Participating on Online Social Networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin can be an effective way to build your reputation and reach an expanded audience; if you connect with the right communities, share quality content and engage your target audience effectively.

To increase your Social Networking effectiveness, identify which of the following stages you are currently in and if you can move to the next stage.

Stage 1: The Conversationalist

Profile: Uses Social Media for sharing personal photos and updates.  Doesn’t use Social Media for business purposes and only networks with people they know.

Audience: Friends and Family.

Opportunities: Keeping up to date with personal relationships that are most important to you.

Risks: Missing out on opportunities to expand your reach in your niche and generate new customers.

Effectiveness: Unless you have lots of family and friends in your niche, you are probably not going to generate any business.

Moving to the next stage: Shift your focus to building your business network and break past using social networks strictly for personal.  Start with creating a Linkedin profile, or a Twitter account.

Stage 2: The Connector

Profile: Uses Social Media for networking and keeping up-to-date with their existing business network.  Doesn’t share much content, just adds people as they meet them.  May not be open to networking with people outside their existing network.

Audience: Existing business network.

Opportunities: Keeping up to date with what is going on in your business network may lead to increased visibility and opportunities.

Risks: A very time consuming way to network that doesn’t take advantage of social media’s one-to-many approach as you rely on meeting people first.

Effectiveness: It is limited by the opportunities available in your current network.

Moving to the next stage: Brainstorm a list of subjects that are interesting to your target audience and find sources for content, such as blogs, videos and news channels.  Follow industry leaders, share their content and look for ways to network with people outside those you’ve met in person.

Stage 3: The Filter

Profile: Sees the opportunities in sharing content, but doesn’t blog or create original online content themselves.  Finds and shares a lot of content with their network or niche.  They are open to networking with people they don’t know and could be trying to grow or build their mailing list.

Audience: Your target audience of existing and potential customers.

Opportunities: Build a reputation as someone who is a Hub for great content.

Risks: Sharing content that is interesting to you, but not your target audience could cause people to tune out and if you only share content and don’t engage people, you just look like a one way broadcast service.

Effectiveness: Sharing good content, even if it’s not your own, can help effectively build your reputation and associate you with quality.  It’s better to be a good filter than a bad content creator.

Moving to the next stage: By monitoring what content your target audience enjoys, you can begin to create similar content with your own twist or perspective.

Stage 4: The Creator

Profile: Creates and shares content regularly with their niche and actively tries to expand their reach and build their reputation.  Networks with people they don’t know and often has multiple social networking and content channels such as blogs, podcasts, video, pictures.

Audience: Your target audience is existing and potential customers.  Potential strategic alliances with partners who also service your target audience.

Opportunities: Expanding your reach in your niche beyond what you are physically capable of doing yourself becoming a 24-hour marketing machine.  Increases website traffic and visibility to get you in front of more potential customers.

Risks: If your content doesn’t appeal to your audience, lacks quality or is too “salesy,” your reputation is at risk and may cost you potential customers and opportunities.

Effectiveness: Extremely effective if you have a strategy to move people past being a connection on a social network and into your sales cycle.

Moving to the next stage: Look at ways that you can improve your field/industry/area of expertise and create content on it.  Collaborate with other Thought Leaders.

Stage 5: The Thought Leader

Profile: Contributes to shaping their field or industry, usually having a fan or customer base of peers who are seeking guidance and direction in the industry.

Audience: Industry Peers, Conference Organizers, Media

Opportunities: Travel, speaking at events, book deals, interviews and media coverage.

Risks: If your Industry Peers are your target niche, fine.  But if your business comes from elsewhere, it’s also important to stay focused on your current and potentials customers.

Effectiveness: Instead of having to look for opportunities and make things happen, opportunities are now coming to you with ease.

Moving to the next stage: Is there one?  You tell me.

Linkedin allows you to stay in touch with your network, build relationships and keep up to date with important changes to your contacts’ situation – such as employment changes or business developments. It also has the ability to help build your credibility with new connections and potential prospects using the Recommendations feature.

Recommendations are testimonials added to your Linkedin profile by existing connections in your network who have worked with you and want to share their experience with others. A good recommendation can be an extremely powerful marketing tool because it can highlight things about your product, service or company that you couldn’t say yourself without sounding overly self promotional or too salesy.

Many of your clients are probably willing to give you a glowing recommendation, but getting them to sit down and actually write it for you can be a challenge. Even if they do write one, not everyone is a gifted recommendation writer and you may end up with a single paragraph, or a recommendation that sounds nice, but doesn’t help show the benefits of working with you.

