The social network boasts a visitor-to-lead conversion rate that is 277% more effective than Facebook and Twitter. Capitalize on this high quality traffic by utilizing the following LinkedIn features:

1. LinkedIn Profiles

Make sure your company page is 100% complete. If a prospect is already spending their time on LinkedIn, a completed company page will allow them to find the information they’re looking for, without having to leave to go to your website.

You can approach your LinkedIn company page as an extension of your website. It can be branded with your logo, colors, and messaging. This is your opportunity to highlight your best products and services with video, peer recommendations, and supporting content. An incomplete company page is a missed opportunity to showcase your value proposition.

Don’t make the mistake of ignoring the LinkedIn audience; fill out every part of your page.

In addition to your company page, employee profiles are a powerful resource to garner greater visibility in the social sphere. While you can’t control all employee activity on LinkedIn, you can have guidelines for how your company name and description are represented. Ensure your company description contains your high performing keywords.

When a user performs a keyword search in LinkedIn, you’ll benefit from having your company and employees in the top results.

2. LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups give you access to highly targeted communities. You have the ability to reach the people that most perfectly match your target market. Sponsoring an event? Published a new article? Find the group that is best aligned with your activity and share. It’s important, however, not to use LinkedIn Groups as a fully self-promotional tool.

You can join groups to learn and add value. Monitor posts and questions to see where you can contribute in a helpful way. You shouldn’t only post information about your own business. You can share networking events, interesting articles, and other tools that you’ve found to be useful.

Once you have established your reputation within various LinkedIn groups as a quality member, you can intermittently include posts that promote your own business or product, when applicable. Self-promotional posts out of nowhere are never welcome. But, if someone needs help and your business offers a solution, this is an excellent forum to share that information.

In addition to building brand awareness, your helpful participation in LinkedIn groups will set your business apart from the competition.

3. Status Updates

Status updates are a powerful way to attract more viewers and build brand visibility. While this is not the case with LinkedIn Groups, it is perfectly acceptable to use LinkedIn status updates for self-promotion. As a professional network, this medium is designed for you to share the latest news, events, and press about your business.

In addition to posting from your company page, you can also ask your employees to share your company’s updates to expand your reach. If you’re lacking in original content, you can contribute interesting articles, interviews, and industry related content.

Use LinkedIn as a knowledge sharing platform. Like with most social networks, you get what you put in. Sharing relevant and interesting news will get you noticed. Don’t forget to comment and like posts from people in your network, as well, in order to show your support.

When you are active on LinkedIn, you’re building a stronger online presence for your business. A filled out company profile and uniform employee profiles will increase your visibility in search results. LinkedIn Groups not only help you to stay on top of industry trends, but also keep you in front of a highly targeted audience.

And lastly, status updates ensure you stay visible. Make it easy for potential buyers to find you by utilizing LinkedIn to its full potential.

LinkedIn Photo via HubSpot

The post 3 Lead Generating LinkedIn Features to Capitalize On appeared first on Small Business Trends.

While Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn remain the top 3 heavy hitters in the social media marketplace, Pinterest can now be included in the top 4.  As you plan next year’s social media strategy, make sure you’re considering ways to reach and engage a broader audience using Pinterest.

Business Pages for Pinterest were just introduced, so it’s a great time to join. Already have an account? Convert your existing Pinterest page to a Business page with just 1 click.

In 2013, you can expect to see a plethora of tools built around Pinterest, optimizing your experience, like the following:

Quozio

This fun tool, which comes with a bookmarklet option, allows you to create an image out of text on the Web, making the text or quote perfectly pin-able for Pinterest. Quozio also takes a cue from Instagram by allowing different “filters” once you’ve selected your quote.

Pinfluencer

Pinfluencer is a marketing and analytics platform for Pinterest. It helps you measure the ROI of your Pinterest activity. It tracks pins from your website, pins from your boards, followers, and other engagement. Pinfluencer helps your brand identify brand advocates and prospective customers, ensuring you use Pinterest to its full potential.

You have to contact them for pricing, but Pinfluencer is offering a 14-day trial and a free demo.

Instagram

Instagram is a social network that made a big impact in 2012, and is often overlooked. Instagram grew enough to catch the attention of the one and only Mark Zuckerberg, who quickly made the decision to buy the social photo sharing app for the price of $1 Billion.

And with Instagram having experienced growth of more than 1,100% since being acquired by Facebook, it is still a network to be watched. Regardless of the recent Instagram-Twitter fight, photo sharing is important to users and any new tools that spring up are either going to look to Instagram for inspiration or serve as an add-on to the platform.

Instagram Extension for Google Chrome

This extension brings Instagram right to your browser. As businesses continue to use the mobile platform for various contest and promotions, access from a browser comes in handy. You no longer have to be on your phone to manage Instagram activity, and instead you can conveniently access everything you need to right from Chrome. And they’ve made the interface as similar to Instagram as possible, making for quick and easy adoption.

Mobile Apps

According to Nielsen, consumers are spending more than a third of social networking time on mobile apps. We’re going to see mobile apps springing up for use during TV watching, to manage a contest, to share music; anything that falls under the category, “Social Experience.”

Facebook Pages Manager

Look for more apps like the Facebook Pages Manager, which was only released this year, and is geared toward social media professionals. Now, we can manage our brand’s Facebook Page without interfering with our personal accounts.

In 2012, Pinterest showed us that Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter will not be guaranteed the top spots forever. All social networks will have to keep innovating in order to keep our attention. It’s clear, however, that social media should no longer be considered some separate entity when it comes to your marketing strategy.

Social can now be integrated into every marketing activity you do, and definitely deserves a place in your plan for 2013.

I think we can all expect to see social media tools, analytics, and apps, that will allow for us to better maximize, optimize, and report on our social media activity and spend.

The post Hot Social Media Tools For 2013 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Here are 10 common Twitter mistakes your business should avoid:

1. Shameless Self-Promotion

Tweeting about your business is OK, as long as you’re doing so in moderation. As with all social media, Twitter is a medium for conversation. It’s important to be adding value to the general conversation.

If you’re tweeting the latest piece of useful content or pertinent event information, your followers will know how great you are without your having to say it outright.

2. Repeating Tweets

Twitter moves quickly. As of June 2012, Twitter was at 400 million tweets per day. With that many tweets streaming through your followers’ Twitter feeds, there is a great chance your tweet will be missed. Many businesses try to combat this by repeating the same tweet 50 times per day. That is just too much repetition and your followers will grow tired of you.

You want to make sure your followers are seeing your tweets, but you want to be cautious of too much repetition. If it’s a very important tweet and I want to make sure it is seen, I like to repeat it a couple times a day for a few days, but not much more.

3. ReTweeting Yourself

ReTweeting yourself equates to liking your own Facebook posts. We know you’re proud of the content you’re tweeting, you don’t need to retweet yourself to prove it. When you want to repeat a tweet, don’t be lazy. Find a new way to describe the content with each tweet.

As I mentioned above, you can repeat tweets in moderation. Take the time to compose a new tweet when re-sending the same link from an earlier tweet. Don’t just retweet yourself over and over again or you will lose followers.

4. ReTweeting Mentions of Your Own Brand

Somebody finally mentioned your brand on Twitter! This can be very exciting. A common response is to just retweet the great thing someone said about you. In the real world, would you go around repeating the compliments you’ve received? Probably not. Apply this same rule when using Twitter.

I would recommend that you reply to the person with a thank you and move-on. However, if you feel the mention contains content your followers might want to see, just make sure your retweet includes a thank you to the user who mentioned you.

5. Too Many Hashtags

Too many hashtags in a tweet is distracting and ineffective. Your tweet will come off looking spammy and consequently will be ignored. You want people to actually read what you’re tweeting, right?

Instead of stuffing your tweet with hashtags, pick one or two keywords that relate to your tweet and place those at the end with hashtags.

What Not to Do

Recommended

6. Generic Questions

I see this all the time. Businesses will tweet a question like, “How’s your day going?” First of all, Twitter only allows for 140 characters. How are your followers going to respond to such an open-ended question in so few characters? And, what’s the point of your question?

You’re allowed to be casual and conversational on Twitter, but put some thought into the questions you want to ask and how you want to ask them. First, decide whether you want to keep things professional or be personal. Then, ask the questions that align with your Twitter strategy.

If you’re keeping it professional, stick to questions that pertain to industry-related topics:

“Our key takeaway from the #SmallBiz event? Balance professional and personal tweets. What did you learn? #socialmedia”

Leaning toward personal tweets? Ask a question that invites a response:

“We spent the morning @SmallBizTrends eating #bagels! What’d you eat for breakfast? #morningchatter”

7. Irregular Activity

When something big is happening to your business, it’s expected that you’ll be doing some extra tweeting. You could be ramping up your Twitter activity because you’re promoting an upcoming event, running a campaign, or publishing a white paper.

A common mistake, however, is to be absent from Twitter 80% of the year and then only show up when you have something you need to promote. Twitter is active year-round and you should be too. Regardless of whether it’s a busy time of year for you or not, you can always maintain a regular stream of activity and engagement.

