Social Media

LinkedIn – More than a resume

March 6, 2018 by Yvonne 2 Comments

LinkedIn has become the most powerful platform B2B (business to business) people have to demonstrate their experience and build authority in their area of expertise.

I’ve been on the platform for almost 14 years. It had become quite tiresome and gloomy by the time Microsoft purchased it. Their first few developments were a little clumsy and glitchy, but this past year has seen vast improvements leading to somewhat of a LinkedIn Renaissance.

LinkedIn is compelling and vital for any person who relies on a quality network of connections for their role – think business owners, executives, leaders, sales professionals and teams.

In my keynote (and accompanying optional workshop), I uncover a 3 step philosophy to LinkedIn Success using a fishing analogy (I love fishing but don’t go enough!).

1: Bait the hook

2: Cast the line

3: Reel in the big one

Bait the hook

Ditch the resume style list of your achievements. Prepare your LinkedIn profile to ensure it illustrates your area of expertise, your level of experience and your authority in your area.

Make it more conversational – ensure you utilise the Summary section to write a 1st person introduction. Imagine you’re answering the questions:

Who are you; What is your speciality area; What led you to this point; What are you working on now?

The most recent THREE jobs are important to expand on, but anything beyond that can remain as a basic list.

Add multimedia elements to your profile such as Slideshare presentations; video; PDFs and articles.

Ask for Recommendations from recent clients and colleagues.

Cast the line

Fish where the fish are. LinkedIn Groups are the most under-utilised, endlessly useful feature of LinkedIn. Find groups related to your area of expertise and interest, join them, join conversations by commenting first then launch a conversation of your own.

People in groups get 4 x more profile views

Further to the standard search box, there’s a trick to finding great Groups to join:

Go to the profile page of a colleage, competitor or industry leader. As you scroll down their profile, you’ll find ‘Interests’, usually towards the bottom. Hit ‘See All’ at the bottom of that box, then view the Groups they have joined. Join any relevant ones yourself.

You are 70% more likely to get an appointment when citing a common group

Get into a Connections habit. After every meeting, industry event, group email, webinar or networking function go to LinkedIn and Connect with each person you met. On desktop, LinkedIn will often ask for that person’s email address. The trick is to use the LinkedIn phone app to search for that person and hit Connect. You won’t need to provide further information.

You don’t have to accept every connection request you get. If it doesn’t feel right, ignore it.

Write ARTICLES. You will notice the ‘Write an article’ button in the same location as your status updates. Articles are your way to demonstrate your thought leadership in a longer form. People searching the platform for the subject matter will find your article and connect with you.

Reel in the big one

B2B buyers are 5 x more likely to engage when outreach is through a mutual connection

The more connected you are to the right people, the more likely you’ll be the one who receives a referral when someone in your network is asked ‘do you know someone who…’.

Dale Carnegie research found 91% of customers would give a referral to potential new customer, but only 11% of people ask for it.

There’s a great technique for warming up a potential connection – someone you’re keen to connect with but don’t have any mutual connections:

Ensure you have the default ‘can see who viewed my profile’ setting on.
View the potential connection’s profile.
You’ll see within a few days, they’ll view your profile.
Send them a message and a connection request.

And finally – you know how LinkedIn lets you know when someone starts a new job? Remember this: new employees are 10 x more likely to make a buying decision! UTILISE this LinkedIn information to reach out to your connections who start new jobs – then you’re part of the BUYING process rather than the SELLING process.

For enquiries about my LinkedIn Profile Building keynote, workshop or webinar go to www.yvonneadele.com

Success with Social Media for Events

March 6, 2018 by Yvonne 1 Comment

Gone are the days of being able to get away without social media platforms for our events, but the frustration is still higher than ever. As a very busy MC, I am involved in many events a year. Each event has a social presence, but event planners are struggling to get the desired engagement, and show tangible ROI. Often you can hear the tumbleweeds blowing through the blank canvas.

It’s best to expand the ‘social media’ term to ‘Online Marketing’ – which then includes your website activity in addition to the traditional social platforms.

WHY online marketing?

Online marketing is the EARNED part in your marketing landscape. You’ve also got BOUGHT (advertising) and OWNED (website, staff, building, email database).

If done ON PURPOSE, online marketing can assist you with all aspects of your event from organising it, promoting it, delegate experience through to continuity to keep the conversation going after the event.

To do it on purpose, you need to start with the end goal in mind. You’re either selling tickets to an event, or for corporate conferences full of employees: you’re looking to build the buzz. In both cases, you’ll provide a platform for delegates to begin connecting with each other before the event even begins.

Let’s break it down to BEFORE, DURING and AFTER your event:

BEFORE:

A rich, compelling newsletter is the perfect way to keep the conversation going with potential delegates in the lead up to your event. The more relevant subscribers you have, the more people you have permission to market to. The key to getting people to sign up is to offer something irresistible in return for their email address. For example, I’ve got www.yvonneadele.com/topfive – a ‘Digital Marketing Top Five’ a download anyone can grab if they sign up. Once they have signed up, I know that type of content is relevant to them and they are now in the funnel for that topic.
Set up Google Alerts www.google.com/alerts – You can tell Google to send you an email every time someone mentions your competitor, your industry terms, your speakers, your sponsors or you. This is a great research tool and gives me a never ending supply of content for blog posts etc.
Begin to gather social credentials of your speakers, exhibitors, partners and create a Twitter list with them in it. You can use this to quickly see new content from those people and also share the list with your delegates.
Create a blog post at least once a month – preferably once a fortnight. Why? To bring relevant eyeballs to your final destination : your website. Blogging provides as many roads as possible to travel to the final destination. Think of it this way: Someone is doing a Google search using terms related to your industry or event. If you’ve done one blog post every month with those search terms included.. you’ve now provided 12 roads into your website. Imagine if you’d done 3 blog posts a month.. that’s 36 roads into your website.
CHOOSE TWO social channels only. Facebook should be the 1st one. Then choose Twitter if you’re marketing to business people or Instagram if you’re marketing to consumers.
Have each of your speakers do a selfie-style short 1-2min video with a couple insights they’ll be sharing at the event.
Load the videos to your YouTube Channel
Share the videos and other relevant content about the event across your social channels

