Status Updates in social media can be confusing if you think as a professional that you have to be extremely personal with your updates.

“You don’t have to tell everyone about what pizza you are eating to grow your business”

Here are four tips to help get the most of your status updates that will drive results for your business.

1.       1.  Be authentic: You don’t have to tell everyone about what pizza you are eating, but you do need to be human. 

2.      2.  Use your current business questions or qualifiers to engage.  For example some of your typical qualifying questions can be posted.  Often times you will see people respond, which then can turn into a warm lead.

3.       3.  Drive people to landing pages or website pages with calls to actions in your status updates.

4.       4.  When providing URL’s in your updates use URL shortner’s such as bit.ly so you can both shrink the URL (saves character space) and keep track of your click through results from specific status updates.

There are countless tips available on how to perfect status updates for your business.  My goal today was to help businesses & professionals beginning to get some initial results. So what have you found helpful in your status updates?

Post by  Guest  Contributor~ Nathan Kievman
CEO, DemingHill
Founder, Linked Strategies (#1 LinkedIn Strategies Group)

In my many conversations on LinkedIn, I recently came across a group post within eMarketing Associations Group on LinkedIn titled “Social Media for Business is Crap.” Amazing post with nearly 3,000 comments at the time of this post.

So this question alluded to ROI directly. This business person and many others haven’t been able to find real world results. So the cry out was for real life results. Here is my response:

Our company, DemingHill, services corporations with their social media needs and we see ROI consistently. I will share some examples below. However, I believe this question is a bit presumptuous, though well done for the mass interaction it’s caused. When you say “Social Media for Business is Crap” I can only assume you mean ROI. If so, I believe the question misses the real potential of social media.

Our largest Fortune clients only care about the ROI as a second or third area of importance (if that high). You see, the most important aspect of social media is relationship building. The number one most important thing to our clients has been building communities of key constituents. This process is not as easy as the market makes it out to be and requires real strategy blended together with an intrinsic knowledge of the social verticals rules & etiquette. ROI is important, but so is customer service, brand monitoring, brand awareness, intellectual property, trademarks, crisis management and many other categories.

Where most Marketers steal the thunder of social media is pushing this ROI issue. No doubt it matters, I definitely focus on it, but the real fact of the matter is, if you are not converting outside of social media, social media will not help you convert and improve your ROI. Social Media will bring people (at times in masses) to your virtual doorstep. Sometimes they can be more ready to buy over others depending on how they came to your virtual doorstep, but that comes down to strategy, positioning, and influence.

So regarding ROI:
First what is the measurement for success? Like I said before, is it community members of key constituents or dollars in your pocket from sales?

ROI on Social Media is almost always indirect in my opinion. We have ran many campaigns to know this to be true. Here are some successful ROI examples I can share to hopefully shatter your notion that “Social Media for Business is Crap.” I believe and know Social Media is the evolution of human behaviour, and when human behavior changes, so must BUSINESS. Here are some concrete examples of successful ROI driven results:

~ One of our sales guys at DemingHIll (my Corporate Social Media Consulting Practice) closed a $7million dollar deal originated from Twitter.

~ A client attracted Walmart, Human Health, and Bank of America as consulting clients through LinkedIn

~ Small client set up and established $27,000 in revenue on 7 hours of invested time

~ Consulting firm grew a group from 0 to 8,500 members in 11days

~ Client with product and training program has generated directly from LinkedIn over $250,000 in revenue from his efforts on this site

~ Business Services firm generated $150,000 in revenue from webinar series launched through social media platforms only (by the way, that was in one month)

You get the idea. The ROI question is really about your marketing path and product path outside of the social platforms. Those paths can be fixed, but need to take into consideration the original source of the incoming traffic and what motivates them to buy or take a specific action.

Grab our complimentary eBook: How Your Company Can Begin to Profit Using Social Media

As a business professional, so much information is available on using Social Platforms to generate business success. With so much noise, I wanted to take the time to provide the business world with three key categories of resources. They are key social media advisors who come not only highly recommended, but have the trackable experience as well. Next, I will share key tools that can help streamline your processes’ to better utilize your time invested. Finally, I will share key educational pieces you may want to take advantage of, before you review these resources take a look at this video.

Advisors
Nathan Kievman CEO of DemingHill, A Leading Social Media Firm
Chris Brogan Considered one of the foremost thought leaders in Social Media and well sought after advisor.
Mari Smith Considered to be the Facebook Queen
Seth Godin Considered to be a foremost business thought leader

Tools
Ping.fm: For Status Updates this tool will save you countless hours of time.
Hummingbird : Growing a targeted following on Twitter is tough enough.  This tool does it on automation.
Google Alerts : Listen to your audience. Without knowing what your target market or competitors are doing online how can you expect to get a creative edge in your marketing process? You must use Google Alerts to keep an ear to the masses.

Education Material
Trust Agents

Twitter Power 

Linked Into Marketing

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LinkedIn Power Users Webinar Every Thursday 4pm & 7pm EST, can’t make it go ahead and register for the playback.  Grabl your spot : http://bit.ly/3wzq9Q

Recently I received a post from a LinkedIn user who was quite bitter about Social Media. This sentiment is not that uncommon amongst my executive contacts and many of the very successful business owners I know.

I understand how at face value, social media seems like a big cluster of chaos. I mean really, how impactful can a tweet be or a LinkedIn group post or a fan page post?