Monitor feeds daily to participate in relevant conversations and re-share other’s useful content. That way, when it comes time to promote your own business, you can increase your activity and your followers will be more likely to help you spread the word.

8. Robot Posts

You’re busy. Your business is busy. You want to participate in social media, but you just don’t have the time. Enter the tweet scheduler. Numerous services allow you to schedule tweets ahead of time. This is a feature that can be very useful. I like to schedule tweets when I’m going on vacation or when there are a few things I want to make sure I promote in a timely manner.

Using a tweet scheduler too often, however, can start to make you look like a robot. Even when you’re using Twitter in a professional capacity, your followers want to know there is a person behind the tweets.

Schedule in moderation and inject some personality. Scheduling the same tweet for 10:01AM, 12:01PM, 2:01PM, and 4:01PM is a dead giveaway that you have relinquished your Twitter participation to a robot, and will hurt engagement.

9. Tweet Length

What could I possibly mean by tweet length? We’re already limited enough by the 140 characters, aren’t we?

Often, taking up the entire 140 characters limits your followers in their ability to retweet you and add a comment of their own. When possible, leave some characters unused to enable people to add their own commentary, @mentions, and hashtags when retweeting your content.

10. Misleading Link Descriptions

There is nothing more irritating than when you see an interesting tweet, click on the link, and find you’ve been taken to a completely unrelated page. We all want to see high click-through rates, high engagement, and large followings, but a misleading link description will only hurt your reputation.

You can be engaging without misleading your followers by composing a tweet that both attracts attention and relates to the link you’re sending out.

While there is no formula for Twitter success, avoiding some of these mistakes will certainly help you in your Twitter endeavors.

What are some common Twitter mistakes you’ve seen?

The post 10 Twitter Blunders Businesses Should Avoid appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I’d like to share how you can continue building your online community using social media for various promotions, sales, and specials, this holiday season.

According to the Social Media Holiday Purchases graphic (PDF version also available) by Mr. Youth, 36% of social media users trust brands with a social media presence, and 80% of users who received a response on a social channel went on to make a purchase.

Social media can be integral to establishing brand awareness and reputation.  The holidays serve as a perfect opportunity to consider how you want people to think of your brand.

Here are 5 ways you can use social media this holiday season for brand awareness and recognition:

1. Talk to Your Customers

Businesses can certainly use social to media to push their products and services, but it can also be used for conversation. Talk to your customers and ask them about their holiday to differentiate yourself.

Perhaps this sounds too easy, but simple questions like, “What’s your favorite holiday tradition?” or “What are you thankful for this year?” can show that you care. These are the questions that add a personal touch and can help ensure your online community remembers you.

But, don’t forget to respond! Just asking the questions isn’t enough. Customers want to know you’re listening, so make sure you’re acknowledging their answers.

2. Give Back

Most businesses utilize social media during the holidays for give-aways and exclusive sales. While that is a great use, you can also use social media to give back to the community.

Are your employees running a food drive? Will you have a company-wide volunteer outing? Is there a holiday charity event you sponsor? Document these holiday activities and post the photos/videos/quotes to your Facebook page or to Instagram with a unique hashtag. Run a promotion where you select a charity and match customer donations dollar for dollar.

Whatever way you choose to give back to your community this holiday season, social media can be an excellent tool to promote your efforts. Your customers will enjoy seeing that you are a business that gives back.

 3. Encourage Sharing

Often, the best social media campaigns are those that  involve your customers and encourage sharing. There are numerous ways you can get your customers to provide and share rich holiday content on your social media networks.

For example, have your online community share and tweet photos of their decorated Christmas tree. One photo can be selected each day to win a 10% discount.

You can also combine the “giving back” element here by asking customers to share photos of their charity efforts this holidays season. People want to feel connected, and they use social media to accomplish this.

The holidays are the perfect time to bring people together on your networks by encouraging them to share their experiences.

4. Highlight Your Culture

You should be using social media to promote your brand year-round, and you can ramp up your culture posts during the holidays. Are you having a Holiday Potluck? Hosting a holiday cookie bake-off? Did you decorate the office? Ugly Christmas sweater contest? Take photos!

Fun, silly holiday photos are excellent to post to your Facebook page, for example, and showcase your business. People like to see the personality behind the product. With all of the holiday happenings, you want to make sure you’re documenting your company culture as much as possible.