Make It Easy For Them

The best way to receive the kind of recommendation that helps sell you in the best possible light is to have a third party interview your client and then write the recommendation for them. Clients often are more generous with their praise to a third party and many people find it easier to talk about an experience, than to write about it.

It may seem like extra work, but interviews are actually the best way to guarantee well-written recommendations and usually turn out a lot quicker in the long run.

The best time to ask a client for a recommendation is right after working together, so the experience is fresh in their mind and they are still feeling very enthusiastic about your services. Ask your client if they would mind giving you a testimonial through a 5-10 minute interview with a third party. Let them know once the interview is complete, your third party interviewer will compile the discussion into a 2 – 4 paragraph testimonial in your clients’ own words and send it to them for final approval.

To do this, you can hire a virtual assistant or copywriter to conduct the interviews and write your recommendations, or simply ask someone you know who is a great listener and will be able to identify the important keys to the interview and put it into the right format.

7 Questions that Guarantee Great Recommendations

Have your interviewer ask the following questions:

1. What problem or situation where you experiencing before working with ABC Company?
2. What other options did you explore before you decided to work with ABC Company?
3. Did you have any doubts or concerns before engaging ABC Company and how did they overcome them?
4. Why did you choose to work with ABC Company over their competitors?
5. What results did you get from working with ABC Company?
6. What most impressed you about working with ABC Company?
7. What type of person or business would you recommend works with ABC Company and why?

Once the questions have been answered, your interviewer should use the words and unique voice of the person giving the recommendation to ensure they are happy with the result and will post the recommendation to Linkedin.

Adding the Recommendation to your Linkedin Profile

Once the recommendation is completed, you need to request the recommendation from Linkedin with these steps:

1. Visit your personal Linkedin profile.
2. From the Profile Menu, select Recommendations.
3. Select the Request Recommendations Sub Menu.
4. Choose the position to be recommended for.
5. Enter the connection/s to request.
6. Add a personalized message requesting they add the recommendation.

Once the Recommendation has been sent to you, you’ll need to approve it so it updates your profile.

Every week I tweet a lot of tips and information about Social Media and I look forward to finding out to what my Followers find interesting – especially when it’s a surprise, like this week’s Top Tweet – a comic.

In case you are interested, my Tweets of the Week are based on Retweets, click-throughs and comments.

The best way to keep track of my tweets, is to follow me – @jaimealmond, as this is just a small section of the Tweets that I shared last week. Make sure, you let me know what tweets you like by Retweeting them.

1. Your Website Has 4 Seconds to Get Your Visitors Attention before they leave

2. 6 tips for treating your customers like friends

It was supposed to be 6 Tips, but I tweeted about 5 and my Followers found themselves with a bonus tip (perhaps surprising and delighting them?).

3. Get the most out of LinkedIn

4. Statistics About the Ages of Social Network Users

According to this study, the average age for Social Network users is 38.  I guess that it makes it totally uncool.  Luckily I stopped wanting to be cool when I turned 30.

5. Free Social Media Monitoring ebook

What Were Your Top Tweets?

I’d love to hear what your followers were interested in this past week.  What were your top Tweets?

If you aren’t sure how to track this information check out Bit.ly and register for an account.

This week started to notice weird spam accounts Tweeting to my Twitter feed and since I check everyone I follow, I had a feeling some random application out there was adding these SPAM accounts, most likely an application that I had tested out and gave my password too (naughty, naughty me).

So I’ve been motivated into doing the following 5 steps for a major Twitter maintenance:

1. Remove SPAM Accounts

Register yourself a free trial of Twitsweeper. This great little tool checks and removes followers that just Spam and does it so easily. What I love is there are 3 levels of automation: Full, Auto Remove after 72 hours or Manual. Twitsweeper suggested I had 250 spammy accounts (where did the rascals come from?) and I checked a bunch to make sure that they were infact spam.

They’ve done a great job with their filters and hopefully they’ll add the ability to check your following list so I’ll never see another tweet about teeth whitening or improving my downline with Donald Trump.  Tweet them to add this at @twitsweeper.

2. Remove Inactive Followers

UnTweeps is a free service that let’s you bulk unfollow accounts that have been inactive for over 30 days. It has a Whitelist so you can give your favourites a free pass, however, I’m pretty ruthless – yeah maybe they could be on vacation, in the hospital or have a legitimate reason for not tweeting, but more likely they are just lazy. Get rid of them.

3. Back up your Twitter Account

Get yourself a free account with Backupify (until Feb 15th) and start automatically backing up your Twitter account (and Facebook, Wordpress and a bunch of others) daily to Amazon Web Services. Once you set it up, it will run daily.

