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Social Media Etiquette – 5 rules to keep in mind

We all love to say that social media is the natural extension of our social lives and an obvious upgrade to the way we exchange information, this being true, a logical conclusion is that you must follow some basic rules of social media etiquette in order to maintain or establish a respectable online reputation for your own brand, that being yourself. A good start to doing just that is to follow these five simple rules that we have put together for you:

1. 1. Start and stay authentic
   Long gone is the era when we could get away with a parallel “digital identity”, chatting with strangers hidden behind a nickname. It is now a norm that you present yourself on social media platforms with your true name and an up-to-date photo of yourself.  Nobody will take your social media profile for serious, no matter on what network, if it is not a genuine representation of who you are and what you do. (Think about all the invitations you get from LinkedIn users who haven`t even bothered to upload a profile picture, or about those Facebook profiles with a phony-looking name inviting you to like their new page.
2. 2. Connect with a purpose
   Whenever you wish to connect to a peer, business prospect or a long forgotten acquaintance, include your motive for reaching out in a personal message, it is only polite!
3. 3. Share wisely
   Posting content through your social media accounts is not so much different than sharing interesting news with your friends, except in the first case your voice can reach a far greater number of people. As your “base” of social media connections gets larger, you must think twice before posting or sharing a piece of information. Is this going to offend someone in any way? No matter if it was only meant to be a joke; it can still negatively affect your online likability.
4. 4. Reply timely
   A direct message on twitter, a “tag” in a Facebook post or an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, they all deserve your attention and apt response, it is only social!
5. 5. Spread some love
   Even though social media is the first place to go when you have experienced bad service at a restaurant, take a minute to consider the opposite situation. Use your influence not only to express and try to correct flaws in our society but also to encourage good examples of professionalism and social responsibility. Support your hair stylist if she decides to open a Facebook fan page by liking and commenting, social prove will always be more than welcomed for her business.

A Step-by-step Guide to Advertising on Facebook

Think about the way you find information about products and services. Are you watching TV ads? Listen radio ads? Or consulting a search engine or a friend?

Social media is an important marketing channel that help businesses to get found and to engage with potential buyers on the web. With effective Facebook advertising you can fuel your lead generation campaigns.

What makes Facebook a unique advertising platform is that it provides one of the most targeted advertising opportunities.

In this article we will present a step-by-step guide on how to create killer Facebook ads.

Get started. To get started, visit https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ and choose your destination URL.

Once you’ve selected where your ad should link to, decide what you want to accomplish. If you want to direct traffic to your website, what should success look like? Do you want to promote a  product? Or maybe you want to send traffic to your Facebook Page.

To build your social media presence by driving fans to a Facebook page, select Get More Likes. If you want to promote specific content on Facebook such as a blog post, select Promote Page Posts. With Advanced Options you can see all creative and bidding options in one place.

When writing your ad text, make sure to explain what you are advertising, the details of your products, services, and offers. Include call-to-action.

Decide who to target. The second step is to choose your targeting options. Targeting will determine the price for your ad as well as who is eligible to see your ad.

Define the budget. For the last step, select a payment type and budget for your ad campaign. Scroll down to the “Pricing” section and click on the “Set a Different Bid (Advanced Mode)” link. This will show you a suggested range of bids that are currently winning the auction among ads similar to yours.

Split testing. It’s tough to nail down a successful strategy unless you do some testing. Run multiple ad variations at the same time and use the Ads Manager to determine which ones deliver the best results for your business.

Get ideas from the ads board. To get some ideas you can always take a look at all the ads that are currently running and targeting your demographic by going to the Facebook Ad Board. This is a good place to start.

Are you using Facebook’s advertising platform to complement your business’ Facebook marketing efforts?

What kind of results have you seen?

4 trends happening right now in social media

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there”
-Yogi Berra

Predicting the future is not an exact science. We made it through 2012 without facing the Mayan Apocalypse, and now we are up to on what might happen in 2013.

