LinkedIn has a reputation as a place where professionals go to find a job. With an array of new features like LinkedIn Today for breaking news, LinkedIn Groups for discussions and LinkedIn Company Pages introducing a Facebook-esque feel to proceedings, some might argue that its reputation has subsided over time.

But that’s not the case. More roles are now being filled as recruiters jump on the social media bandwagon to find quality candidates. Reportedly 77% of all job roles are posted on the site and 89% of recruiters have filled a position using LinkedIn at one time or another – meaning that LinkedIn is a far more cost-effective way to find the best candidates for any role compared to traditional searches.

LinkedIn, and social media in general, gives recruiters a chance to find out a lot more about a candidate before approaching them directly. By going into LinkedIn Groups and contributing to discussions (as opposed to adopting the gung-ho approach of going in for the hard sell straight away) recruiters can be sure that they are approaching the right people and not just adopting a “same message for everyone” mentality.

Infographics courtesy of Masters in human resources via socialmediatoday

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Hashtags have become the standard way to label social media posts, not only on Twitter but also on Google+ and increasingly on LinkedIn. Monitoring hashtags is an easy way to spot a social media trend and to respond accordingly.

However, it is rather unclear what kind of hashtags tend to trend on these three major social channels. I thought it would be interesting to compare trending hashtags on a given day (in this case, 17th April 2013) to understand the differences between the platforms.

Recent events and consumer products trending on Google+

Google Plus is a rapidly growing platform not only in terms of its user base but also the virality of its content. A quick look at the most popular topics and hashtags (G+ mashes them together) shows a good proportion of conversations being Google-centric (unsurprisingly!) as well as discussing recent events and consumer products. Interestingly, hashtags relating to images (such as #FlowerPower) also tend to trend on the platform.

Politics, sports and bespoke hashtags on Twitter

I was quite surprised to discover that hashtags on Twitter tend to cover topics that are more serious and even political. Unlike Google+ where conversations are largely centred around consumer products, funny pictures and gadgets (with a few exceptions), there is more of a sincere thought exchange on Twitter. Of course, there are some one-off humorous exceptions again, such as the #AskBale hashtag, set up for the fans of Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur, which was hijacked by Arsenal fans!

Industry-specific, generalised topics on LinkedIn

LinkedIn introduced hashtags very recently, alongside LinkedIn Signal. There is still room for improvement to make trending hashtags easy to spot, and, bizarrely, they are case-sensitive. (Searching for any hashtag containing an upper-case letter will return no results.) It is also tricky to spot trending hashtags, and my search was limited up to 2nd degree connections, instead of LinkedIn-wide conversation.

The results were, um, rather vague. Hashtags reflected more of the industries my connections tend to work in rather than specific topics, trends or events. Perhaps it shows users still need to get used to using hashtags on LinkedIn, and that there is a great potential for growth?

In any case, each social platform naturally develops its own unique culture of conversation. It is essential we treat each social platform differently, tailoring the approach and strategy according to the specific culture of the specific channel. One-size-fits-all will bring some results, but quite often this approach will result in misguided decisions, flawed targeting, low returns and miscommunication. It will also be interesting to see how hashtags will be used on Facebook when they’re finally introduced.

How do you diversify your use of hashtags on different social platforms?

Images courtesy of Quinn Dombrowski,  Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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With 200 million registered users and over 11 million in the UK, LinkedIn must focus on helping its user base expand their networks and engage with the platform on a deeper level.

In the same way Facebook has introduced Graph Search to help it’s users to discover more within the platform (other examples include tagging in photos or simply the Like button to discover the obvious…), LinkedIn is making a visible effort to help users interconnect and discover more –  learn more about LinkedIn’s recent platform update allowing users to @mention

Here are 3 ways LinkedIn are pushing the boundaries of discovery:

Discovering people

The recent update to the platform will allow users to interconnect around posts that are published. Whether these posts are sharing content, questions or seeking advice, recommendations or promoting products and services – the basic principle is that users will be able to join a conversation themselves, directly responding and bringing others to the conversations through @mentions. More people at the post party = more reasons and ways to meet people!

