LinkedIn
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, August 17th, 2011
Advertising on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is becoming more and more popular. A recent Pivot Survey showed that two thirds of marketers surveyed are using social media advertising. This will only continue to grow as more and more people join the ranks of social media users, and companies catch on to the highly targeted and effective nature of this medium.
Often called social advertising, this method (based on a very old approach) takes advantage of the growing number of people using social networks (700m on Facebook, 100m+ on LinkedIn, etc) to advertise to people in a highly targeted way – usually according to their likes, geographic demographics and other defining characteristics. It can be a really useful tool to drive traffic to your website, and especially to build your connections because each follower or connection has given you their implied permission to keep in touch, and are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
Here at Out-Smarts we always emphasize the importance of strategy when it comes to any social media or internet marketing project, and social ads are no exception. First of all, you need to consider your audience. Who are they and which networks do they use. This will help you determine whether to use Facebook, LinkedIn or another network. Next, you need to consider your goals and how you will measure success.
We were approached recently by a client of ours who had (as an experiment) run simultaneous ads on Facebook and on LinkedIn. The ads were almost identical but whilst the Facebook ad had a phenomenal click through rate, there was not a single click through on LinkedIn. They wondered why this had happened, and how the could track whether the Facebook ads converted to actual business for them.
There are two issues here, the first being the target audience. The reason they were more successful on Facebook is that their target audience is much more likely to be on Facebook, and using it on a regular basis, than LinkedIn. When you are considering which social advertising forum to use, it is always important to consider which tools your audience uses – doing so will help you cut to the chase and will make the likelihood of success higher. If your product or service is aimed at a consumer or broader target audience, then Facebook is going to be better than LinkedIn. If your product or service is business-to-business then LinkedIn will be the way to go. If you have a large brand aimed at the mom community, Twitter might be your best bet.
The second issue is how to track the success of your ads. It is important to consider what your goals are from running the ads (do you want to build your following, drive traffic to your website, etc, and by how much?) and then put processes in place that allow you to do this effectively. If web traffic is your goal, Google Analytics allows you to track conversions from your Facebook ads (but that is a whole other blog post!). If you want to track sales, put processes in place to ask people who buy from you, or who inquire about your products or services, how they heard about you. What is important here is to set realistic goals and outline how you will track them, otherwise why bother?
Once you have determined which tools are best for your audience and how you will measure your success, the process of creating your ads is relatively simple. In the coming weeks we will be creating some how-to posts designed to help you do just that. In the meantime, if you are interested in advertising using social media but don’t have the time or wherewithal to do so, please contact us – this is what we do and we’d love to help!
Other posts about online advertising:
An Introduction to Internet Advertising
The Future of Digital Advertising – iAds and Promoted Tweets
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, August 05th, 2011
LinkedIn recently overtook MySpace as the second largest social network. With over 100m users worldwide, LinkedIn is not only one
of the most popular networks but also one of the oldest (launched in 2003), and it is by far the most used network in the business community.
These days, if you are a professional and you’re not on LinkedIn you risk being perceived as old fashioned, out of touch, or worse, lazy. If you have been procrastinating about using LinkedIn for business and are not sure where to start, this blog post is for you.
LinkedIn 101
LinkedIn is a social network that centers around your career and your connections. You post your resume, in as much or as little detail as you feel comfortable with, and start connecting with people you work with, or have worked with in the past. You also connect with people you went to school with, or people you know through your existing business connections.
Why use LinkedIn?
People use LinkedIn for a multitude of reasons. Your goals and usage will depend on your career, your ambitions, your role and, ultimately, your business goals.
If you don’t have any other social media presence, and you’ve avoided it like the plague, then LinkedIn is the place you should start. Given that, with the current economic times, no job is a job for life; building a LinkedIn presence can help you stay current – just in case. Not only that, LinkedIn can also save you a lot of time and effort in your current role. Those are just a couple of reasons why LinkedIn is a must for business people. Here are ten more reasons why every business person should be on LinkedIn:
1. LinkedIn for Research – LinkedIn’s questions and answers is great place to crowd source. If you are working on a project and need to do some research, why not consider asking the LinkedIn community. People are often keen to show their knowledge, and you will find that if you word your question correctly you will get valuable feedback, links and information that will save you time.