DURING

Use a unique hashtag and ensure your event materials, your MC and your speakers mention it often.
Encourage delegates to post highlights including video and photos by offering a prize (2 tickets to next year’s event / tickets to the gala dinner) for the best post.
Be sure to retweet and share the best posts from your delegates.
Do short live videos with your most valuable exhibitors/sponsors (more ROI for them!)

AFTER

Keep the conversation going by thanking your speakers on the social channels.
Curate a great sample of social posts from the event and put these into a newsletter for a few days later, with a special early bird offer to buy tickets for next year.
Your Google Alerts should let you know whenever someone does a blog post or mention of your event, so you can be sure to engage with / share that content.
TO measure the effectiveness of your hashtag, use a platform such as www.tweetreach.com

Get in touch with me to discuss having me MC your next event – as your MC I assist with social media strategy and amplification of your marketing across my own social platforms. www.yvonneadele.com

Professional Eavesdropping (psst!)

September 12, 2014 by Yvonne Leave a Comment

In real life the art of conversation is as much about listening as it is talking. So too on the social web.

Listening, or – in social media terms – ‘monitoring the conversation’ – is a critical first step when embarking upon your social media marketing program and just as important ongoing.

Take Twitter, for example.

Twitter is often likened to a busy bar. Now, imagine you’re a stranger in town: you wouldn’t enter a bar full of bravado and start shooting your mouth off, would you? Not if you want to make friends, anyway! You’d sit down, observe your surroundings to get insight into the lay of the land, keep your ears open to who is both interesting and interested in others, and gravitate towards them. Then you’d consider joining in and only when it makes sense to do so.

The same with Twitter. Rushing in and tweeting for the sake of being ‘part of the conversation’ – especially if you’re new – is not the best way to win friends or influence people.

Like most social norms, there are unwritten protocols on Twitter. Taking things steadily in the first instance, listening before bursting forth with too much enthusiasm is recommended – we cover more of this in the Twitter module coming up soon.

Three things to be aware of when monitoring the social web:

1: Stand back. Watch and ‘listen’ before jumping in. We call it professional eavesdropping –

The best way to begin to understand how it works and discover who the active players are in your circle is to ‘eavesdrop’ on their conversations. Very quickly you’ll develop great confidence in the nuances of social networks, the tone of language used – not to mention the online ‘shorthand’ like 🙂 or 😎 if you wear glasses like Yvonne and Trevor!

2: Look for red flags –

For major services-based business such a bank or telco or airline, it is absolutely critical to keep an ear out for any pending issues or potential threats happening in online conversations. As a small business, you should also keep the radar on via free monitoring tools (see later in this module) but don’t get overly-paranoid about negative comments. They can be just as useful for your customer service reputation as a positive testimonial. Monitoring conversations about your brand and your industry will give you the edge.

3: Find opportunities –

This is the exciting part of being involved in social media. As an active participant you will always show up, add value, be authentic and helpful. When an opportunity to contribute presents itself you will feel compelled to join in. You’ll see it as clear as day. Eg: you’re an accountant and someone on Twitter asks whether anyone knows the answer to a specific tax question. A mutual connection suggests you, you answer the question and the person who asked it becomes a new follower for you. However, if you’re inactive on Twitter and just show up when you’ve got a tax-time special offer to talk about you’ll be going against the spirit of the social-web and gain no followers.

A great example of this is 13CABS who monitor Twitter for hashtags (see ‘Whats a hashtag’ below) about events happening around town. As the event seems to be drawing to a close, they make sure there are cabs available outside and they leave a friendly mention on Twitter using the same hashtag like: ‘Hi everyone at #imbs14 – hope you’ve had a great day. We have cabs waiting outside for you’

Clever huh!?

What’s a hashtag?

The # symbol on Twitter is known as a hashtag. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to group related messages together during a search. For instance, we can guess there would be a hashtag #smallbiz for tweets relating to small business topics. Search for it on Twitter and you’ll see how it works. If you’re tweeting a topic related to small biz, add the hashtag anywhere in your tweet and it too will appear in the search results!

Monitoring is essentially about OPPORTUNITY.

The opportunities include:

Building your network
Helping others
Demonstrating your expertise
Building relationships with colleages
Creating valuable content
Leveraging an online crisis

So as you can see, the social web is not a place where you can just show up every now and then, add your two bob’s worth, and then leave again. Not if you’re fronting up as a business. There are plenty of reasons to participate regularly, and this means monitoring the array of social channels where your customers hang out – watch, listen, learn, respond…keep an eye out for negative sentiment (directed at your business, or your competitors) as well as potential issues by all means, but also don’t forget to mine the online space for opportunities to get noticed and have people engage with your brand.

(originally written in conjunction with Trevor Young)