10 ways to get found in social media
There really is no point saying anything if you have no-one to listen. Okay, a bit of talking to oneself to clarify thoughts is fine – I can regularly be found asking the cat what he thinks of my ideas. But, in social media terms, if you don’t have connections, you’re talking to the ether. So, how do you make connections in social media? In the first of two posts on the subject, we’re going to look at ways of making yourself easy to find. In part two, we’ll look at how you can proactively find people you want to connect with.
1. Use your real name, that you use in business, in your social media profiles. For this site, ‘Bryony Thomas’ and ‘Cheryl Crichton’ are consistently in our top 10 search terms. Which just shows that it’s not just me who Googles people before I meet them. Using the name that you use in business for your social media profiles will mean that people are more likely to find them in search.
2. Add ‘follow’ buttons to your website: Twitter launched their official ‘follow’ button this week. Just like Facebook and Linkedin, adding it to your site is a simple piece of HTML snippet. Or, as is now popular, you can put the links in your website header or footer using their common icons as links to your profiles. We do this on our contact page.
3. Add social media links to your professional profile: Most websites will have an ‘About us’ section these days where key people are profiled. Add their individual social media links to these. With Twitter, you can even add a little snippet that shows their most recent Tweets.
4. Add social media links to your other social media profiles: If you, or your company, appear in a directory, there’s usually a place to put relevant links. Put links to your social media profiles there.
5. Add a by-line to your blog posts: If you’re blogging, add a by-line about the author that includes their key social media profiles – like their Twitter. See example below.
6. Add key IDs to your business stationery: Your business cards should have your individual profiles, and things like headed paper, compliments slips, marketing literature, invoices, etc. should have your company IDs.
7. Cross reference your social media IDs: For example, list your Twitter ID on your Linkedin profile, and make sure your blog’s RSS feed and Twitter is linked to your Linkedin company page. See our Linkedin Company Page.
8. Use standard tags for your industry: There are hashtags for most industries on Twitter, like #marketing, which allows other Twitterers to easily find Tweets about that subject. Find out what the tags are for your area and use them.
9. Craft your social media biographies: Think about the copy in your bios, these will be searched by Google, and by the search tools in the various applications. Make your description clear and relevant to people likely to be interested in what you’re saying.
10. Say interesting and relevant things: If you share interesting and relevant information, people will pass it on. This puts you in front of their followers, which usually prompts a few people to follow you directly.
There are loads more ways to be found. Hopefully, these should get you started. Please do also share what’s worked for you.
By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | @bryonythomas | www.clear-thought.co.uk
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:
- Blog: How to balance the personal and professional on Twitter
- Blog: Three clients we won through Linkedin
- Video: How social media supports every step of a sale
Clear Thought Consulting works with small businesses, equipping them with the marketing strategies, suppliers, skills and set-up that they need to become bigger businesses. We do this by planning and delivering 12-month marketing transformation programmes – supporting a small business through a step-by-step process to making marketing pay. We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend your competition, you have to out-think them.
Published on 2 June 2011