In social media terms, the future is rarely predictable. The explosive growth of Pinterest for instance, on the social media scene last year came to many as a surprise.

But what if you had a glimpse into the future?

There are always trends in social media that can be predicted with a certain degree of confidence, and the best marketers have already mapped out their destination.

MOBILE FIRST. More people are using smartphones and tablets to access social media.
Nielsen’s Social Media Report 2012 found that 43 percent of U.S. users said they now use smartphones to access social media, with 16 percent connecting via a tablet.

For marketers this means that mobile has to be your top content priority this year.

A PICTURE IS WORTH 1000 WORDS. Image-based social networking is on the rise. Sites as Instagram and Pinterest prove that visual content is worth 1000 words, or in Instagram’s case, $1 billion.

A few days ago Facebook also announced that they’re changing the News Feed to a more visual-focused style.

Prepare for this trend by creating content that is visually compelling. If you post links and text-based statuses, you can think about how those ideas can be converted into visuals.

Infographics, photos, video, and other forms of reach media will increase over the coming years as people look to digest more information faster than ever.

SOCIAL LISTENING A KEY CONSUMER ACTIVITY. Social media is transforming the way consumers around the globe make purchasing decisions. Consumers are using social media to listen and learn about other consumers’ experiences (70%); find more information about brands, and compliment brands (53%).

This is an opportunity for you to educate consumers through compelling content, improve customer experiences and maintain strong customer relationships.

MULTIMEDIA ENGAGEMENT. Are you interacting with social media while watching TV?

According to the newest study by Nielsen having a mobile device on-hand while watching TV has become an integral part of consumer routines – 41% of tablet owners and 38% of smartphone owners use their device daily while in front of their TV screen.

In the following year, businesses will experience growing complexity in managing the emergence of multiple channels and technologies. To adapt marketing will become more integrated, real-time and inbound.

A lot can change in the following year.
Share your thoughts and opinions? What other trends do you anticipate to emerge this year?

The State of Social Media – January 2013 (Infographic)

The new year of 2013 is well under way, winter as we know it in our part of the world is fading away and Social Media seems to only get stronger and more present in our every day life.

In the past year, every major Social Media site has reached a milestone of their own kind and they continue to do that. We at Cyberlink Media have gathered some key points in order to give you a picture of the state of Social Media for the opening month of the new year, January.

By the time it took you to read this, 70 new profiles were already created on LinkedIn, see it for your self below.

The State of Social Media – January 2013 (Infographic)

Who are LinkedIn leaders in Europe? (Infographic)

Do you know which country in Europe is the leader when it comes to LinkedIn adoption?
Today we share with you our infographic that shows just that, along with the percentage of LinkedIn penetration in several countries.

The numbers that you can see are the result of the LinkedIn members estimates by country that can be found in LinkedIn’s “Advertise with us” section and the latest estimates of the population of several European countries.

The popularity of the professional networking site is on the rise too, LinkedIn has recently passed the 200 million members mark and continues to grow at a rate of 2 new members per second.

There are plenty of reasons why professionals all over the world choose to join in and spend time on LinkedIn, here are just a few:
- Business networking
- Lead generation
- Job seeking
- Headhunting/Recruiting
- B2B marekting
- Personal branding
Take a look and feel free to share our latest piece of information.

If you like our infographic please share it on your blog.

What do your LinkedIn connections see when you browse their profiles?

We will start this short post with yet another question:
-What do you want them to see?

There are currently three options in the settings menu of LinkedIn concerning this feature. Each one of them is suited for different purposes, so let start with the first one:

1. Your full name and headline
- Choose this If you want to grow your LinkedIn Network and get more profile insights

If you have this option checked and then visit Joe`s LinkedIn profile, then Joe will get a notification that you viewed his profile with your full name and current job position included in it along with your profile picture.
This setting can prove the best one if you want to grow your LinkedIn network. Consider it this way, when Joe sees that you have viewed his profile, there is a great chance that he will also view yours and maybe dedicate a minute or two to the content you have provided on it. This leads to the possibility of connecting and furthermore establishing a relationship that may someday grow in some sort of business opportunity.

Another plus of this setting is that it enables you to have full access of your LinkedIn profile statistics available in the “Who’s viewed your profile” section of your LinkedIn Home Page. There you can track how many people have viewed your profile on a weekly basis and also see how many times you have come up in the LinkedIn search results.

2. Anonymous profile characteristics such as industry and title
- Choose this if you only want to provide a hint as to which industry you work in

This time what Joe will get as a notification is “Someone in the marketing function in the Finance Industry” viewed your profile. This option is almost as limiting as the next one, since having it set won’t let you access your profile statistics we mentioned earlier.

3. You will be totally anonymous
- Choose this one if you prefer to anonymously browse LinkedIn profiles

With this option set, when you view Joe`s LinkedIn Profile, he will see nothing in terms of your name or the industry you work in.
This setting would be applicable for you if you intended to study certain LinkedIn members and the content of their profiles prior to approaching them by sending a connection request.

Let`s say you want to grow your LinkedIn network but grow it only with fellow marketing professionals with specific interests related to social media. This will require quite some browsing and checking the interests of a number of LinkedIn profiles, which does not mean you will be sending invitation requests to all of them since all will not fulfill the criteria you have set (them having interest in social media).

Having the “anonymous” option checked you will prevent for all of these profiles you have browsed to be informed that you did that, because let’s admit it , viewing someone`s profile and stopping at that could say something like “ I saw what you do and what you`re interested in, and i do not want to connect with you” , and that`s not that much social , isn`t it ?

If you have any opinions on the subject we will be more than happy to discuss at our LinkedIn group Social Media Mk. Also , follow us at our company page to stay updated with the trends in the industry.

How to say “Hello” on LinkedIn

As in many occasions in life, simplicity beats everything else, say it just like this: “Hello Steve, I’ve been looking at your profile and I can see we have a lot of interests in common. Would love to connect and maybe chat some time. Cheers!”

LinkedIn is not that much different than the real world… except that it is. You do not have the opportunity (not yet mind you) to walk down the street or enter a party and instantly see every person`s name, occupation, interests, educational background, work experience just hovering over their heads, therefore you do not get the chance to use an opening line like the one that you can see at the beginning of this post.
Approaching someone on LinkedIn is that much easier exactly because of the detailed info you can see about them, displayed on their profiles.

One thing that LinkedIn and real world communication have in common though, is that the opportunity for first impression only comes once, when you actually make the contact with someone you do not know in person. Baring this in mind, this early phase of connecting has to be recognized as a very important and unique moment that should be carefully executed.

Here are some basic rules when it comes to making initial contact on LinkedIn – sending an invitation for connecting.

• 1. ALWAYS write personalized messages when hitting the “connect” button.
  Sending out an invitation request accompanied with the generic LinkedIn message “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” does not give the impression that you really want to connect with them.
• 2. Use groups as a reference when you initiate contact with someone for the first time by choosing a group that you both are members of. This gives additional highlight to the point that you both share similar interests.
  In addition to this you can significantly upgrade your potential contacts reach by joining Linkedin groups relevant to your profession and interests.
• 3. Follow-up all accepted connections with a short “thank you” message. Here`s something you can use : “Thanks for accepting my invitation to connect, we`ll be in touch”.

After you go through these steps you will hopefully gain yet another relevant LinkedIn connection and then you can start thinking about how to meaningfully engage with them.

For more discussions on the topic join us on our dedicated LinkedIn Group:

How to get the most out of Twitter

So far, we have presented some numbers in the previous posts and campaigns’ emphasizing the impact Twitter has on the new marketing landscape. We hope that we contributed just a little bit in your growing love for this micro-blogging network, and the potential it has for your business.

Although we are sure you have a Twitter account by now, do you visit it every day? Can you honestly say you are using its full potential? And in the end, how to utilize Twitter to enforce your marketing efforts?