It is not just this very latest update that will help users discover new people, there has also been a significant update to LinkedIn’s search which supposedly delivers users the following benefits:

• Auto-complete
• Suggested searches
• Smarter query and intent algorithm
• Enhanced advanced search (this has been constantly changing over the last year e.g. finding users within groups you are a member of)
• Automated alerts

With a staggering 5.7 billion professionally oriented searches from the platform in the last year it is not hard to see why. If you want to know more check out the LinkedIn blog including the Smarter Search Slideshare

Discovering content

So, you can see how the @mention update will drive more content discovery. Users will now discuss in the thread of comment and bring more users (and companies) to the discussion through @mentions. Companies (and thought leaders) will be looking for conversations with influencers and prospects who can engage with the shared content. This will really help to take “discussions” out of groups and into updates, making the platform a lot more conversational!

But there’s more: the introduction of LinkedIn Today has undoubtedly flooded the platform (and your update feed) with richer, more relevant content. In addition, the introduction of thought leader profiles has provided users with direct access to influencers in their field of interest, much like Twitter has in the way it has made celebrities or industry experts. Not only has this benefited users, but there has also allowed companies to deploy their subject matter experts out into the platform to drive traffic.

In an example we found this week, we could see that significant web traffic had been driven by a LinkedIn today article written by their thought leader (and Founding Partner) Charlene Li  for Altimeter. 44% of the traffic for this campaign link was driven from LinkedIn and 98% of that traffic was driven from the article on LinkedIn Today.

Finally, you may have seen the recent announcement about LinkedIn Slideshare  and video ad units, propelling even more content into the platform, and yet more examples of content discovery. Find out more about the LinkedIn content ad units here

Discovering companies – suppliers, clients and your next job

Company pages continue to evolve and opening the doors for users to find out more about their next new supplier, client, partner or job target.  Utilising a network of connected employees, brands can use the range of ever evolving LinkedIn company features to engage many different audiences, to gain a follower base and propel themselves into the path of discovery:

• Company page updates - share and drive engagement around content  from within the company and their products and services
• Careers section - the introduction of rich content in the careers section including video has provided a platform for companies to communicate their culture and why it is fantastic place to work to encourage talent looking for their next steps
• Product and service recommendations - quite simply, this is discovery through referral! Users recommending companies products and services which will encourage other users to discover their next supplier or partner
• Company page insights - openly available on company pages is a range of insights to help users discover more – the employees, the top skill-sets, most recommended individuals and where employees came from. All of these insights help to build a connection with the user and the company and to extend the realms of discovery.

HP have recently been the first LinkedIn company profile to reach 1 million followers (check out the infographic) and there are many benefits associated with building these communities. You may also be interested in this recent post by my colleague Janis – 3 ways Everything Everywhere uses LinkedIn to its benefit

Discovery channel…

I desperately wanted to find a way to quote the Bloodhound Gang track Bad Touch (let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel) in here. I couldn’t find a link that worked, so it is on Spotify instead…

I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the progression of LinkedIn – so get tweeting or comment below…

Tweet to @iftweeter

Image source: Bit.ly screenshot of link https://bitly.com/QkcYRH+

Image courtesy of Matthew Gain, LinkedIn logo, Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license

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There is no doubt that the growth of Slideshare has got B2B marketers excited about using social media again. It has become the world’s largest content sharing community. Combine this with the reach of Twitter and LinkedIn and the platform has become a vital part of the best B2B social media strategies. The site has seen dramatic growth amassing more than 60 million visitors and 3 billion slide views a month.

For those in the B2B arena it is clear that certain social media platforms just do not facilitate engagement with the right target market. Are you really going to engage a key business decision maker or Managing Director in and around the topic of advanced web analytics on Facebook? More often than not B2B marketing involves the creation of thought leading content, traditionally this would have been in the form of case studies, reports, factsheets and brochures. In the digital age, users are looking for digestible content that they can use within their own presentations as well as research into new products and services.

