Driving Traffic and Profit

Twitter may have started as a general social networking platform, but soon its potential for business growth was realized and there has been no looking back ever since. Its ability for b2c and b2b lead generation is astonishing and every online / offline business must incorporate Twitter into their internet marketing programme.

Twitter is a text based micro-blogging website with many innovative features to publicize your business. It provides you with a ready platform to build a network of target audience by creating a huge follower base. You can tweet and share interesting information about your business and perform twitter analysis on your target audience for social media optimization. Below are some Twitter best practices to best optimize your website for higher rankings.

• The first and foremost thing you need to do in order to make your website more visible is add a Twitter widget to your website/ blog so that when a visitor clicks on it he/she will be added as a follower, whom you can keep updated with regular interesting tweets.
• Follow people to encourage them to follow you back. In order to generate relevant rather than random followers, personalize your company profile on Twitter by creating a relevant background image for a professional first impression.
• Customize your profile icon to incorporate your business relevancy and choose a user name relevant to your business. If possible add your location and a brief bio of your company in your profile.
• Make your tweets viral by posting interesting and informative content that people would want to retweet on. Use popular keywords and terms to encourage back tweets. Using humor and posting helpful information that others are looking for can generate you some fast loyal follower base.
• Get listed on the Twitter Yellow Pages and use the same to track down a geographical and categorized list of followers.
• Regularly check who is following you and keep in touch with them by following them back.
• To encourage retweeting, tweet your link multiple times and from different accounts. A tweet from the boss himself or from an authority person in the company carries a lot of weight and boosts retweeting that finally leads to b2c and b2b lead generation.

Twitter in future could go the Facebook way and introduce PPC/ adwords management to streamline social media marketing, and if that happens you don’t want to lose out on the golden opportunity. These Twitter marketing best practices can take your business to the next level. If you find the entire practice too tiring or time consuming, there is always the option to outsource SEO Twitter activity to an organic SEO company who specialize in this kind of social marketing techniques.

Social Networking sites have emerged as an important medium for making contacts, b2b lead generation and expanding business these days. Among all the social networking sites, LinkedIn is where you should be if you are seriously looking at making new contacts, b2b lead generation and marketing your company. So how to take maximum benefit from your profile on LinkedIn? Here are some of the things you can do to optimize your company’s presence on LinkedIn:

Update your Profile: Give detailed information complete with your photograph in your profile. Keep it updated with the latest work that you have done. Add widgets to provide a link to your blog or twitter account. Not only that you can also add your company’s logo along with its address and phone number.

Customize Your URL and Labels: LinkedIn pages usually get higher ranking in search engines. So use this opportunity to market yourself fully. Use a great keyword as part of your URL. If you already have some brand image for your company, you can customize your URL with your company’s name. Similarly LinkedIn provides you with the option to customize your labels like “My Blog”, “My Portfolio”. Instead of using the generic labels for them, change them to a suitable text: like changing default “My Blog” with your actual blog name. These small changes help in getting more traffic to your LinkedIn page. But to make all this work you need to select “Full View” option in your public profile setting.

Get Recommendations: Getting recommendations is one great way of promoting yourself and your company. Get in touch with people you have worked with, your previous clients as well as current clients and ask them to recommend you.

Build a Good Contacts Database: Use your LinkedIn account to find people you know or would like to know and work with. Get in touch with your previous colleagues, your school mates, your college mates and previous employers. Once you are done and added them as your contacts, you can go through their network. You can find lots of useful information and contacts which will be beneficial to you. For e.g.: if you find some contact in your friend’s account that will be good for your business, you can ask your friend to introduce you to him. This way you will not only get to meet a good contact but also get some credibility and authenticity attached to you.

Use Public Forums to Get in Touch: You can use your knowledge to reply to queries posted in the question and answer section. This way you can display your expertise in your area of work. Do not use this forum to promote your company, answer in an unbiased way. Alternatively you can use the same section to post queries to know your customer better. Participate in discussions, write articles or share articles in your field of work which will be of interest to your customers.

You can undertake all this work on your own or outsource SEO Internet Marketing to an organic SEO company. They can professionally do adwords management for you and also take up all your social media optimization and viral marketing needs for a reasonable fee. At BVM Internet Marketing – SEO Company Bangalore, we pride ourself at giving the customer a hassle free, quality, outsource SEO experience.

Often I find people getting worked up and worried about immediate returns from investment into the social media.

I think organizations should invest in building and engaging communities around their products and services more from a long term perspective. Expecting immediate returns like from an adwords campaign or an email marketing campaign will most likely lead to disappointment and one runs the risk of striking off Social Media Marketing from one’s marketing road map. Hence having the right expectations from social media marketing is extremely important.

One has to build and grow the community but the key is that the organization ENGAGES with the community. How will you be useful for the community that will listen to you on a regular basis. Are you providing them useful info alerts in a timely manner? Are you providing them customer support via social media channel? Can they get hot deals and exclusive discounts only via the particular channel ???

Once the organization understands the objective of engagement with its audience via social media and pursues it diligently, the consumers will respond warmly and the community will grow.

Info as on 5th September 2009:

Thought this would be useful info for the readers:

This info is as on 5th September, 2009.

Both Linkedin and Facebook are excellent social media platforms but both have their independent individual characteristics.

1. Linkedin is highly focused on professional networking. It is a heaven for recruiters as they can gauge the credentials of the potential employees and also contact prospective recruits with the help of their existing network.

Facebook is more casual and diverse in nature and truly encourages interaction amongst its members. As they opened their API for application developers, many interesting applications including games, polling apps, etc. intrigued and caputred the imagination (and time) of the community members of the platform.

2. Linked in has the subscription based revenue model and also has ad based revenue stream. Facebook on the other hand has ad based revenue model as of now. But they are also collaborating with mobile companies like Nokia for OEM deals and must be making big bucks.

3. In Facebook one can upload pictures/videos to share with friends…. Linked in has stayed away from rich media game play. Profile pictures are allowed but in all probability one would find people in their business suits at linkedin. In Facebook one can be more relaxed and opt for more casual profile pictures as they are out there to socialiaze with friends and have fun.

4. Linkedin has added the Q&A module for knowledge sharing. Facebook does not have have such a mandate.

5. Facebook allows building web pages to promote products or service or organization or event. Linked allows the users to add companies which can show in the search results.

In a nut shell, Linkedin is a more focused social media platform. Facebook is a larger giant allowing people to be more casual and encouraging them to indulge on the wall !