5. Be Helpful

People are dealing with a lot over the holidays. You can use social media to offer helpful advice, tips, and facts for customers. Post daily gift ideas, ideas on how to maximize a limited holiday budget, tips for stress-free entertaining. Using a branded hashtag will maintain brand awareness even when the topic may not directly align with your products or services.

Everyone appreciates useful advice and your customers will thank you for pushing content that makes their holidays slightly less stressful. Start brainstorming about how you can continue to serve up useful advice beyond the holidays. The season will come to an end, but your helpfulness can continue year-round.

If you haven’t planned ahead this year, that’s ok! Your holiday social media activity doesn’t require an elaborate plan (though I do typically recommend you have a strategy in place).

These 5 simple steps will help you engage your customers with holiday posts and promotions that complement who you are as a brand and strengthen your online community.

The post Integrate Social Media Into Your Holiday Marketing Strategy appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If you’re new to the game and wondering what to do next, below are 5 social media tips to send you and your small business off in the right direction to achieve social media success:

1) Develop a Strategy

I’ve seen many companies make the mistake of approaching social media without a strategy. First, decide which social networks make most sense for your company. You may not have a product that will translate to Pinterest or Instagram. It’s better to have a limited, strategic presence on social media than to be everywhere without purpose.

Once you have selected the social networks that best suit your company, you can then align your strategy to meet your desired goals. For example, do you have the goal of growing your Facebook community? If so, you should be brainstorming content, promotions, and posts that will attract your target customer.

2) Respond

Assigning an intern to manage the social media channels a few hours per week is simply not enough anymore. Your online community expects to receive responses to inquiries in a timely manner (typical accepted response time is within 24 hours). If you aren’t willing to invest the time and money it takes to respond to your online followers, then you probably shouldn’t be on social media.

Customers want to know someone is listening. The simple task of responding speaks volumes to your customer service. If you don’t have the answer and need some time to find it, let that person know that you have seen their question and you are working to get the answer for them.

3) It’s All About the Content

Don’t just broadcast anything to make it look like you’re active on social media. There are too many companies out there bombarding their followers with the social media equivalent of spam. If you want to build a following, create content that makes you a leader in your industry.

If you don’t have enough time to regularly produce original quality content, share the good content that’s already out there or approach the experts to create content for you. Your online community will thank you for helping them find the good stuff.

4) Don’t Duplicate

Posting the same thing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like is redundant and will cause you to lose followers. Tailor the content for each network and audience. LinkedIn is a professional network so this serves as a great place for thought leadership. Make use of photos and other rich media content to tell a visual story using Facebook Timeline.

People join social networks for different reasons and you best serve your online community when you know who they are and what they want to see. Take the time to do the research and post what is best suited to each medium.

5) Self Promotion is Anti-Social

In real life, when you’re trying to make friends, talking about yourself won’t get you far. It’s the same with social media. Your participation in the space should foster conversation. It’s okay to tell your online community about a new product or promotion, as long as that’s not all you’re doing.

Make it easy for your community, customers, and industry leaders to share content on your social pages. Be an active listener to better understand what your community wants. If they’re following you, they already think you’re great, you don’t need to constantly remind them.

How do you use social media for your small business?  Share your social media tips with us.

Social Network Photo via Shutterstock

The post Social Media Tips for Small Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Retargeting has proven to be a highly effective way to convert customers. Consider how distracted we are as we do online research or purchasing. Phone calls, emails, or chat windows regularly interrupt me, for example. These interruptions result in my abandoning a shopping cart or forgetting what I was doing entirely.

Retargeting is rapidly become an integral part of online marketing and advertising for one simple reason — it works.

You can effectively capture those visitors who have already expressed interest in your products or services and never completed a purchase. As consumers, we are going to be served ads no matter what, so why not have those ads be for the things we are interested in?

Below, I’ve listed a quick look at some of the best (and more affordable) retargeting companies that can help you get your campaigns started.

Retargeting Companies

Google Remarketing:  Built into your existing Adwords account, Google makes it easy to begin remarketing on the Google Display Network, with very flexible pricing.

AdRoll:  Set up a campaign in minutes and gain access to prime online real estate with AdRoll. They’ve been around since 2007 and they know what they’re doing.

ReTargeter:  ReTargeter offers a comprehensive starter package for just $500. Known for their stellar customer service, you even get a dedicated account manager working to make sure all of your needs are met.

Fetchback:  Fetchback offers a full product suite to make sure your campaign is set up in the way that is most effective for your business.

One Tip

Don’t overdo it.  Make sure you limit the number of times you serve ads to the same people so as to not scare away someone who could become a very loyal customer.

