fed” post information is well. Though from a technical standpoint it’s not quite the same thing as an RSS feed, which we will get into with subsequent posts.

Finally, your blog can be monitored in TweetDeck, to make it a smoothly running social media system that you’ll enjoy using on a daily basis.

Interesting LinkedIn quote on Mashable that may mean something important for entrepreneurs. Overall, LinkedIn appears to rank in second place among the best, i.e. “top ten” social media sites for up & coming start-ups and highly entrepreneurial businesses:

From hiring to networking with cohorts and potential clients to participating in groups and question threads, LinkedIn is a powerful social network for entrepreneurs and business professionals of all stripes. It’s a great place to both discover and research potential job candidates (with a reported 75% of hiring managers using it over Facebook and Twitter), as well as both keeping up with and extending your network.

Like many other entrepreneurial firms, our Agency is working fast and furiously on social media strategies for clients and ourselves. LinkedIn has been growing exponentially in recent years. However, like other social media choices, it’s not an instant success kind of thing. You need to position yourself as an expert in the LinkedIn Answers domains, particularly in the ones that will best reflect your professional interest. This is a very good way to underscore your credentials and experience in a fast growing professional social media environment. As the aforementioned post on Mashable suggests, you’ll increase your authority and drive more traffic to your website with an effective use of LinkedIn.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to ask for advice on LinkedIn as well. You don’t have to be the oracle of the tribe at all times. It also works well to be asking intelligent questions.

Here’s another good link on LindedIn from a recent post on “Lept Like a Blog.”

Are you making good use of your LinkedIn presence?

As always, we like to hear what you think.