We bet we can give you at least five substantial ideas to capture attention and give you the motivation you need to get involved with twitter on daily basis

1. Twitter brings traffic to your website. As soon as you accommodate  tweet about interesting resources you’ve posted on your blog or website. Have you recently published an e-book or recorded a webinar that people can download for free? Tweet about it, linking back to the landing page to download it from your website. If the content on a site is truly remarkable, people will start tweeting about it on their own and sharing your resources to their followers on Twitter.

2. Help with events and campaigns. Twitter will spread the word for you. If you have something say, Twitter will say it for you. Tweetups are a great way to get to know your Twitter community offline. You can use them to promote your future events and campaigns. Best practice is to send people directly to an event sign-up page.

3. Promote. Twitter users love new toys, especially if they create some sort of outcome, grade, or analysis of the person using the tool. Make the results of your tool/grader as easy to tweet as possible!

4. Monitor. Using the aforementioned Twitter Search tool (http://search.twitter.com), you can search and track what people are tweeting about your company, products, competitors, or any other news or trends in your industry. Set up an RSS feed to receive all search results in Google Reader. If you find someone tweeting about your products or a person who is looking for a solution that your product provides, let them know!

5. Free testimonials page. When you hover your mouse over an individual tweet in your Twitter stream, a few options appear, including the option to “Favorite” the tweet. When you click the little star that appears, it turns yellow, and that tweet gets added to your ―Favorites‖ tab. As you track what people are saying about your company in Twitter Search, add the positive tweet to your Favorites. Public, third-party testimonials are taken as a very reliable these days.

The guide

If so far, we have made you at least a little bit interested in taking an adventurous journey with this micro blogging network feel free to download our free e-book “The definitive guide to Twitter marketing”. We have covered how Twitter can help you in your marketing strategy, customer service, and lead generation. Download our e-book today, and add another channel to your marketing strategy! Very powerful channel, that is.

7 tips for effective Facebook page posts that drive engagement

Most of the Facebook marketers and community managers take time off and do not post during weekends, but they don’t realize this is where they miss great opportunities for interaction with their audience.

Buddy Media published a report in September called “Strategies for Effective Wall Posts: A Timeline Analysis” based on activity from 1.800 of the world’s biggest Facebook brand pages from the period of April 1 to May 31.

It turns out that posts that are published on weekends get 14.5% higher interaction compared with weekdays.
Among other facts timing is crucial, considering that posts published between non-busy hours (between 8pm and 7am) receive 14% higher interaction than those posted between 8am and 7pm labeled as “busy-hours).

You can download the full report, it contains very useful recommendations and here are few of them:

• Post one or two times per day, but space posts out to avoid exceeding seven posts per week
• Use photo attachments or text-only status updates to increase interaction.
• Post that are shorter are more engaging. Use 80 characters or less per post.
• Ask questions (at the end of a post). Posts that include question generate 92% higher comment rates than non-question posts and questions asked at the end of post get 2x more comments.
• If you want to drive engagement on your Facebook page, “caption this” and “fill in the blank” post types are great tactics.
• The use of emoticons in some industries are very powerful way to elicit emotion, particularly food & beverage, health & beauty and entertainment.
• Use call-to-actions to guide your fans but be very careful with the selection. Softer keywords resonate better with audience.

Facebook marketing is not an easy road

People have become overwhelmed by the amount of information shared online and offline.
Trust could not be earned overnight, especially considering that people got different reasons to join social networks. Following and communicating with brands is certainly not their primary choice.
There is a need from brands to deliver and provide real value to earn the attention of their target population.

Brands need to develop and share remarkable content that stimulates interaction. Preparing and implementing social media marketing strategy is not a job you could allocate for your intern staff or employees running out of projects.

In order to share our experience to help you engage your Facebook community the right way and build a brand that is “likeable”, our team at CyberLink Media prepared a FREE eBook “7 Proven Tactics to Improve Your Facebook Fan Page Engagement”.
Feel free to download it and share with friends.