Black Tie Its A Random World

In my opinion, the most powerful social media profile you can use is the LinkedIn profile.

Most powerful that is, if you are looking to do more business and/or achieve your professional goals.

There’s a certain mindset LinkedIn members have when they spend time there.

They don’t browse through pictures and videos of their friends.

They don’t go there to share 140 characters of their current status.

And they don’t go there to watch panda bears sneeze or talking dogs say “I love you”.

Although other social networking sites have their place and purpose, none of them have the professionally directed power of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn means business!

Your LinkedIn profile says everything about who you are professionally.

And since it tends to rank well on Google for your name, people will read your LinkedIn profile when they want to do research on you, your product, service, or company.

In other words, what you say on your profile will have an impact on the amount of business you do on LinkedIn.

Here are 7 ways to enhance the copy on your profile to ensure that you get everything you want from LinkedIn:
1. It’s all about the headline

Headlines are everything in newspapers, magazines, and on blogs.

They are just as important on your LinkedIn profile, because the headline the first thing that shows up anytime someone does a search online. A simple way to ensure your headline doesn’t suck is to follow a simple formula.

Tell people specifically:

Who you are
Who you help, and
How you help them

Tell them in the fewest words possible. Make your headline compelling and you’ll increase your chances of more meaningful profile views.
2. Get personal

Although LinkedIn is the “professional” social networking site, you want to reserve the first part of your “Summary” to add a personal note about yourself.

People don’t want to look at a resume with bullet points of past sales achievements (barf!), they want to know a little bit about your background. They want to know who you are.

To achieve this, add a personal intro about your goals, what you’re passionate about, and what you love to do in life.

This small touch of transparency will help you connect on a personal level with anyone who views your profile.
3. Spell check. And then check again.

You probably have no clue how many deals are happening day in and day out on LinkedIn.

I hear success stories all of the time about people landing their dream job, getting hired for a major consulting deal, finding 7 figure investors, receiving major sponsorships, selling out tickets to live events, and more.

The potential for what you can accomplish on LinkedIn is nearly unlimited.

However, I also hear about people who are completely turned off by a prospect with a bare-bones profile, or worse — spelling mistakes. Make sure to spell check everything and have others review it to give you their feedback.

This small step could make all the difference in your interactions on LinkedIn. You know what they say about those first impressions.
4. Make a call to action

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is not having a call to action on your LinkedIn profile.

If you spend all of this time crafting a great message but don’t lead the viewer anywhere, all your work will have been for nothing.

In your “Summary”, or in your LinkedIn welcome video make sure to tell people what site they should go to for more information, what number to call to get a free consultation, or the best way to email you.

Don’t leave your potential customers and clients hanging. Give them a place to go next (and a reason to go there).
5. Social proof is powerful proof

Social proof helps influence others into making a “buying” decision.

LinkedIn makes this step easy by providing 3 primary sections to add social proof:

Education. Adding the college or university you attended provides your education credentials, and increases the value of your personal brand.
Awards. This section is the one place you can brag about yourself a little. Include any past accomplishments or industry awards you can think of that will increase the value of your profile.
Recommendations. The more recommendations you have on your profile the better. This is the best form of social proof, as it conveys credibility and authority. The best way to receive recommendations is to give them first.

6. Improve your search rankings

If you want to get more leads and sales, then the easiest thing you can do is become easily found on LinkedIn for keywords in your niche.

Think about what people would be searching for on Google to find your business, service, or product (for example, mine would be “sports” or “LinkedIn Tips”). Make sure you add your keywords throughout your LinkedIn profile in five main places.

Learn more about where to include your keywords and increase your LinkedIn SEO here.
7. Stand out from the crowd

With close to 130 million LinkedIn profiles, many of them look the same.

Don’t join the herd of boring “glamour shot” profiles. Instead, do something creative in your copy to market yourself on LinkedIn, stand out, and keep people coming back for more.

Add LinkedIn’s blog application, sync it with your twitter updates, or include other advanced applications to help your profile stand out from the rest.
Take your profile to the next level

As LinkedIn continues to grow in numbers and gain more media attention, it will prove to add more value to your brand and business.

If you want to get the most out of your efforts with LinkedIn, take the time right now to implement these 7 steps and watch your profile take off.

10 Tools to Create an Amazing Twitter Presence for You

Posted by: Leonhard Widrich, In: Social Media, On: September 26, 2011 | 8 Comments

The power of developing your own personal brand is something that I found to gain more and more importance on Twitter. Using your personal voice as a strong messenger of thoughts, great content and a powerful channel to get feedback and engage with others has been very useful for me.

It has allowed me to build a very targeted Twitter following around my account and helped me grow my business solely through Twitter. Of course, Twitter alone can easily become very time-consuming. So here are my top 10 Twitter tools to build an amazing brand around your Twitter account without spending hours and hours on Twitter, yet still remaining a genuine personality.

Buffer – Easily Tweet At Optimal Times

One of the most important component to a great Twitter performance I found is to Tweet great content on a regular basis. Here is where Buffer is most useful for me. Every morning I can fill up my Buffer with a few Tweets or so and the App posts them for me at optimal times over the day.

The great thing here is that you can add Tweets to your Buffer from any website you are reading with one of the browser extensions. Whenever I like an article I can give it a click on the Buffer icon and add it as a Tweet.