You don’t want to be the creepy company that doesn’t appear to value privacy because it follows its customers all across the Internet.

Retargeting Photo via Shutterstock

The post Turn Visitors Into Buyers: Benefits of Retargeting appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Luckily, there are numerous free and low cost tools you can use to measure your social media activity. Do you want to know the increase in brand mentions? The number of conversions directly related to social media efforts? The growth rate of your online community? Know what you are measuring and why when choosing your social media monitoring tools.

Here’s a list of 20 free social media monitoring tools worth checking out:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a web-based dashboard that allows you to monitor multiple social networks in one place. You can collaborate with fellow employees, schedule messages, and assign tasks to your team. It’s particularly great for managing multiple accounts on the same platform. This is one of my personal favorites.

2. Klout

Klout provides an influencer score based on your social media activity. Your Klout score is determined using over 400 variables. In addition to working on your own Klout score, you can look at your influences and who you influence to regularly share content that is of the highest quality from trusted sources.

3. TweetReach

Who is reading your tweets? How is it being shared? What is the measured impact of what you’re putting out there? TweetReach is a social analytics tool that helps you capture this valuable information.

4. TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet aggregates your activity from various social media platforms so you can get the full picture of your online presence. Then, you can determine which of your activities are most valuable.

5. Twitalyzer

Measure your impact, engagement, and influence on Twitter with this tool. They offer three plans, depending on your needs, Individual, Business and Agency, all at a very reasonable price. They do offer their three most popular reports for free, so just connect your Twitter account and start Twitalyzing.

6. PeerIndex

Use this tool to determine your online authority and who your online brand advocates are. Learn which topics are best for you to focus on and who to connect with to spread the word.

7. Facebook Insights

This dashboard gives you all of the analytics data related to your Facebook page so that you can track growth and impact. Use the Insights to better understand your followers and reach the right audience.

8. SocialMention

Track and measure who is talking about you, your company, your product, or any topic related to your industry. SocialMention pulls data from hundreds of social media services to give you the most accurate, real-time information.

9. SocialPointer

This tool allows you to track and monitor social mentions and respond in real-time. Find potential customers, listen to what your competitors are saying, and get immediate feedback about your business.

10. SocialBro

Manage and analyze your Twitter account with SocialBro. This tool gives you detailed information about your Twitter community so that you can interact with followers more efficiently and garner the best results.

11. FollowerWonk

This Twitter analytics service, now owned by SEOMoz, allows you to understand and sort your followers. Learn when your influential followers are most active so that you can select the best times to engage your community and to ensure you’re reaching the right people at the right time.

12. HowSociable

Measure your brand’s impact online with this tool that provides you with a magnitude score. The score analyzes your level of activity online so that you can determine whether you have enough of a presence.

13. Seesmic

Manage all of your business’ social media accounts in one place with Seesmic. Quickly view and respond to social activity in real-time even from your mobile devices.

14. Engag.io

This is a great tool for managing your conversations on social networks. Engag.io provides you with valuable insights into the people you are talking to via social media and also gives you a place to track whether or not you’ve responded.

15. TweetDeck

Arrange feeds from all of your social networks in one place using the TweetDeck dashboard. You can also schedule tweets and set-up customizable feeds for your social search needs.

16. Brand Monitor

Track your brand across numerous social media sites. Find where conversations relevant to your business are taking place so that you can start becoming an active social media participant. Learn trending keywords and measure conversation engagement to help bring more valuable brand content to social media platforms.

17. Kred

Similar to Klout, Kred mines social data to give you a Kred score. The score is a combination of your influence and your outreach activity. Kred measures how often you tweet or post, how people interact with you, and the growth of your audience. Kred gives you a detailed breakdown of your score so that you know exactly where you should improve and the areas in social that are working well for your company.

18. Google Analytics Social Reports

Nicely integrated into your Google Analytics platform, Social Reports helps measure how social traffic is directly impacting your conversions. Using an overview of your social networks, this tool allows you to visualize your social traffic so that you know where your time is best spent in the social world.

19. TwitterCounter

TwitterCounter tracks Twitter users to give you statistics and usage information for your account. This service offers a very basic free package with graphical data, but you can pay a bit more for access to an account comparison feature, more updates, report exports, and more.

20. Topsy

This is a real-time social search engine. Sort through the latest social activity related to your industry, brand, or community and apply that knowledge to future business decisions.

There’s a lot of overlap in the services these social media monitoring tools provide. It’s most important that you find the tool that aligns with your business needs and personal preferences.

Social Media Photo via Shutterstock

The post 20 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools You Should be Using appeared first on Small Business Trends.