4. Remove connections to your Twitter account.

Each time you use OAuth to authenticate an external application with Twitter, it adds a connection to your account. Since I test out a lot of Twitter apps, I suspect that this could be one of the possible culprits for how I mysteriously follow rogue spam accounts.

Either way, it’s good practice to regularly remove connections you aren’t using or you don’t 100% trust with your first born’s life. Visit Twitter Connections and remove them all – don’t worry they’ll reconnect again when you reuse the service.

5. Change your password

Ah yes, we all hate doing it, but it’s really the best way to protect your Twitter Account from being hijacked. There’s a reason I put this one last too – because since we’ve used services external from Twitter, by removing the connections and changing our password last you’ve ensured the services you used in the previous steps won’t have access to your account unless you reinstate them.

Twitter password change

Repeat regularly for a squeaky clean, protected Twitter account.

This Twitter Resource list isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of everything available, instead it’s a list of tools and applications that I’ve used and liked.  If you know of something better or something I’ve missed, please add a comment and I’ll check it out.

Finding Available Twitter Names

• Tweexchange – checks names and availability and shows if .com is available.

Automate Following Twitter Accounts

It’s important to use discretion when automating following users.  Go for quality, not quantity.  I only automate following of people I have strategically searched for.  I don’t auto follow back anyone who follows me as I want to make sure that I only follow people that I’m actually interested in.

• Tweet Adder - Simple interface, 1 time fee.  Use the coupon code – IMCASHSAVER (20% off).
• SocialOomph -  More advanced than Tweet Adder with loads of options. Reoccurring monthly fee.

Tweeting – Scheduling and Management Consoles

• CoTweet – my favourite Twitter client.  Simple interface, allows you to manage multiple accounts and schedule Tweets.  The features I love about CoTweet are it tracks conversations you’ve had, so when you click on someone’s profile it will tell you all the Tweets that you’ve exchanged with them and it allows you to archive tweets easily.
• Hootsuite – a very popular management console.

Schedule of Twitter Chats

• Twitter Chat Schedule – Maintained by Robert Swanwick (@SpkrInteractive)

Client to participate in Twitter Chats (using hashtags)

• TweetChat – simple interface to follow 1 hashtag per window.
• TweetGrid – follow up to 3 keywords or hashtags in the same window.

Temporarily Unfollow A User

• Twick Twock – allows you to schedule an amount of time to unfollow a user when they filling your feed because they are at a conference or talking about something you aren’t interested in.  Options are 5 min, 1 hour, 8 hours, 1 day, 1 week.

URL Shortening

• Bitly – register an account and this great tool will not only shorten your URL, but track will also track how many people clicked on the link.  Most Twitter clients like CoTweet allow you to add your API Key so Bitly integrates automatically to shorten your links on the fly.

Delete inactive followers

• UnTweeps – Since Twitter make Twitter Karma remove the Bulk Unfollow tool, UnTweeps has become the next best thing. It will allow you to search for inactive followers and delete them.
• Twitter Friends – a tool with lots of interesting statistics.  Check out the Inactive tab to see who hasn’t used Twitter recently.  Unfortunately, there is no bulk select, so to unfollow you have to go to each Twitter user’s page and select unfollow.

Sources for Finding Content

• Delicious.com – bookmarking site allowing you to see popular and recent content that has been bookmarked.
• Daily RT – shows trending tweets.
• Twitt(url)y – tracks and ranks URLs that people are tweeting about.  Make sure you sort by language.
• Digg –  shared content that is voted on by the community based on quality.
• StumbleUpon – community that discovers and rates web content.
• Squidoo –  community generated pages (called lenses) on anything and everything.
• Google Alerts – emails you updates about keywords you specify in news and on the web as they happen, daily or weekly.

Alerts – tracking conversations and keywords

• Tweetalarm - free alerts for Twitter with options to receive emails as they arrive, twice daily, daily and weekly,
• Tweet Beep – this alert service is able to keep track of who’s tweeting about your blog or website even if they use a URL shortener.  Free hourly alerts and premium option available to be alerted every 15 minutes for a monthly fee.
• ListiMonkey - receive alerts for when a keyword appears in Twitter Lists you are monitoring.