Presentations by their definition look to condense key information into a series of impactful slides, a perfect social object for distribution as part of a content strategy. 71% of B2B companies are doing more content marketing than last year and in some cases are estimated to be spending a quarter of their marketing budgets on content marketing.

Here are some nice little tips if you are developing a Slideshare presentation as part of your B2B social media campaign or ongoing content strategy;

The Slideshare sweet spot is between 10 & 30 slides! Keep it succinct, it is not a numbers game!

Tweet

19 images is the average per Slideshare presentation, equivalent to one per page.

Tweet

Average number of words per Slideshare presentation is 24! Don’t dribble on and stick to the point

Tweet

Slideshare Infographic

Sources: Infographic by Column Five.  Column Five infograhic sources: Content Marketing Institute, Slideshare.net, Quantcast, Comscore

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In the second part of our series on online influence, we round up the three best tools for measuring social media influence; along with a look at their advocates and sceptics.

In my last post I paraphrased Brian Solis and Vocus in defining an online influencer as someone who has online reach and someone who produces quality, relevant content. These are three of the top tools used in social media marketing to identify them:

1) Klout: markets itself as ‘The Standard for Influence’ and combines what it calls True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Influence to generate an overall Klout Score from 1-100 (100 being the highest and most influential) of a social media user.

Advocate: Michael Cohn offers a nice summary of precisely what Klout measures and why it’s so important to the success of a business.

Sceptic: Steve Farnsworth’s ‘Problem with Klout’ infographic demonstrates how, on the basis of the Klout algorithm, an automated Twitter user with zero engagement can still gain a high influence score.

What we say: An influencer’s network size and quality are both measured, in part, on the basis of retweets. But a good joke, or a cute animal video could become massively retweeted, can that be considered relevant and high quality content that will ultimately change anyone’s behaviour? Unlikely. Plus, if a non-human entity can be considered highly influential, it certainly casts doubt on the reliability of the tool.

2) PeerIndex: uses an algorithm to identify, rank, and score the authority of online influencers and is considered similar to, although less widely adopted, than Klout. According to PeerIndex itself, the tool “addresses the fact that merely being popular (or having gamed the system) doesn’t indicate authority”. It therefore promises to “build up your authority finger print on a category-by-category level using eight benchmark topics.”

Advocate: Andrew Bruce Smith demonstrates how he was able to use PeerIndex’s group function to make a highly popular list of UK Social Media Power Players; he also answers to sceptics with the point that “people had a similar attitude towards statistics based language translation in the 1990s.”

Sceptic: Mark Ralph recently called PeerIndex – along with Klout – the “Emperor’s New Clothes” of social media “appealing to our vanity but leaving us naked.”

What we say: It’s good for drawing in multiple social platforms and getting a broader view, but Twitter still seems to trump the other platforms – if you’re not considered influential on Twitter, you’re just not considered influential.

3) Tweet.Grader: a Twitter-specific tool measuring ‘power and reach’ across the social platform, grading influencers with a score between 1-100 (100 being the most influential). There’s is also a hashtag search function.

Advocate: Omar Kattan recommends it as a very useful tool for tracking the influence of your own business on Twitter, but also for identifying key influencers within your followers.

Sceptic: Steve Allan accuses Tweet.Grader and its ilk of “using fuzzy maths” and “trying to make a buck by rating you and selling that information to marketing companies”.

What we say: In short, even the best of today’s influencer measurement tools, has as many sceptics as advocates. The algorithms are getting better by the day, but they aren’t perfect. While a combination of measurement tools will give good insight into online reach, there’s still no substitute for good old-fashioned research as a means of measuring quality. As a social media agency, we find the best way of identifying the relevancy – and value – of an influencer to our clients, is to take a look for ourselves and ask, are they worth following?

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Social media likes to give and take with both hands. It gives you innumerable ways of getting your company’s voice out to your target market, managing your reputation and adding value to your business. And then it takes. It takes all the content you can possibly feed it and it always asks for more.

Quality content, as Jason Miller at Social Media Examiner recently wrote, is the “fuel for your social media rocket ship”. So if you need a constant stream of content filling your social platforms, where exactly do you get the constant stream of ideas?

Miller provides a series of really insightful tips, including the use of RSS feeds, identifying blogs which are relevant to your business and subscribing to their feeds for inspiration. He also suggests jumping into relevant LinkedIn groups to see what people are discussing; as well as searching forums, crowdsourcing topics that your audience would actually like to read about by posting up a tweet or FB post and even listening to industry audio books when you’re on the go.

With the Google Panda update which came in to play in February – followed by further changes in April – ‘quality’ content is more important than ever; and social media has become an even more valuable means of sharing content and securing search visibility.

Content isn’t really a conundrum. All it takes is a clear strategy and a pre-planned calendar. With these in place, you always know where your next content is coming from and you ensure your website content is aligned with and pushed out via your social media platforms to increase that all important Google visibility.

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Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend a great event, hosted by the London Press Club and Women in Journalism, with Carole Stone, the Queen of Networking herself, as a guest speaker. Having heard so much about Carole Stone, her weekly networking salons and her legendary Christmas parties (what I wouldn’t do for an invite…), I jumped at the chance to attend this event!

Carole was an extremely entertaining, dynamic and engaging speaker, and, as you would expect from a woman who has over 40,000 contacts in her database, she had some invaluable tips for anyone making their first forays into the world of networking. I have listed below the key outtakes from the event, and as an added extra, for each of Carole’s tips I have written my own social media version (with some help from my colleague James), highlighted in italics….

1. Wear something with pockets – It is important to always have business cards at hand so you don’t have to awkwardly rifle through your bag to find them! (Maybe more of an issue for females!) From a social media viewpoint, ensure that you have a LinkedIn profile, and it’s fully up to date, before you attend an event. You never know who will look you up!
2. Always follow-up with an email the day after you’ve met someone. And/or send them an email through LinkedIn, adding them to your online network at the same time.
3. When handing out business cards don’t scatter them like lawyers and accountants (Carole’s words…), make sure you actually spend time chatting to the people you’re giving them to. The same applies online really, just because LinkedIn is there doesn’t mean you should ask everybody you have ever heard of to join your network. As a general rule, only add people you have had a proper conversation with or who you would feel comfortable emailing.
4. It’s not all about quantity, it’s about quality. Pick out a few people in the room who you really want to meet. Don’t fret if you haven’t met the ‘big players’ at an event, chances are they’ll have so many people thrusting business cards in their direction that they won’t remember you anyway. Old school networking tips live on, this is definitely still relevant online. Engage the up-and-coming bloggers or influencers who will want to, and have time to, share knowledge with you.
5. Always remember details. Note down one or two key details about the person you’ve just met to remind yourself who they are/where you met. Taking this a step further, you could use tools like Evernote, Digg etc to log relevant posts, articles or web pages that will help you re-engage your new contact in a later conversation online.
6. If someone is acting rude, or haughty, be honest and ask them “did you mean to sound rude when you said that?” (Maybe a tip to be used with personal discretion…). This is particularly relevant in the world of social media as sometimes irony or humour does not come across quite as well in an email or a 140 character Tweet! If you have engaged with this contact through Twitter, send them a simple @reply asking whether their last comment was supposed to sound rude… This is a win-win technique, the contact will either laugh it off or they’ll (hopefully) realise that their comment was out of line and clarify what they meant/apologise. Easy.
7. Stand up at networking events so you can get away easier. Conversely, online it’s easy to leave a conversation so get as involved as possible, comment on walls, reply to tweets and use those hashtags!
8. Carry an empty glass so you have an excuse to leave a boring conversation (“I’m just going to get another drink…). As previously mentioned, online you can leave a conversation whenever you like, but always check back and make sure you are not missing an opportunity to engage with new connections.
9. OR carry 2 glasses of wine, pretending one is for a friend, allowing you to leave a conversation to look for said friend if necessary… See above… but there is nothing to stop you having two glasses of wine anyway!
10. . Don’t worry about failure! Absolutely true in social networking online as in the real world, be bold and don’t be afraid to get involved in conversations, it’s the best way to broaden your knowledge and understanding of a subject.
11. Never toss a card aside! You never know when that contact may come in useful… Hopefully LinkedIn won’t go down.