2. Looking for work? Find out if the person who is hiring, or prominent people from the company that you want to do business with, are in your extended network and ask for a connection from the person you have in common. It’s always easier to get an interview or a first meeting if you are referred by someone trusted. Also if you are on the job market, make sure that you post your resume to LinkedIn and update it as your experience grows. LinkedIn is often the first place recruiters look when considering hiring someone.
3. Share an Update – Use your status updates on LinkedIn wisely. You can use them to inform your networks of what you do, or what you are looking to do. For example, if you are conducting a strategy session with a client, tell your network that – many of them might not know that you provide this service. Or you can entrench yourself as an expert in your field by posting valuable links to articles or news pertinent to your field that will educate or add value for your connections.
4. Company Profiles – LinkedIn isn’t just for individuals, businesses can have profiles too, and yours should. Doing so will help build your organization’s web presence, will allow interested parties to learn more about your business, give you valuable referrals and will improve your web ranking. Make sure that employees know about your page and link to it, and that your services are prominently displayed.
5. Save Time and Maintain Relationships – In the old days people had a rolodex and had to lift a phone on a regular basis in order to keep in touch with their connections, and only managed to keep in touch with the main ones because it took so much time. These days you can use tools like LinkedIn to stay at the forefront of people’s minds (even those on the periphery of your network). I am not saying that you shouldn’t lift a phone – you should, but by using LinkedIn you can more easily keep in touch with more people and augment your relationships.
6. Build Your Network – Not only is it important to keep in touch with people but it is also important in business to connect with new people. When you do so, follow up with a LinkedIn connect request and take advantage of your in person networking in the virtual world too. Get in the habit of doing this and your LinkedIn network will quickly grow. Connect with people you meet, work with, people you connect with online and use this as a way to stay in touch with your connections as in point five above.
7. Reach the Powers that Be – LinkedIn is the social network used most by top level executives so it can be a really valuable tool in connecting you with decision makers. This is especially powerful for strategic selling.
9. Hiring – with over 100m potential candidates online, have you thought of using LinkedIn to facilitate in your hiring process? People use LinkedIn for recruitment and for finding jobs and, given the professional nature of the tool, it can help you find just the right person for the job. You can easily set this up – it costs about $195 for a 30 day job posting.
10. Advertise – LinkedIn recently started allowing members to advertise on its network in a highly targeted way. You can advertise to specific people by company, geography, title, gender and age. You only pay for click throughs (each time someone clicks on the ad) and the cost is quite affordable (minimum $10 per day), but one downside is that you are limited by characters in the text.
If LinkedIn is on your to-do list please remember that we provide LinkedIn set up, maintenance, education and coaching services. Contact us and let us know how we can assist.
Please connect with us on LinkedIn at Out-Smarts or with Mhairi.
Related articles:
http://www.out-smarts.com/2010/01/21/using-social-media-for-recruitment-part-1-linkedin/
http://www.out-smarts.com/2009/04/17/is-your-company-on-linkedin/
http://www.out-smarts.com/2008/10/27/the-out-smarts-podcast-11-linkedin-with-rob-duncan/
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, May 30th, 2011
Quora, the crowdsourced question and answers community has been getting a lot of publicity lately. Purported to be more than just another questions and answers site, Quora is aimed at going beyond a simple forum for questions and answers (like Yahoo Answers) to being more of a brain trust where individuals’ knowledge on a topic is collected and made available to members of the community.
Founded in 2008 by former Facebook executives, the latest social community for business seems destined for big things. Since its inception, Quora has grown steadily and in the last year, user counts have doubled - although according to this compete.com graph, the number of visits is still erratic. Quora doesn’t make user counts available but there are an estimated 200,000 – 500,000 users - according to this Tech Crunch article.
On its website, Quora describes itself as:
” a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.”
It is easy and free to join Quora, simply 
sign up, enter a few details about yourself and you are off to the races.
Once there you can search questions (put the term you want to search for in the add question box but don’t click enter or you will end up asking a question) and review all related answers, find and connect with others in your community and share your content in other networks.