Finding People to Follow

• Listorious – directory of the best Twitter Lists and their members.
• Twellow – Twitter Yellow Pages
• GeoFollow – user directory by location.
• Twibs – user business directory.
• Tweep Search – allows you to search by location and Bio

Research and Measuring Results

• Bitly – tracks how many people clicked on your links
• Twitter Advanced Search – options to search based on keywords, people, places, dates and more.
• Twitter Analyzer – includes graphs of daily tweet volume, RTs, reader reach, chats, mentions, subjects, hasthags and more.  Can give you insights into what your competition is doing on Twitter, or how you are stacking up.
• TwitterCounter - some pretty cool statistics and allows compare your account activity with others.
• TweetStats – graphs on analysis of your tweets.  With pretty colours. Win.
• Twitter Grader – Get your Twitter ranking.
• Tweetaholic – simple,but good statistics on your growth.

Back up your Twitter accounts

• Tweetake – backs up to .csv file your followers, friends, favourites, tweets, direct messages or everything.
• Backupify – backs ups Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress and much more.

Create a PDF of all your Tweets

• Tweetbook – creates a PDF file of all your tweets.

Share pictures on Twitter

• Twitpic – share pictures on Twitter from your phone or on the web.

Share videos on Twitter

• VidTweeter – create a custom video profile that is synced with Twitter and and allows you to create and share video tweets, short bubble video messages, video greeting cards.

Stop Receiving Automated Direct Messages

• SocialOomph Opt Out – this will only work with auto direct messages that are configured with SocialOomph, so it won’t get them all – it’s still worth doing.

Create Twitter Coupons

• twtQpon – offer exclusive coupons to your followers.

Facebook has a great new feature for Pages that will be a blessing for businesses with a following larger one city, especially if they host regional events and marketing initiatives.  Status updates can now be posted by location or language, making it easy to share relevant information with audiences in specific locations.

As someone who runs local workshops and events, I think this is fabulous.

Creating a Status Update by Location

Start by entering your status update and then select the options button beside share and select customize.

In the choose the Choose your audience box, you can enter the country (or language) for your status update.

Once you have chosen your city, you further target by state/province or by city.

What I love about this feature is you can drill down to city and select multiple cities if necessary, which avoids having to send out multiple updates if there is more than one city targeted for the update, making it a very well thought out feature update.

So in exciting social media news, you can now easily post your Twitter status to update your Linkedin status.

What I really love about this feature, is you can instruct Twitter which status updates to add to Linkedin by adding the hastag #in.  Simple, easy and only takes up 3 characters from the precious 140 we have in which to play with.

Anyway, setting it up is super simple, props to Linkedin for making it easy for us.

Setting Up Linkedin with your Twitter Account

So first, use the link below to head over to Linkedin and adjust the Twitter Settings:

Linkedin Twitter Settings

You’ll probably be asked to log in.  So do that.

Select Add your Twitter Account.

You will be prompted to allow access from Linkedin to your Twitter account.  Select Yes, because Linkedin is a trusted site. Generally, you should make sure that you only allow a site that you trust access to your Twitter account so you avoid having your account highjacked.

Select save to approve the default Twitter settings.

Posting updates from Twitter to Linkedin

When you post an update to Twitter, simply add the #in hashtag at the end and it will then update Linkedin.

Updating your Twitter status from Linkedin

Now you’ve configured the Twitter settings on Linkedin, you can now update Twitter directly from Linkedin by selecting the Twitter icon.

Keep it professional

Linkedin is a professional networking platform, so select your best tips and updates to send to Linkedin.

A few years ago, while I was working in corporate IT jobs, I decided to go to India for 3 months and do a Work as Meditation program. The basis of the program was that I would work for 7 days a week, 6 hours a day in a job that I didn’t pick for 3 months, with the purpose of learning how to bring meditation into every area of life, specifically, the one I spend the most time doing – work.

At the time, I had just finished a particularly intense contract and wanted to find peace and balance in my life. The whole experience was a rollercoaster of inner transformation, and I realized the 4 key lessons I learned there apply perfectly to getting started with social media.

Lesson 1 – Do What You Love

Since the Work as Meditation program was Karma Yoga (or selfless service), I didn’t get to choose my own job, but when I arrived when there was a vacancy at the information desk, so my job turned out requiring me to sit under a gazebo in the lush, green paradise and talk to guests about the resort. I Loved it.

After a month, there was an opening for a graphic designer. With my IT background, they gave me the choice of staying where I was or moving into the new role. Since I wanted to learn how to love the job I hated but paid my bills, I felt the new job would give me experience that was applicable to my “real” life. Groan.

Funnily enough, instead, the lesson I learned was to choose what I love. The next 2 months were very challenging, and I fought with myself numerous times about dropping out and leaving early.

To get started with social media, start by sharing your passion. It takes time to see results and success with anything, and your passion will keep you going. It’s also important to start with strategies that compliment what you already enjoy. For example, if you like writing, you might want to start a blog, or contribute to Squidoo or Knol. If you enjoy talking or teaching, try making videos and sharing them on Youtube or Vimeo.

