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social media assignments

Jul 07
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Social Media Assignment #10: How to Smoosh Your Facebook Page and Twitter Together

By Communications

In certain situations, a Twitter feed is established as a method of publishing information. It’s not there to engage, and the people behind it are not tweeting conversationally at all. Some examples of this are the feeds from news organizations, some nonprofits or other institutions. There are often too many regulations placed on these institutions to allow them to engage in social media the way a business, individual or nonprofit would.

In this case, for an organization that wants to have a presence on Twitter integrating that account with an official Facebook page is probably the most efficient way to achieve their communications goals.

Hopefully, the organization has set up a Facebook page (not a group or a profile). If you’re an admin of that page (and I hope you are!) take the following steps:

  1. Login to Facebook and go to your page.
  2. Click on Edit Page in the upper left.
  3. Click on Resources in the right hand sidebar.
  4. Halfway down the page you will see Link your Page to Twitter.
  5. In a separate window, log in to the Twitter account you want to link to the Facebook page.
  6. Click on Link to Twitter.

If you manage more than one page and more than one Twitter account, take care that you’re linking the right Twitter account to the right Facebook page!

Now, updates on Facebook will cross publish to Twitter. I think it’s important to mention that users that choose to use this method of integration still need to log in to and monitor Twitter — there’s no excuse for not paying attention to replies, mentions and direct messages your Twitter account may have, regardless of your method of publishing there.

 

Apr 07
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Social Media Assignment #9: Boost Your Connections

By Communications

“People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.  All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.” — Guy Kawasaki

Today’s social media assignment: Add Five!

Whether LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter are your social networking platforms of choice, take a few minutes today to think about and choose five new connections to make in your social network. If it’s LinkedIn, make it five people you’ve worked with or know from a business relationship. If it’s Facebook, connect to five friends in your community. If you’re a Twitter user, find five interesting people in your industry to follow and respond to one of their tweets today.

Feel free to make me one of your five!

Feb 18
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Social Media Assignment #7: Find Your LinkedIn Contacts on Twitter

By Communications

If you’ve been following the social media assignments, congratulations! You’ve made a lot of progress if you’ve knocked off each of these simple tasks.

This assignment makes a couple of assumptions. If you’re reading this blog, you most likely have a LinkedIn account and, I’m assuming that your LinkedIn profile is complete and that you have all of your contacts entered in to your business social network.  The second assumption is that you have an established Twitter account. If not, you might want to backtrack and hit this social media assignment.

Today’s Social Media Assignment

You may be making an assumption of your own; you might think that your contacts in LinkedIn aren’t using Twitter. Depending on your network, your community, your profession and a number of other factors, a higher percentage than you think may be there. (Statistics estimate between 11% and 20% of Internet users are frequent Twitter users. ) The point is, if your business contacts are on LinkedIn, and you are on Twitter, you want to follow your business contacts on Twitter.

First, you will need to log in to LinkedIn and install the Tweets Application. You will be able to access the application by clicking on More in the top navigation menu.

The applications functions to integrate your Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile. I don’t recommend using Twitter solely through your LinkedIn account, however, it is useful to find and follow your connections.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I am following 1,076 people on Twitter. Let’s look at how many of those are my LinkedIn contacts and if I’m missing following any of them on Twitter.

There are not, in fact, many people I’m not following from the list of my business contacts using Twitter. This tool lets me review who they are and quickly and easily follow those I’m missing.

Feb 09
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Social Media Assignment #6: Listening to the Social Web

By Communications

Do you know what is being said about you, your brand or your company online?

Maybe you have been using Google Alerts to monitor for news about your organization, but do you know what people are saying on the social web?

What is the social web? Twitter, blog comments, bulletin boards, Facebook and blogs are some, but not all the elements of the social web.

Today’s Social Media Assignment

Take about half an hour to play with some of the tools displayed in this post. Try out Social Mention and IceRocket in particular — free tools that allow you to search the entirety of the social web.

With these tools you can subscribe to the search you create and continue to monitor mentions on an ongoing basis (recommended). You may find you have to tweak your search terms until you refine them to exactly the right keywords to find the results you seek.

Another approach to consider — search for your customers, clients or employees — do you know what they’re doing or saying online?

I recommend you spend some time listening — not just one day, or one half hour of one day. It takes time, and ongoing attention. And while you’re listening, take time to develop a plan for how you will respond to any mentions of your brand — positive or negative mentions.

Jan 28
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Social Media Assignment #4: Edit Company Website

By Communications

A surprising number of my contacts have the following default setting in their LinkedIn profile:

It’s an easy fix, and one that’s often overlooked.

Today’s Social Media Assignment

Customize that “Company Website” default thusly: Edit the default Website settings on your LinkedIn profile. Login to your account and select Edit Profile.

When you’re in Edit Profile mode you will see lots of click-able blue links that say “Edit.”

Move to the section of your profile that lists Websites.

Click on the blue Edit next to one of your listed Websites (or if you’ve only listed one, that one — it doesn’t matter, they’ll all show up on the edit page.)

You have lots of options when you get to this stage, so you may have to think it through a bit.

You probably chose “Company Website” or “Blog” in the past. What you want to do, to open up an additional field to the right of this drop-down menu, is choose “Other.”

Choose Other! Really — it’s OK. When you choose “Other” a field opens, as depicted in the image at the left, that asks for your Website title. It is a really great opportunity to take advantage of smart search engine optimization to add the name of your company or a description of what you do to this field, then the URL in the field to the right of that.

As you can see in the capture of my profile below, my website listings are much more descriptive than “Company Website.”

I’m thrilled to hear from all of you who are following the social media assignments — keep up the good work!