Top Tip: With every Tweet you send via Buffer you will get detailed analytics about how many clicks, retweets and reach.

Smartr – A Smarter Way To Read Tweets

Smartr is one of the most beautifully designed Apps I have come across. It pulls in news from your Twitter feed and displays it in a new and much easier way to consume. And it also filters out any spam for you, so you are presented with top news from your stream only.

What I like a lot about Smartr is that you can easily read with it via an iPhone app, browser, or soon desktop App. All Tweets are displayed with pictures and preview so you can save time on whether a post will be interesting for you or not.

Top Tip: Smartr is also a community in itself and you can follow others that are interested in the same topics right inside the App.

Formulists – Create Twitter Lists More Efficiently

Building my Twitter lists has been one of the most powerful aspects to continue growing my network organically. However it is often a very time-consuming process and I forget about putting great new acquaintances into lists.

With Formulists you can easily set up certain triggers that will put others into the right list you have chosen. So if someone retweets, mentions or follows you, you can have them in the right list of your network without doing anything.

Top Tip: A great advantage with Formulists is that it automatically keeps a tab of the most engaged people in your network open for you.

Twylah – Your Personal Twitter Brand Page

An App that certainly can’t be missed here is Twylah. The App automatically turns all your Tweets into a beautiful brand page, filled with categories and rich media display. It makes is very easy for your followers to understand what you are Tweeting about the most and whether you are a good fit to follow them.

I found this to be a great way to use in certain situations where a glance over my past Tweets isn’t really useful. You can try putting your Twylah page in your Twitter bio, in your email signature or on your blog. It is a great way to get more out of your Tweeting efforts.

Top Tip: All of your Tweets are also indexed in Google via Twylah, which is a great way to get more SEO juice out of Twitter for you.

Twimbow – Your Colourful Twitter Dashboard

Twimbow is taking a completely new approach to a Twitter dashboard. Instead of seeing one monotonous stream of Tweets, the App allows you to add colours to them. You can colourcode @replies, retweets or simply hashtags.

I found Twimbow to be a great way to stay on top of your Twitter feed. After a few days, you are starting to recognise the colours and you can handle your stream a lot easier. Twimbow is one of those Apps that you just have to try.

Top Tip: You can add pre-set hashtags to your Tweets to colourcode them for other Twimbow users, which I found to be a great way to connect with the Twimbow community.

TweetChat – Participate More Seamlessly In Twitter Chats

If you haven’t come across Twitter Chats, this might be a great way to get started. They are online events, usually lasting about one hour and discussing a particular topic. There are Twitter chats for web design, blogging tips, Social Media and more. Here is a great list of over 400 Twitter chats.

Participating in a Twitter chat is highly facilitated with TweetChat. It is a dashboard that allows you to set a pre-fix of a hashtag so you don’t have re-enter it for every new Tweet. It also has a realtime function and updates seamlessly throughout the time of the chat going on.

Top Tip: A great feature of TweetChat is that you can block any user that might be cluttering or overtweeting during the chat.

Hashtracking – Get Full Stats On Any Twitter Hashtag

Whether you are starting your own online or offline Twitter event, or whether you want to learn how well a hashtag actually performs, Hashtracking is a great solution for both. By simply entering the hashtag, the App will generate a very powerful, free report for you.

The App will determine how many Tweets there were posted, how many eyeballs you may have reached an which number of retweets that have occurred. Additionally you will get a display of the top 10 users from the hashtag, which is very helpful to identify key players in the field.

Top Tip: Hashtracking makes it very easy to export all results to be used in a presentation elsewhere, also including a geographic analysis that is coming soon.

ManageFlitter – Clean Out Your Twitter Following

After spending some time building your network it often happens that there are a few people you are actually no longer interacting with. Some Twitter accounts my turn idle or are Tweeting way more than you have expected.

With ManageFlitter you can unfollow all those that make no sense for you to have in your network anymore with just a few clicks. The App also makes intelligent suggestions for you showing you who is not following you back or no longer active on Twitter.

Top Tip: What I like best about this App is that you don’t have to sign up with any account information. You connect with Twitter, unfollow a few people and you can leave again.

WhoTweetedMe – Find out who Tweeted URLs

Another great way to extend your Twitter network is to connect to influential people that are interested in the same topics as you. Here is where WhoTweetedMe can be hugely helpful. You can insert any URL and the App will give you some very interesting insights about its appearance on Twitter.

You will learn how many retweets the post got and at which time they happened. Additionally you will learn about the potential reach and the average follower count per person retweeting the post. Overall this is a great way to understand about your post’s audience I believe.

Top Tip: You will also get a list of who the top 20 people were Tweeting the post. You can thank them right there with just one click too.

TwitSprout – A One Page Twitter Analytics Dashboard

There exist a huge amount of various Twitter analytics tools out there and many can easily turn out to be rather difficult to understand. With TwitSprout a lot of the hassles are already taken care of and understanding what is going on around your account is a lot easier.

On one single page you will see all the most important metrics including follower growth, number of retweets and mentions over time. The app interestingly even overlays them for you to make it easier to understand whether your growth is happening organically.

Top Tip: What I like best about TwitSprout is that you can export all data into a pdf. file and use it in your presentations or reports.

Those are my top 10 Tools to create an outstanding Twitter presence. How about you? Do you think any of these tools could be useful for you too?

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