When it comes to social media one of the most common complaints I hear from writers is "I don't have enough time". We're all aware that marketing via social platforms is a necessity in today's world but creating content consistently, commenting on other peoples posts and replying to comments on older posts takes time.
I'm not sure that 30 minutes a day would really be enough (can you imagine only being on Facebook for 6 minutes?!). That said this infographic by Pardot does highlight the need for a marketing strategy and offers some nice time saving tips.
 |
| infographic via Pardot
How much time do you spend on social media a day? Do you think you could realistically spend just 30 minutes a day marketing on social media and still get good results?
 |
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
You might be surprised to read this, but it’s
time you learned the truth: Facebook isn’t the answer to a struggling writer's
unemployment woes.
Sure, Facebook has nearly a billion users. It’s
the biggest social media network in the world, connecting people across
continents, helping businesses reach new customers, and reminding you that
those friends from grade school still exist. For the casual blogger, Facebook
works as an indispensable tool in spreading the word about your content to your
friends, family members, and coworkers. The social network can certainly help
your blog get off its feet and establish a small readership. But for unemployed
writer, the social network doesn’t have much to offer in the way of real help.
At the beginning, Facebook can be helpful for
networking or for a job search—but there are many more social media tools at a
writer's disposal to feel out potential employment opportunities. Facebook is
too vast and unorganized to fit the needs of professional writers who want to
find a specific employer with specific job requirements.
So what social media tools get results for the
unemployed copywriters, journalists, technical writers, and aspiring novelists
out there looking to get noticed?
Twitter:
The classic and dependable social media tool
Let’s talk about Twitter for starters. It’s the
social media tool on the go, built for connecting people with passions in any
subject that you can think of. It’s the ideal venue for finding fellow writers,
readers, and industry contacts. The audience on Twitter is much more receptive
to writing professionals in the web industry who want to share their knowledge
with the world. Add a cleverly placed hashtag to your tweet, and you might just
get noticed by thousands of users instantly. There might even be a publication
out there looking for new hires!
Facebook is loaded with people who use the
service solely for keeping up with their social lives; far fewer people use it
for advancing their business or for selling their blog to the masses. On
Twitter, you have a real chance at sharing your work with people who are
genuinely interested in what you have to say. All you need to do is follow the
right people in your industry to get an idea for how to sell your skills to
fellow tweeters.
LinkedIn:
The golden standard of professional networking
And then of course there's LinkedIn, the online
service that was specifically built to bring together professionals in every
field you could imagine. PR reps, technical writers, advertising executives,
restaurateurs, and entrepreneurs from every conceivable background are just a
few of the types of people you'll find on LinkedIn. What’s more, the people on
this service are here for one reason, one that will surely benefit a job
seeker: they're looking to make connections with the right people.
LinkedIn differs from Facebook in its tone.
While many businesses have their own Facebook pages, they usually don't conduct
actual business on those pages, nor do they make attempts to hire or network
through them. Facebook is first and foremost a place for socializing. LinkedIn
is strictly business.
LinkedIn will help you get in with the right
people in the writing industry, but it will take considerable effort on the
writer's part to get the connections need to start a career. Writers have to
market themselves aggressively, proving their talent as ambitious young
professionals with shameless self-marketing backed up by outstanding clips of
their own work. On LinkedIn, a writer has to be forward thinking and unafraid
of risks and new ideas in their field if they want to get noticed. In other
words, they must present themselves as valuable assets to any company looking
for new hires.
Which social media services do you think help
bolster employment opportunities for writers?
Guest post by Maria Rainier. Maria is a
freelance blogger who writes about higher education, student lifestyle, and
general industry writing advice for an online
degrees blog. Maria also writes about the web’s
increasing influence on education and what it means for the students of
tomorrow. Feel free to send a comment her way!
One of the easiest time saving tools for people not wanting to spend too much time on social media is the ability to sync accounts so that by updating the status on one, you automatically update your other platforms too.
LinkedIn and Twitter have had a collaboration together since 2009 which enabled you to share your updates with both platforms. Twitter has recently been evolving its strategy and this will have an effect on the way tweets appear in third-party applications. One of these is that Tweets will no longer display automatically on LinkedIn.
You will however still be able to share your updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn. This means that if you start the conversation on LinkedIn, click the Twitter icon and share, your update will post automatically to both your LinkedIn account and your twitter account.
Any update posted on Twitter will no longer show on LinkedIn, even if you synced your accounts.
You can find out more information about what these new changes mean for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts in the LinkedIn help centre.
Do you sync your social media accounts?
LinkedIn is the professional social network. It requires a slightly different approach than the other main social media players (e.g. Facebook, twitter etc...) as the content you post should be geared towards your career, including your status updates. There is a lot more to this platform than a lot of people think though. It's not just an on-line resume for job seekers.
As of February 9, 2012, LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 150 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
This infographic gives a nice summary of how to use the site:
 |
| Image via mindflash.com |
Learn more about how to make LinkedIn work for you in the free on-line workshop on Saturday 19th May at www.PromoDay.info
This video is by Chris Voss, a Social Media Consultant and Owner of Strategix One Consulting. A nice how to for those with twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/
"Social Media Examiner is a free online magazine designed to help businesses discover how to best use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find leads, increase sales and generate more brand awareness. Technorati ranks us as a Top 100 Small Business blog (even though we service all businesses).
Offering a unique single source of knowledge, the site contains comprehensive articles and videos on how to use the best social media tools, along with original case studies, reviews of the latest industry research and advice direct from the world’s leading experts.
Our mission is to help you navigate the constantly changing social media jungle.
Michael Stelzner, the site’s founder and executive editor, had a vision to bring together the brightest minds in social media. Mari Smith, Jason Falls, Chris Garrett, Denise Wakeman, Cindy King and Casey Hibbard answered the call as founding contributors".
You can get Social Media Examiner delivered for free, straight to your email inbox. Well worth signing up for.
This site is packed full of very useful information to help you in your online marketing efforts. Recnt articles include (but are not limited to);
"Social Media Examiner is a free online magazine designed to help businesses discover how to best use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find leads, increase sales and generate more brand awareness. Technorati ranks us as a Top 100 Small Business blog (even though we service all businesses).
Offering a unique single source of knowledge, the site contains comprehensive articles and videos on how to use the best social media tools, along with original case studies, reviews of the latest industry research and advice direct from the world’s leading experts.
Our mission is to help you navigate the constantly changing social media jungle.
Michael Stelzner, the site’s founder and executive editor, had a vision to bring together the brightest minds in social media. Mari Smith, Jason Falls, Chris Garrett, Denise Wakeman, Cindy King and Casey Hibbard answered the call as founding contributors".
You can get Social Media Examiner delivered for free, straight to your email inbox. Well worth signing up for.
This site is packed full of very useful information to help you in your online marketing efforts. Recnt articles include (but are not limited to);
5 Ways to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page
8 Simple Steps to Growing a Quality Twitter Following
7 Essential Design Elements for Great Business Blogs
How to Add Retweet Buttons in Your PDF Documents
Social Media Revolution: Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore.
5 Tips For Joining Your First Social Media Site Such As Twitter, Facebook Or LinkedIn
By Yvonne Perry
The truth is that this is a world of official and unofficial rules. It is easier if you start out knowing what's what, and this is probably especially important if you're more of an introvert.
Let's imagine you already use email, search for information on Google, and read blog posts. But you've never joined any social media sites. How do you start?
1. Decide how comfortable you are sharing information about yourself. And the corollary to this - how wide a sharing of this information are you willing to do.
If you're a book author and want people to buy your book, it's a good idea to decide that you will share personal (although not private) information to as wide an audience as possible. If you only want to connect online with former high school friends, your target audience is much smaller.
If sharing information makes you somewhat nervous, think about what it means to be personal as opposed to private. Personal is a good marketing book you just read that you can recommend to help others; private is a fight you had with your business partner over implementing the marketing steps recommended in the book.
2. Ask online savvy friends which popular site they would recommend you start with based on your goal. (And do start with just one while getting your feet wet in this brave new world.)
• If your goal, for example, is to have a wide audience, then Twitter may be the best choice because of its "open to everyone" format.
• If you only want to search for high school friends, then Facebook may be the best choice as you can confine your information to a very small circle and can search by name for those long-long friends.
• If you want to make connections to help with a future job search, then LinkedIn, whose format is set up for such a process, may be the best choice for you.
3. Once you have chosen the site you'll start on, do a Google search for information on effectively using that site. That's right, before you ever sign up, read some blog posts that provide guidance on effectively using the site.
Now this isn't a research project that serves as an excuse for postponing actually joining the site. Just learn a few of the basic "rules." And if you do this step, you'll be way ahead of most other people who start on social media without first doing any research.
And why not learn this on the site itself? Because most of these sites have inadequate information for newcomers or an abundance of information that overwhelms newcomers.
Plus, to encourage you to sign up, the site's home page says something like: To join now just do this. And it's only after you've provided your name, email, password, etc. that you're left wondering "What do I do next?"
4. If you're starting on a site that doesn't require your real name, choose a username carefully. You want to think about seeing this name used all across cyberspace as lots of social media sites pull information from other social media sites (with your permission, of course).
You may initially think, for example, of choosing the name of your first book. But what happens when you write a second book? Or perhaps using the name of the book won't work well for a site that is focused on a non-book arena.
Remember that what you do on the internet theoretically lives forever. So this choice of a username should be considered carefully and for continued use in the long-run. (Once you've established a good online reputation with one username you don't want to start at square one again with a new username.)
5. Immediately post a photo of yourself - a headshot in which sunglasses and a baseball cap are not blocking people from totally seeing your eyes. (This does not have to be professional-photographer quality but should not be blurry.)
This photo should be one that will also work on social media sites you will join in the future because you want consistency across these sites. You want consistency to help people recognize and connect with you on more than one site. (The same for your username.)
Keep in mind that the photos for Twitter are quite small. And even if you're starting on Facebook, only include a headshot of yourself. Do not include other people and preferably not animals and other props.
By posting a good headshot of yourself you're signaling that you're interested in connecting with people - real people such as yourself - and you'll be off to a good start on your first social media site.
Now that you've read these five tips for starting on your first social media site, what are you waiting for? Join the cyberspace social media community today.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller's company has just launched the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program at http://www.weteachwebmarke
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For even more information about marketing your book online, read Book Marketing in the Digital Age, Online Promotion Made Easy.
Purchase Now!Published by Yvonne Perry, owner of Writers in the Sky Creative Writing Services and the author of this e-book. http://writersinthesky.com
UPDATE
We are no longer .com and have gone back to being a .blogspot.com site. Some graphics on site may therefore not show the correct url. Sorry for any inconvenience.
