Guest post by Marianna Pratt

LinkedIn exists to facilitate business and professional connections. You’re telling prospective clients or customers, search firms or potential employers who you are. Your LinkedIn profile should reflect your personality as well as credentials, but keep it professional. And look for LinkedIn profile tips that can boost your results.

LinkedIn can be a terrific B2B business marketing tool, especially for generating leads. Your profile tells people why they should do business with you, so write engagingly, in the first person. Fill each profile section with relevant, enlightening information about yourself and your company.

Here are some specific LinkedIn profile tips: [Read more...]

Guest Post by Clare Tischer

Use the below four guidelines to sing on key in social media as a small to medium business.

1) Now, let me clear my throat…
One of the first things I learned when I dove into social media was that voice is a huge priority. No, not your voice. Your business or brand’s voice! Who is it? Is the brand male or female? For example, if you’re Calvin Klein, the brand is androgynous but either he or she smells great and wears perfectly crisp, black T-shirts and never smiles too much. One of my first social media clients was a Latin fusion restaurant in town known for its savory brunch and late night truth serum. I felt stuck for a couple of days, brainstorming how to speak to an audience that consisted of both families with young children and also black-out bound undergraduates. While watching an episode of Modern Family, it hit me: When creating content for this client, I would channel Sofia Vergara’s character, Gloria. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, Gloria is a Columbian bombshell, a newly remarried young mother who manages to be both provocative and, because she’s totally unaware of her own sexual intrigue, family friendly. I allowed Gloria to inform everything I wrote for this client. What would Gloria do?

[Read more...]

Guest post by Beth Hartman

These days, everyone knows that having an online marketing strategy is important for any business, from the smallest street stall selling seashells to the largest enterprise solutions obsessed with acronyms and international profit margins. The tricky part is how to go about managing your online marketing strategy, which can seem like an overwhelming process, especially when you are just starting. One great solution that works well for many folks is to use the services of an online marketing expert like Trada, which leverages a crowd-sourcing model to create pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns affordably for small and medium businesses. Another strategy that may work well for certain businesses is to use social media to get your customers to do a lot of your online marketing for you, since creating content yourself can be time consuming. Depending on the business, this can work for small, medium and large organizations targeting both B2B and B2C markets.

[Read more...]

I always considered myself relatively proficient with social media. I’m on Facebook, I tweet. That’s why I was so surprised when I found out my Klout score was a mere 27! Apparently my rambling thoughts about how the Vikings will never win a Superbowl or which Prince song I’m obsessed with at the moment failed to capture a substantial audience. As a digital marketer, I knew this was unacceptable. I needed to boost my Klout score now… but how?

After days of hanging my head in shame, I approached Elaine Ellis (Trada’s Twitter queen) and confessed my social media sins. I told her how I used Twitter mostly for reading other people’s tweets, and that I joined FourSquare but haven’t checked in anywhere for over a year. She tried to convince me that all hope was not lost, that with a few tricks and a little work I could have a Klout score I could be proud of.

From that moment on, Elaine Ellis (or @elaineellis I should say) became my social media mentor. Within a day my Klout score had already climbed several points with no sign of stopping. Here’s what seems to have worked:

[Read more...]