Ensure you fill in your LinkedIn professional headline!
This week’s video tutorial:
Ensure you complete your LinkedIn professional headline. Don’t just put in your job title. Explain to potential clients what you actually do and how you add value.
How to use Vine to engage with your audience
- Have you heard of ‘Vine’?
- Would you like to know how it can improve the relationship between you and your customers?
Vine was launced by Twitter in January, and is a video sharing medium which allows you to record and broadcast a video lasting no more than 6 seconds. The time limitation is intentional so that similarly to Twitters’ own 140 character limitation, you are forced to be brief, get to the point and ideally be more creative in your message. The creative nature of these videos can be inspiring and intriguing to the viewer, in turn encouraging them to interact or find out more about your brand. The videos are set up so that they loop and also initially the sound is muted which encourages both interactivity with the audience and also allows your video to be sent to more viewers without causing any noise problems. In fact, if promoted and made well, your Vine video could very quickly go viral, becoming the topic of conversation around more than just your normal brand’s audience.
What makes Vine extra popular is that is that it operates via a mobile phone app so can be recorded and broadcast on the move. It discourages too much planning and editing but at the same time makes you as a company really think about what elements of your product or brand appeal to your audience. The best way to appreciate this is to look at some examples for yourself.
How schools can use social media to fight cyber bullying
As well all know, bullying is no longer just something which occurs in the playground, classroom or on a child’s journey to and from school. With the widespread use and acceptability of social media into all aspects of our lives, a new type of bullying has also evolved – namely cyber bullying.
The official government guidelines define ‘Cyber bullying’ as
“the use of Information and communications technology, particularly mobile phones and the internet, deliberately to upset someone else".
The place where cyber bullying is most prominent is via social media. However, social media can also be used to educate against bullying as well as being used to monitor any potential incidents.
So what can a school do to reduce incidents of bullying via social media networks?
There are various, easy steps which schools can be take tackle bullying via social media:
- Regularly check all the official school social media pages for any malicious or offensive comments. Such comments can then be removed quickly and before too much damage is caused. Ensure your administrator
- Appoint a specific staff member within the school to be responsible for such monitoring and set up email notifications for each social media platform so they’re alerted when any posts are made. This means the school will be aware almost immediately when any unacceptable posts made on the school’s social media pages.
Do you monitor when customers talk about you on Twitter?
- Are your customers having conversations about your product on twitter?
- Are you monitoring these conversations and responding or joining in the discussions where appropriate?
To use twitter effectively you need to do more than just tweet about your company. You need to first identify those twitter users who might be interested in your producs or services.
So how do you find these sales leads? And how do you get them interested in your product?
- Firstly monitor twitter users who are talking about your product area, industry, a competitor or even your own actual company/product. You can do this via the search or advance search facility in Twitter. Simply type in a keyword or hashtag and Twitter will filter the results with the relevant tweets. Or even better, use a tool called Hootsuite that enables you to create separate feeds, each one tracking up to three keywords or Hashtags.
- Some comments and discussions will contain useful information whilst others should present an opportunity for you to subtly persuade people to look at and talk about your product. e.g. If you’re selling a product that cures back pain, you might track the keyphrase "my back is killing me". When people talk about their back problems, you can ask them whether they have tried any products to ease their pain and what the outcome has been.
Is it safe for schools to use social media?
The use of the internet is as popular and common in schools today as it is in other walks of life. Most children can not even remember a world without the internet. However, unlike in other fields, schools have an added responsibility to protect their pupils when both using the internet and when appearing on it (i.e. on the school’s website.)
Has your school taken steps to protect their students in relation to the internet and have your staff or colleagues been trained in what they should and should not post on the internet too?
Avoiding the internet because of safety concerns is also not the answer. So what should you been doing?
Internet Safety in General – Before posting anything on the internet at all, those tasked with the school’s internet presence should agree on what they actually want to share about the school on the internet.
Don’t ignore strangers on LinkedIn, they could be your next customer!
I often meet clients, who tell me proudly that they never connect with strangers on LinkedIn. But what if that "stranger" wants to buy from you, or what if they have a referral? In this short video, I explain why you shouldn’t be so quick to ignore connection requests from strangers.
Help, what’s a Google Hangout?!!
Register for our Google Hangout and FREE social media briefing on Thursday 28th February – we’ll contact you with instructions on how it works and how to join
So…what is Google Hangout? And why would I want to join it?
Google Hangout is a free video chat / conferencing service from Google+ (now the world’s second largest social network) which allows 1-2-1 or group chats or even meetings for up to 10 people at a time. It can be used for business or social (i.e. catching up with family and friends.) What is unique and attractive about Google hangout is that you are literally chatting face to face as the screen shows the faces of all attendees to everyone with a bigger portion of screen held off for the person speaking.
On Google Hangout you can…
- Host virtual meetings…doing this via Google hangout can increase your team’s productivity as well as saving time and money – allowing up to 10 people to participate. Google hangout have recently also added screen sharing and Google docs programmes to improve the effectiveness of such meetings.
How head teachers should be using social media to promote their school
- Are you a head teacher?
- Are you active on Twitter and Facebook?
With social media impacting on so many people’s lives, to merely treat it as an afterthought could seriously damage your school’s reputation, especially if you’re looking to attract sixth form pupils.
The question is, which social media platform should you use and how should you use it?
Facebook in particular should be exploited for use as an interactive brochure or window into life at your school. So much more interesting than a prospectus! Through videos, pictures, commentary and documents you can promote your school’s:
- Exam results
- Introduce yourself and your teachers
- Show examples of your school’s teaching style
- List, describe or show what a typical day at your school might be like
- Share your students’ school experiences from trips and lessons to extra curricular activities.
How can I get my twitter audience to talk to me?
Are you trying to use twitter as a sales tool? If the answer is yes then you need to look at what and more importantly how you are tweeting.
- Do your twitter feeds look like nothing more than news feeds?
- Are you giving out lots of information but getting little interaction or response back?
- In other words, is your twitter feed increasingly resembling a monologue?
If the answer to any of the above is "yes", you need to make some drastic changes to the way you tweet or you’re wasting your time!
Lets take a regular offline social environment, say a networking meeting: if someone talks to you all the time without giving you the chance to respond, the conversation becomes dull and most likely fizzles out to an awkward silence. The same applies if you fail to tweet in a way that encourages your followers to interact with you.
How to promote your social media activities offline
You may be actively tweeting about your company or updating your company’s profile on Facebook but how many of your customers even know you exist on social media?
Unless you build your audience and direct your customers to your social media channels, you’re talking to a brick wall!
So how do you direct people to your social media activity?
This is more of an ever growing list but for an introduction here are a few suggestions:
- Include your social media addresses in all your offline/printed marketing:
- In Adverts in papers and magazines and on posters. Depending on the size of your advert you can include your company’s twitter account, Facebook page, phone app and QR code.
- In mailshots – this can be done like the adverts of more as a campaign in itself where the mailshot becomes a teaser for a promotion on on of your social media channels.
- On POS or merchandise such as bags and clothing even if displayed on something unrelated to your service or product. As this particular advertising will be aimed at people noticing them in passing it works better for easily remembered names and in particular twitter or Facebook.
- On all company stationery such as letterheads and compliment slips.
