Web Marketing: The Nitty Gritty of Social Media

We’ve heard it a million times. Twitter this, Facebook that, Link in here, Tweet there, Facebook everywhere. For a print shop owner who is already burning the midnight oil on a hundred other projects, that’s pretty overwhelming. And while we know from these articles, blogs, news stories, and more that setting yourself up in the social media world is unavoidable at this point, no one is really telling us how to do it. How can we make the most effective use of our already taken time to embrace this world without hiring a whole new staff? How can we make social media manageable, yet truly impactful to our printing customers and prospects? Most importantly, how do we make money from it and secure lots and lots of new prospects?

My advice, let’s break social media down to the basics. This article will be the first in a series where we talk about exactly how to make use of each of the big three social media giants—LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. My hope is that you can use these as a check list to take the mystery out of these tools and make them manageable and relevant to your specific audience—the print buyer. You might be surprised how fairly little can go a long way when it comes to embracing social media.

I’d like to start with the social media tool that I believe should be your first step—LinkedIn.

Why start here? It’s purely a business community. LinkedIn makes life a little easier just by that fact alone. It takes the guesswork out of what’s appropriate because there’s very little (if any) posting of personal information. It will be easy to understand what type of information to add to your profile simply by reviewing a few others.

It’s easy to connect. When you ask someone to connect with you on LinkedIn, you’re not asking to be their “friend” you are simply asking to be their business associate—which you already are. So acceptance is much quicker and easier than with other social media tools.

Your people will be here. Do a quick search for 10 of your customers and I bet you find that more than half already have a LinkedIn profile. You can also use your existing email contacts and LinkedIn will do the contact searching for you. Doesn’t get much easier than that.

We’ve only just begun. I believe in the next 18-24 months there will be more and more of a shift towards using LinkedIn for all types of business connections. People are already using this tool as an address book, a replacement for email, and as their site of choice for sharing all of their business happenings (books they’re reading, business trips they’re taking, even sharing presentations and slides).

It’s so very searchable. An updated, active LinkedIn profile has a very good chance not only of being highly visible on LinkedIn, but ranking very high on search engines in general.

Okay, now that you’re convinced, let’s get to it. Here’s the step by step on how to make a quick, easy, yet impactful presence on LinkedIn.

Step One: Set Up

When you join LinkedIn you will be required to set up a profile. Add basic information about yourself (your business self) such as your company information and, most importantly, your company website. You can complete the “Experience” section simply with “Owner, XYZ Print Shop,” but be sure to add any awards, distinctions, or certifications you’ve received under “Additional Information” to add some credibility to your profile. If you’ve already completed this step but haven’t been back since, make sure your information is up to date.

Add a quick blurb about your company under “Summary” and be sure to add a few items to “Specialties” so that if someone is searching for a printer with your expertise, your profile may come up. Think about words a print buyer would use to search for a provider and add those to your specialties—direct mail, marketing consulting, or logo design, for example.

If you have a little more time, you may also want to consider adding information to your “Professional Headline.” This is the blurb that will appear directly under your name in your profile. It will default to your current job position if you don’t add anything; however, experts now say this is one of the best ways to get noticed if someone searches for your industry. They recommend that you answer the question “How do you help people?” here instead. But don’t stress over it if it doesn’t come easily—remember you can go in and update or change your profile at any time.

Ignore that “percent complete” number on the side of the profile and don’t cringe if you are only 80% of the way there. Try your hardest not to get caught up in details like this. Your profile will still get noticed through other tactics, even though you’re not at 100%. In fact, you may not even be close, and that’s okay. I promise.

Step Two: Connect

Small steps are key to keeping this part of LinkedIn manageable. Commit to connecting to five people per week. They could be customers, business associates, vendors, or other employees in your company—actually the more diversified your connections, the better. If you are engaged in professional organizations, that’s a great place to find contacts that quickly connect you to the community. A great feature of LinkedIn is once you are connected to someone, you are immediately connected to their entire network (“six degrees” style), so you might be surprised how quickly and easily you can build a network.

Also, LinkedIn can do a lot of the work for you here. The system can use your email address book and find those contacts for you on LinkedIn. And once you have a started a network, the system will continuously send suggestions to you of people you might know based on your location, business, and other connections you have. You’ll find those suggestions on the home page of your LinkedIn profile in a box called “People You May Know.”

Step Three: Recommend and Be Recommended

A quick nice sentence or two about the people you work with will work wonders to the visibility of your profile. Commit to provide two recommendations per week as you’re building your profile. You could recommend coworkers, vendors, or customers. Again, don’t worry about details here. We’re literally talking about a sentence or two.

Why recommend? Recommendations build credibility for your company. If you recommend a business associate, chances are they will recommend you back. Think about this with customers—a returned recommendation from your customer is an instant testimonial that you could use other places (with their permission of course). Couldn’t your website or other marketing materials use a few shiny new testimonials?

Another added bonus of recommendations is that they increase the visibility of your profile—not only on LinkedIn itself, but also in search engines. The more you or your company name is listed on your LinkedIn profile (and on those recommendations) the higher your LinkedIn page will climb on search engines when someone “Googles” your company name. And who knows, such fame might even get you some gigs as the expert in your industry—you might find yourself speaking at a local professional event or giving a quote to the local media before you know it.

Step Four: Participate

Remember those printer bulletins or forums you belonged to in the past? The place you’d go to get advice on buying a piece of equipment or the like? Consider LinkedIn your replacement for that. On your LinkedIn profile you have the ability to “share” a thought, a question, a statement, and so on. So this is the perfect place to ask questions such as this. You can also post updates on business ventures or community activities. Are you working on an exciting customer project? Share it. Are you and the staff heading out to do a little volunteer work? Share that too.

Sharing can get you the same type of search engine benefits as recommendations—not to mention the great advice you’ll receive from peers. Also, the more you post, the more you’ll appear on your connections’ homepages under “Network Activity.” So post when you can. But again, this is not a place to spend more than a few minutes per day—or every few days.

Finally, join some groups. There are groups upon groups on LinkedIn. There are industry-specific groups (such as Quick Printing and NAQP), topic specific groups (such as Midwest Marketers) and company created groups (such as Satisfied Clients of Firespring). Joining a group gives you access to an amazing wealth of information as members converse with one another in the discussion forums. You may even consider creating your own group once you’ve joined a few and understand the value they provide. A great example to take a look at is “Social Media Marketing,” this group has done an excellent job generating conversation and engaging their group members to talk back. Of course, the information this group provides may be helpful to you as well, since you’re starting your adventure in social media.

Step Five: Encourage Others

The more your company has a presence on LinkedIn the better. Encourage your employees to get involved and create their own profiles. Then have them complete steps one through four of this article and you’ll be well on your way to LinkedIn success.