I’ve always found LinkedIn answers a useful tool for researching blog posts so I thought I would test drive Quora and at the same time do little crowdsourced research for this blog post by asking the question:
How has using Quora benefited you? 
It has been several days now and so far there are no answers. Now, this could be because I don’t have many contacts yet, because its not a stimulating enough question or because people haven’t yet decided on the benefits of using Quora. One neat feature of Quora is that it finds and suggests “related questions” that might be of interest. The one answer to the question “What are the benefits of using Quora?” has the short and sweet answer :
You get to read the answers to questions like the following: Quora: Frequently Asked Questions for New Users, Getting Started on Quora: How does the Quora search box work?
In browsing through Quora, I couldn’t fail to notice that it has some very influential users. One question about social media startups had answers from industry pioneers like Robert Scoble: with answers that were both in depth and insightful (and a good read for anyone launching a web startup). Another Quora user, Marc Bodnick lists new and interesting Quora users they have discovered every week and whilst many of these users seem to be centred in the tech community, I was also able to to find questions about such diverse topics as the Vancouver Canucks Stanley Cup chances (go Canucks!), best Croatian Islands and Scotland’s independence.
Some of the downsides to Quora seem to be question regulations, reviews and user administration. Personally, I came across a lot of comments about voting up a question but couldn’t work out how to vote up a great answer far less vote down the crappy ones.
In the longterm, the value of Quora will depend on the quality of both the user base and the answers people provide as well the ease of use and ability to connect with your community. For now, Quora will stay on my radar (join me there!) but I won’t need a daily fix for the foreseeable future.
Written by Jan, March 04th, 2011
Today and over the next few weeks we will be taking a close look at social media for non profits: we will even share some of our “Social Media Strategy Smarts” specific to this sector with a view to helping you understand how using social media can benefit your organization and help it grow.
Keep It Simple and Achievable
The Out-Smarts mantra for our non profit clients has been “Keep It Simple and Achievable”. Adding social media tools to the strategy of non-profit business is essential in our networked world and tools such as Facebook, email, blogs and twitter are not only cost effective they also encourage a two-way conversation between people and organizations that can effectively increase the momentum and reach of a non-profit - but it has to be manageable given your time and resources.
Good Planning Makes for Good Fortune:
Non profits that focus first on developing a clear strategy are best positioned to succeed with an Social Media program. The first step is to develop a strategy that authentically reflects the organizations strategic goals and vision – whether the aim is to increase fund raising opportunities, engage volunteers or educate the public.
Here are some questions to explore to jump start your Non Profit Social Media strategy:
1. What do you want to accomplish with social media?
i.e. Do you plan to use Social Media to:
- Listen and Learn?
- Build Relationships and Issues Awareness?
- Improve Reputation?
- Generate Conversations?
- Drive Visitors to a website or blog?
- Taking Action or Fundraising?
- All of the above or other?
2. Identify and Research your Audience:
- Who must you reach to meet your objectives?
- What do you want to say to your key audience? (and what will they say back!)
- Which social media tools does your key audience currently use?
- Is there research required to better understand the online social behavior of your target audience?
3. Integrate your Social Media with existing marketing – harmonize with your online approach with off-line message:
- How does your social media support other components of your communications and fund raising strategy?
- Is your website Social Media ready?
4. Change can be hard – Social Media means added transparency for your Organization
To move forward with your strategy you will need to face these common fears and concerns:
- Loss of control over your message
- Dealing with negative comments on-line
- Perception of wasted of time and resources
- Suffering from information overload already, this will cause more
- Not being successful, fear of failure
5. Pick Your Tools and Your Leader
- What tools to support your objectives?
- What tools suit your audience?
- What tools do you have the capacity to implement?
- Who will be responsible for over sight?
6. Get Started
- Do you need any outside expertise?
- Who will implement your organization’s social media strategy?
- Do you have a Social Media Policy to provide posting guidelines
- Determine how much time you can you allocate to your strategy?
If your Non Profit can answer most of these questions it is clearly ready to step out onto the Social Media stage with your message. Remember keep it simple and achievable. Treat your first steps as experimental. Go easy and record your successes and challenges to share with others.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, February 22nd, 2011
If you were planning on dating someone met online, you’d want to find out everything you could before committing to a real date. That’s the way it is when choosing a vendor for your business: you want to find out if they have a reputation for breaking (business) hearts or for being dependable.
Using Social Media to Make Good Business Decisions
In 2009 PR Newswire reported that a whopping 86% of recruiters use social media to research candidates and make the right hiring decisions. As business people we can use the same techniques to help us make the right decisions when it comes to determining which businesses to work with or to outsource to. It is important to get the right people on the bus and social media can be a great tool to help you determine whether or not to work with a vendor (or even a potential new client). This blog post is aimed at showing you how.
Bad Date
Social media is a tool for connecting, communicating and building community but it can also be great for research and that is exactly what you should do when making any important entrepreneurial decision. Gone are the days when you had to rely on gut instinct and the assurances of your prospective business partner.
When I meet with a potential client for the first time or talk with a would be vendor or supplier, I always do some due diligence to find out a bit about them in advance but also to make sure that they are who they say they are and that they are the right calibre of business or professional to work with Out-Smarts. I am not being arrogant here but exemplary customer service is paramount and if we make the wrong decisions in the court ship phase of a relationship it can often come back to haunt us down the road and we don’t like doing anything that will jeopardize the standard of our work.
Social Media for Due Diligence
When conducting due diligence like this, the first thing I do, after checking out their website (and especially their testimonials) is to Google the name of the business person in question as well as the company. A Google search can tell you a lot about the person’s personal brand online and will often deliver the pertinent search results you are looking for. But this is all very well and handy when the name is unique (try Googling Mhairi Petrovic – I think I might be the only person on the planet with this name) but the same cannot be said for the John Smiths of the world.
Social Media Research Tools
One way to hone in on the right person to research and find out a bit about them is to use Pipl. Pipl comes in extremely handy if the person in question has a common name because it allows you to narrow it down by place. Pipl is a simple tool which searches the “deep” web for mentions so the results are often quite extensive. Simply enter the first name, last name, city, state and country to start the process. The results that are delivered provide a comprehensive list of mentions across the web with links to the source content so that you can check out the person.
A similar tool to Pipl is Social Mention which provides real time social media search and analysis. Unlike Pipl, which is centred on people, Social Mention delivers search results on any term you choose to enter – this can be an individual’s or company’s name or any word or phrase you want to search for. You can search across blogs, comments, bookmarks and more or you can do a universal search.
Another approach, and one of the best ways to research a business or an individual, is to use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest “professional” social network with over 90 million LinkedIn users worldwide (3m in Canada) as of January and this means that, if you want to find out about a professional or business person there’s a really good chance that there will be on there. There were nearly two billion people searches on LinkedIn in 2010 and over 1 million companies have a presence there. Its search functionality is great but the most beneficial aspect of LinkedIn is that once you have found the right person you can review their professional profile to check out their references and to see if anyone else in your network is connected with them. We humans are social people, if we find that someone we know has given the person or business a good reference on LinkedIn then we are much more likely to trust and work with them.
No Active Presence?
So what happens if you do all this research and fail to come up with any information at all about the vendor or business person? You’ve done your digging but they don’t have a presence online. Well, it’s up to you whether to work with them or not but in my personal opinion, in this day and age if someone isn’t even slightly active online, you have to question their commitment to their business. My advice would be to give them a wide berth.
One last thing to consider is that this is not a one way street: the chances are that the next time you meet with a prospect they will have done their research online as well and this time you or your business is in the spotlight. So, it’s always a good idea to run through the steps outlined above, check out your own profile online and ask yourself – would you do business with you?
Just like find out about someone before going on a first date, do your research and sleuth work in advance before embarking on that first business “date”, it can help you avoid a costly “divorce” or worse in the long run and the tools to allow you to do so are at your fingertips.
the “top this and that of 2011”, and here we are throwing another one into the mix. But, we really wanted to share with you our most read blog posts of 2011. Hopefully you’ll find some bits of wisdom, or a key takeaway, from the following list:
