Last week I wrote about how I was converted to create a Facebook fan page for my business, https://power-to-change.eu/why-do-you-need-a-facebook-fan-page/ This week I am going to share a few tips on how to use LinkedIn and Twitter to increase your visibility online and get more hits to your website or blog.
So why use LinkedIn and Twitter?
Well, last time I checked, LinkedIn had over 55m users in over 200 countries with a new member signing up every second so my view is that you really can’t ignore it and one big advantage is that you can learn a lot from the discussions on LinkedIn. Twitter, on the other hand, is an amazing micro blogging platform that allows you to achieve enormous visibility and to quickly connect with people and I love the challenge of trying to get my message across using only 140 characters!
4 quick tips to using LinkedIn to increase your visibility:
- Update your status regularly.
- Make use of the answers function as this is a great way to demonstrate your expertise and get you in front of people out with your network as well as within. Review the section under your area of expertise and see if there are any questions that you can answer. This makes people aware of you and what you do as well as putting you in front of other people who are watching that question. To get even more exposure, ask some of your own questions.
- Recommendations – Try to recommend someone as often as possible. Not only is this a great way to thank people but it is also a great way to be seen on other people’s profiles.
- Events – You can also make use of the events function to advertise your events and get even more exposure.
4 quick tips to using Twitter to increase your visibility:
- Link your blog to your Twitter stream so that your blog posts are automatically tweeted as this will give you more visibility and drive traffic back to your blog. If you use WordPress then there are several plugins that you can easily use.
- Start researching to find the best people to follow on Twitter and then start engaging and connecting with them. Two great free tools you can use are www.twellow.com which helps you to find people by category and location and www.twollow.com to automate finding targeted people to follow based on keywords.
- Use hashtags – This is a way of identifying tweets belonging to a topic using the #symbol in front of the word or string of words. Simply include the tag in your tweet and other people searching for the same tag will be able to find it.
- The 80:20 rule – Once you have set up an account with Twitter try to spend about 80% of your time providing helpful, useful retweets or posting links to useful resources in your industry and 20% on promotion and blog posts.
I hope that these few tips will encourage you to get started on LinkedIn and Twitter and as always, drop me an email, anne@power-to-change.eu if you would like some help.