Lesson 2 – To Thy Own Self Be True (Be Authentic)

Even in a small spiritual community in India, people voice opinions about your life and how you’re living it. Since I felt like a total novice to spirituality, I let others’ opinions have way too much influence on my life.

This led me to discover my the second gem my experience in India had to offer – the only way to happiness is to find answers within myself, because trying to live by anyone else’s standards drives me a little crazy.

To be part of social media, you have to share yourself, your ideas and opinions. For some people, this can be really scary. If you are worried about privacy, overly concerned about what others think or you’re too focused on seeing results and making money straight away, you’ll struggle to be successful with social media.

Authenticity is a huge part of what makes people attractive online. Others can sense whether you’re genuinely interested in them or if you’re just trying to sell them. Choose authenticity.

3. Time and Focus are Required

On top of working 6 hours a day and I was required to attend a 2.5 hour meeting each night. After meals and a morning meditation, I was left with 1 – 2 hours of personal time each day (although, I was constantly reminded by others that all the time I spent there was personal time and I must stop segmenting it).

The point of this intense schedule was to teach us how to live for the moment, rather than living for the future (weekends). This highlighted the value of my personal time. If someone asked me to do something, instead of automatically agreeing, I would stop and consider if I really wanted to do it.

One of the biggest challenges you’ll face getting started is where to put your time and energy. Remember, not only will it take time to see results from social media, it will also take time for you to learn how to use it effectively. It’s better to start with one strategy, focus on it until you master it and measure the results before starting another strategy.

Lesson 4 – Let Go

To be perfectly honest with you, the first month I was at the resort I did very little serious meditation. Actually, I considered myself to be bad at it. I have a tendency to resist any authority, even if that’s my consciousness trying to exert authority over my mind.

After a particularly upsetting situation, I was feeling a baseball of stress sitting in my chest with the hitter, anxiety, stepping up to the plate to take a swing. A few people I knew were taking a night off their spirituality and heading into the town to do some serious drinking and for a moment I considered going too, even though I had quit drinking a couple of years before.

Stressed as I was, I realized where that was going to end, a few hours of release and monster hangover and no resolution. I decided to take a new road – instead I got up at 6am and did the craziest meditation I think ever invented, involving being blind-folded while screaming, jumping up and down, dancing, standing like statue. Something I had mocked only 2 weeks before.

But it worked. I was able to let go of my pain that day and see things in a new light. I even continued that crazy meditation every day for the rest of my time there and found some peace in the madness. That choice to start something new was an incredibly pivotal point for my time in India and my life.

Social Media is not a get rich quick strategy, it’s a long term medium to build relationships with others. It’s the gift of an open channel for communication with people you may never be able to reach traditionally. Regardless of the technology, building relationships is the same online as it is offline, it takes time to build rapport and trust. Doing that requires some selflessness on your part, helping when you can and while having no expectations of getting anything in return.

As a business owner, it’s important to separate your social media strategy from immediate sales goals. Some self promotion is ok as long as it’s deeply surrounded with service to others. By letting go of expectations, you allow yourself to be open to the serendipity of social media, while those who only try to promote themselves shut themselves off to all the opportunities out there.

Facebook does love to redesign their site, often much to the chagrin of those who use it.  After hearing lots of feedback from users after the last redesigns, Facebook has made changes to the homepage and how the News Feed works, many of them this time, definitely for the better.

Now, there are 2 feeds on the Homepage instead of one:

• Live Feed which gives you updates as they happen
• News Feed which is now the revamped Highlights section

What was Highlights in the right-hand side bar, has now been added back into the News Feed view and has been causing some confusion, because like the Highlights section it doesn’t necessarily show updates in chronological order, but rather in what is popular or what Facebook thinks you might find interesting.  I really can’t wait until Facebook lets us customize what we would like to see based on what we think is interesting rather than just guessing for us.

The Live Feed view has some welcome re-additions, bringing back when friends are tagged in photos, RSVP for events, join groups and make new friends. Thankfully, birthdays are again more visible and I won’t have to feel so guilty for not sending my birthday wishes.

With the addition of the Live Feed, a new default setting has been added that only allows 250 friends to show updates in your feed. Since you can’t actually choose which 250 friends, you may want to change this setting. To do this:

1. Make sure you have Live Feed set.

2. Scroll to the Bottom of the Live Feed screen and Edit Options.

3. Change the Maximum number of friends shown in Live Feed to 5000 (the maximum friends that Facebook lets you have).

Don’t forget to save the changes.