Et voila… the top tips from the Queen of Networking… and yes, most of them are pure common sense, however it was nice to hear these things from a lady whose reputation and business success are built on networking!

Hopefully these tips will prove useful and show you that, when it comes to taking your first tentative steps into networking, both online and offline, everyone has been in exactly the same situation as you and everyone is nervous about not having someone to talk to or saying the wrong thing. Confidence is key!

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Never mix business with pleasure. That’s what they used to say. Perhaps they just meant don’t get caught in flagrante with your secretary, but let’s just say it was a belief that our corporate and social lives belonged in two separate spheres. But ‘they’ didn’t know that Web 2.0 was coming. ‘They’ didn’t have the foresight to see the two worlds were on a collision course that would form a whole new dimension: the corporate social sphere.

Business has become social. CRM – much to the Daily Mail’s horror – has become a social media interaction. Jason Lewis calls it ‘spying’ for a company to monitor and react to online sentiment. For the customer in question, it means passively receiving customer service. Rather than waiting in a call centre queue, the customer simply has a rant on Facebook and waits for a customer services representative to actively come straight to them.

Business has become personal. As recently reported by Cleveland Ohio Business News, the early days of social networking sites led to embarrassing blows for companies, when employees failed to realise that their personal social networking accounts were very much in the ‘public’ domain. We’re all a little older and wiser now. We know how to set those drug-fuelled orgy photos to private.

But in the corporate social sphere the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Social networking pages become resources for building more personal relationships with colleagues and clients. ‘Following’ industry peers on Twitter and LinkedIn becomes a constant and unlimited reach to new contacts and news.

You can look at the corporate social sphere in two ways. You can argue that the business world has invaded our personal lives and in doing so, ultimately infringed on our privacy. Or, you can look at it the other way. Our personal lives have invaded the business world. We’re not starchy, formal cogs in a machine, we’re an interwoven web of relationships – and the better those relationships are, the easier it makes it to get up on Monday morning.

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This week the Guardian online posted a blog on the rise of social media as a relevant source of information for journalists, as revealed by a recent US survey which claimed that 56% of reporters view it as an important tool for producing stories. The research carried out by Cision and The George Washington University, showed that over 89% of journalists make use of blogs while conducting their online research, with two thirds turning to social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

But, is this a good thing? Are journalism standards slipping?

There is certainly a strong advantage to using social media as part of journalistic research. Its global reach and speed means that stories can be documented and sourced as they are taking place – the New York Hudson River plane crash is a great example. Ferry passengers were able to tweet about the accident before TV crews even got to the scene.

However, social media shouldn’t be used as the sole source for stories, but rather it should sit alongside public relations – providing interviews and access to sources and experts to help paint a fuller picture. It still begs the question as to why the media is so obsessed with social networking?

Phenomenon! Everyone loves to be in the middle of a newly discovered craze and social media is currently it! Flick through the national papers and there will undoubtedly be a story relating to social media. As a PR professional, I have been told by numerous news desks and news agencies that stories relating to Facebook or Twitter stand a much higher chance of being selected than those that don’t.

Why? Because social networking provides that much needed human interest angle that the media loves, especially tabloid papers. The fashion designer, Alexander McQueen died tragically last week but rather than lament on the fashion world’s loss guess what the papers chose to write about…the string of ‘weird’ Twitter posts that he had left during the run up to his death.

So, celebrities and politicians be afraid. It’s no longer what’s lurking behind your closet that matters but what’s lurking on your Facebook and Twitter page!

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