Social Media Marketing Tips: LinkedIn, YouTube and Big Business Learnings
I’m really enjoying the great reminders and ideas speakers at the Social Media Success Summit #SMSS10 are sharing. Here’s my recap of the Social Media webinars from the Tuesday sessions:
Getting the Most out of LinkedIn
@LewisHowes has spent a lot of time using LinkedIn and he’s learned by trial and error the best place to focus. With 65 million business professionals using this tool, he believes it is the #1 social media site to build your business. You can export your contacts (to use in other marketing ways, like email) and the demographics of those who use it are people with a high net worth (an average Household Income of $109,000). These are business decision makers, so, if you make a good connection for a business partnership, you can most likely close a deal quickly.
Top 3 places to focus:
- Optimize your page for keywords.
- Join as many targeted groups as possible.
- Add Blog Feed and Video Apps.
How Big Businesses are Leveraging the Power of Social Media
This webinar had the marketing directors of Whole Foods, Best Buy and Home Depot talking about how they are utilizing social media. Many have “global” sites for the brand and also “local” sites for stores (since they are brick and mortar) – both in Facebook and Twitter.
They are using Flickr for photo streams, YouTube for both user generated and vendor generated content, in addition to their own videos which range on a variety of topics. They are putting their social media sites in printed circulars, in their windows (since they are store fronts) and sandwich boards in front of the stores.
Many are using twitter as a customer service outlet like Best Buy @twelpforce and some even have twitter accounts just for specific topics like Home Depot and their sponsorship of NASCAR racing @homedepotracing or Whole foods and their food and wine guys @WFMWineGuys. The big takeaway was to have fun with it and find out who is passionate about your brand and tap into that.
3 Reasons You Need a YouTube Marketing Strategy
@GregJarboe spoke about YouTube, pointing out that 86% of internet users are viewing videos each month and 81% of all videos are viewed on YouTube, so, you need to be there! Many people stop watching at the 10 second mark, so, your call to action and good content needs to be front loaded. You must optimize your video for keywords, so, be sure to put them in the Title, Description and Tags. If you need ideas for what to make videos about, visit the YouTube Creator’s Corner:
There is also an “insight” button in “My videos” of your account where you can see demographic info, referring URL info and where people are bailing out.
Bottom line is to add video frequently so people will subscribe to it (like your blog). And, every time you post a video on you tube, embed it in your blog as the views there count in YouTube.