Obviously strategy and tactics are requisite for success with these social tools, but failing social media campaigns are not always because of a poor strategy. Let me share with you some of our core beliefs from My Corporate Media, Your Social Media Advisor.

There are only three major components to creating successful (and profitable) social media campaigns:

1. Quality Content
2. Trust & Credibility
3. Capacity to Communicate/ Distribution Destinations (ie Group)s, Fan Pages, Followers, Etc.)

If any of these are missing from your social media campaign, IT WILL FAIL… period end of story! So for all the nay sayers out there, I challenge you to measure you successes (or failures) against these 3 categories. I would suggest that if you failed, you left out one of these 3 categories.

I share this with great confidence because My Corporate Media teaches others to follow this model and they do profit. They have attracted top fortune 1000 companies, earned 27,000 in 7 hours of real time marketing efforts, earned 250,000 over the course of 12 months, grew communities to 8,500 members in 11 days and there are many more examples.

So, my final thought for anyone that doesn’t believe social media is a place for business or a place for businesses to profit; adjust your strategy around these three principles for your next campaign and let us know how well you succeed!

*Let My Corporate Media recommend the write campaign and help you develop a strong Social Media Strategy. Email us to learn more at support@mycorporatemedia.com  Put in the subject “Help My Company With Our Social Media Strategy”

So you and your company have a social media presence. How do you generate a lead using your status updates application? While I could write a book about this very subject, I would like to share just some practical strategies that will help move you and your company forward in this arena.

Some Practical Strategies for Generating Leads with Status Updates in Social Media:

1. First and foremost, be sure to use the 12:1 Ratio strategy. What do I mean by this? You should always be pushing 12 status updates that are not directly related to generating a lead. Rather these 12 updates should be informative, resourceful, and thoughtful to help your community. So for every single promotion you should focus twelve updates that are not, before making the next direct plug for your company. Otherwise your community will get tired of you quickly.
2. Just like in your business, what type of qualifying questions do you use to take a cold brand new lead to a warm lead? Use these qualifying questions in your status updates.
3. Next, give away a resource, book, or report with opt in of an email address.
4. Share your travels and upcoming events. You will be surprised who responds. Someone may be in the area and want to meet.
5. Integrate your status update application in one single place, read my recent article on Status Updates on Social Networks Made Easy.

These are just a couple practical ways to generate leads using Status Updates. What tips do you have to generate leads using Status Updates?

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Are you on multiple Social Networks for your business? Are you looking to bring continuity and one seem-less process to your status updates? Many services offer you the capability to send one status update that will update multiple social platforms at once. Many of them fall short of truly encompassing the majority of social networks online today. Except for one, that is Ping.fm, As a business professional myself this tool is a great resource to communicate one consistent message in just one full swoop.

Ping.fm should really be called “Status Updates Made Easy” for Social Networking. You can do status updates from Email, Chat, SMS, Blackberry, Android, WEB, Windows, OSX and much more soon. This is why Ping.fm is extremely easy to use and access –just send an update and it can touch on 50 social networks including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, WordPress, TypePad, Yammer, Status.net and many more. Ping.fm is compatible with every single Internet device in the world, which why it has become so successful among thousands of users.

Setting up your Ping.fm updates is really simple, first create an account then login and this screen will come up. On the lower left you see “add networks” click here to select which networks you want to add.

Then the list of networks comes up as seen below and you simple click on which ones you want to add and follow the directions to add. Usually it’s as simple as putting your username and password in for the account.

Recently Seesmic acquired Ping.fm, I would really call it a partnership as well since all the players at ping are working with seesmic. I am sure we can expect even more seem-less integration in the future.

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Be sure to grab our:

Fast Start Guide to LinkedIn
Fast Start Guide to Twitter
Register for our next LinkedIn Power Users Webinar with Playback
Five LinkedIn Power User Strategies

Whether you are a beginner or have been on a Linkedin a long time replying to each Linkedin invite is truly a gold mine. Most people who have large growing networks and receive multiple invites everyday often do not practice answering all invites. The main reason people overlook this step is simple, “not enough time”.

I am going to show you a way to both capitalize of this great resource and save a ton of time in the process. First lets look at how you can accept invites and reply to them. Once you go to your inbox and choose to only view invitations we can begin to accept the invitations.

Next as you begin to accept the invitations you have the option to send a message to the person who just invited you. Once you do this, you will continue back to the page of accepting invites and sending a message. This moves pretty quickly once you get the hang of it with just a few clicks.

The Message: This cannot be overlooked. You will need to refine your response to just a few bullet point sentences along with a call to action and a link to your website, blog, etc… Next you will want to save this as a word document so all you have to do is copy and paste it into your message response field. Once this is copied to your clipboard you can continue to paste countless times as you respond to the invites.

Here is an example of a message I copy and paste:

Thank you for the invite, I am absolutely thrilled!

As a new connection I would like to send you some of my
Linkedin Strategies I have discovered along with my eBook
“Fast Start Guide to Linkedin Success” at no cost.

Just Register here to receive the details: http://bit.ly/1dkaOI

~All the best,

Randy Schrum
Join me at the number #1 Linked Strategy Group on Linkedin http://bit.ly/13BGkp

Now you have a fast, efficient, and effective way to answer Linkedin invitations.

3 Bonus Resources:
~ Get your free copy of the Fast Start Guide to Linkedin Success: Grab it here
~ Join me on the Linked Strategies Group on Linkedin to access more tips.  Join Here
~ Join us for one of our “Complimentary” Linkedin Power User Webinars: Count Me In