Social Media and Blogging Series

While people are generating leads on all of the social media sites, LinkedIn is the #1 choice for business networking and business-to-business marketing. According to the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner, 70% of marketers surveyed are using LinkedIn, and 64% plan to increase their use of the site.

In this blog post series about how social media and blogging work together, we’re looking at how blogging helps you make a valuable contribution to your social media communities in three different ways. Today we’ll apply these to LinkedIn.

Expand your mind
Expand your relationships
Expand your influence

How to expand your mind with LinkedIn

LinkedIn saw how important blog posts were for sharing information, so they created their own blogging platform right on the site. You can browse through posts written by more than 250 business giants hand-picked by LinkedIn to be their “Influencers.” You’ll see these posts displayed as soon as you log into the site and there are always many interesting titles to choose from.

Influencer posts are great pieces of content to share with your network, since the experts have already been pre-selected by LinkedIn based on the quality of their work and ideas. Being associated with this premium content makes you look good. As a bonus, you’ll be expanding your mind with new ideas for your own blog posts, business, and life.

Action: You can choose to follow specific Influencers, or LinkedIn channels that gather blog posts into similar themes and feed those to your Home screen. To customize your reading experience, look for the “Interests” tab on the LinkedIn menu, and then choose “Influencers” from the drop-down options.

How to expand your relationships on LinkedIn

Take time regularly to browse through your activity stream to see the content people in your network have posted or shared. Show them you appreciate their contributions by liking, commenting about or sharing these posts.

Notice also who else has liked, commented on or shared a post that interests you. This is a great opportunity to grow your network by discovering new people with inspiring, helpful and like-minded ideas.

Other people may discover you the same way, either by noticing your comments or what you’ve liked, or by seeing when one of your mutual contacts likes something you’ve posted.

LinkedIn also tries to help you grow your network with its “People You May Know” feature for its desktop and mobile applications. However, the huge drawback here is that you do not have the opportunity to personalize the invitation (see action tip below).

Action: When LinkedIn suggests someone you might know, click on the person’s name to open their profile page, and then use the “Connect” button to send your personalized invitation. In your note, mention what (and who) you have in common.

Gmail users, try this: Rapportive is a Gmail add-on that works in Firefox, Safari, Mailplane and Chrome. When you’re emailing someone to follow up a conversation from an event, Rapportive allows you to send a personalized LinkedIn invitation at the very same time! This is a seamless way to take your offline relationships online.

Expand your influence on LinkedIn

Blog posts give you the opportunity to provide value by sharing helpful information with those in your LinkedIn network. In turn, this demonstrates your expertise and helps remind them what you do in your business.

Action: You can easily share relevant content – whether your own or someone else’s – with the LinkedIn Bookmarklet. Here’s how to install it:

From any page in LinkedIn EXCEPT the Home page, scroll to the bottom until you see the navigation menu in the footer of the page.
Click on the word Tools.
Once you’re on the Tools page, click on the words “Sharing Bookmarklet” near the top of the screen.
On the next page, you’ll find instructions for how to add the icon to your browser so you can click on it to share a blog post or webpage you’re viewing.
For most browsers it’s as simple as drag and drop. If you’re using Internet Explorer, there are a couple of steps but they’re explained clearly on this page.

You can also insert the link of the blog post right into the update box on the LinkedIn site, but you must use the permalink (here is how to find the permalink of a blog post).

LinkedIn offers a wealth of resources for gaining knowledge, connections and business. By finding and sharing valuable content with existing and new contacts, you can add value to their lives and businesses, and increase your credibility as an expert in your field. Ultimately, it will be your own well-written and relevant blog posts that will be most effective at expanding your influence on LinkedIn.

Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.

According to the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner, the top reason companies said they were using social media was to increase exposure for their business. What stumps many business owners, though, is this question:

What should I say?

When you post useful and relevant content (links to blog posts), you’re starting a conversation, one that hopefully grows as people respond to you and mention you in their own messages.

When people are talking about you and sharing your content with their own networks, this is “earned media,” the social proof that people are listening to you and value what you say.

Blogging is one form of what’s known as “owned media”: content you create and share to educate and inspire your audience, while teaching them who you are, what you do and what you know.

(Paid media is the third media type, and it’s just what it sounds like. For a more in-depth discussion about owned, earned and paid media, see this blog post at Branded3.)

Blog posts are the most important form of currency in social media, whether they’re yours or someone else’s. In social media, you trade blog posts for attention, visibility, credibility and connections. This is what turns social networking into business networking.

You are what you post

Sharing content on social media gives you exposure, and you want to be noticed for the right reasons. What topics do you want to be known for? Ideally, these will be the same topics you address in your business.

Remember that anything you put online is instantly public, and it is a permanent reflection of your business. Sharing something indicates endorsement or agreement, so before you like, comment or share, be sure to read the content through to the end. Always aim to add value to the people you’re connected to in your network.

To add value with the blog posts you share on social media, think about expanding – expanding your mind, expanding your network and expanding your influence.

Expand your mind

To be an effective curator of valuable content, and to keep creating interesting blog posts yourself, you need to constantly seek out fresh ideas related to your topic. Each social network has unique tools to help you do this, which we’ll be exploring in an upcoming series of blog posts.

You can also use your social media activity to generate blog topic ideas, by getting into a blogging mindset. Notice the conversations – especially the questions – that are happening in your groups, communities, chats and lists. What are some of the themes other people seem to be posting about? Find the intersection between these topics and what you do in your business; this can be your route to a goldmine of blog posts.

Expand your relationships

As you come across information, you’ll also be discovering people. Each network has ways to search for and follow these fascinating new friends. It’s also crucial to organize them so that you can continue to benefit from their expertise and build your relationships. In future posts we’ll look at how to accomplish this effectively on each social network.

Sharing posts from the people in your network is a nice way to grow your relationships, encourage reciprocity in terms of sharing content, and stay active so that your business continues to get noticed.

Expand your influence

The ultimate way to expand your influence on social media is to produce your own content in your own voice (otherwise known as blog posts!).

When you post a new article on your site, notify your network. Promote each blog post with several different “teasers” to invoke curiosity. Clearly state the benefit of clicking the link to read your post – are you offering solutions, information, inspiration, entertainment or something else?

Creating and sharing your own content on social media reminds your network of what you do. More importantly, it reminds people of what you know.

Here’s a summary of how blogging adds value on social media, whether you’re sharing your own posts or someone else’s:

Blog posts give you something to say and a way to participate, particularly if you’re new to social media.
Liking, commenting on or sharing blog posts from your network grows your relationships, gets your business noticed and connects you with new people.
Posting your own original content demonstrates your expertise and reminds people of what you know.

Watch for more articles in this series about how social media and blogging work together. We’ll explore each of the top social networks, starting with LinkedIn.

Links to all posts in the series: