Can Non-Profits Benefit from LinkedIn?

Sam Harrelson on September 1, 2017

je-linkedin-see-more-link

One of my favorite clients had this question on our weekly call this morning.

I excitedly said “YES!” which feels a little odd. Going back through my blog archives here, you’ll see lots of instances over the last 10 years where I’ve written that LinkedIn “sucks” is “terrible” and “should not be used.”

However, LinkedIn can be a fabulous tool for groups and nonprofits looking to make an impact within a certain influencer group. I offered a couple of different thoughts on how to do that in our call this morning, but the highlights are that you should be posting updates and your posts should be “mobile-first” (short, narrative, and text). Secondly, use their native video feature to share QUICK and focused updates via mobile video, especially if you’re doing outreach or looking to connect with parties in your community.

There’s a great list of other ideas here from Social Media Examiner that I found while doing some research:

Keep it short. No one wants to read walls of text. Also, on LinkedIn mobile, a See More link appears on text updates longer than five lines. On the desktop version, your post is cut off after only three lines. With these limits in mind, if you use a storytelling approach, put a compelling hook in the first line to encourage people to read the whole post.

via How to Improve Your LinkedIn Engagement : Social Media Examiner

Pinterest Gets Analytics

Sam Harrelson on March 12, 2013

Pinterest has announced their iteration of web analytics for bloggers, businesses and groups with a verified website in the profile of the popular sharing service:

Introducing Pinterest Web Analytics – Pinterest Blog: “Bloggers, businesses, and organizations often ask us, “what are people pinning from my websites?” These website owners help create the content on Pinterest and we wanted to help them understand which pieces of content people find most interesting. Today, we’re pleased to announce Pinterest Web Analytics, a first step towards doing just that. Web Analytics gives site owners insights into how people are interacting with pins that originate from their websites.”

Getting your website verified by Pinterest is a pretty painless and straightforward process involving dropping some code into the header of your site.

Most interesting is the ability to see stats on not just your pins but also repins as well as impressions and clicks. This should make many of the marketers and businesses that have been eyeing Pinterest but not sold on the platform because lack of analytics happy.

This isn’t a good thing for sites such as PinReach that have sprung up to fulfill the need for analytics and insight into Pinterest trends. However, much like Twitter’s once flourishing API coral reef (still a great post six years later), these sites can become interesting platforms to dig deeper or look at other types of social engagement outside of what Pinterest itself offers.

Pinterest is definitely upping the social media involvement ante with businesses as it continues to scale its user base and explore areas of monetization and ad serving in a different path than either Twitter or Facebook.

Instead, look to LinkedIn and Twitter for further innovation in the social networking monetization space.

Spreading Too Thin on Social Sites

Sam Harrelson on March 7, 2013

Spreading videos you’ve already made (and the ones you haven’t made yet) to social channels is one of the common sense things that many marketers don’t do well.

On top of that, making sure to do more than just link or embed your videos on sites as if you’re simply broadcasting is something most marketers just simply ignore.

Yes, spread your videos around but don’t just dilute your message online by blasting your posts or videos or podcasts everywhere… just as when you are learning in school, it’s better to go deeper than wider when applying social media strategies. Don’t have time for LinkedIn? Don’t post there. Think Twitter is silly? Don’t tweet. Have no clue why Pinterest is a big deal? Don’t pin.

Find the balance between spreading your content (posts, video, audio, pics etc) but don’t spread yourself too thin on sites that you’re not authentically using and engaging…

Leverage Your Existing Videos on Your Social Media Sites | SoMedia Video Marketing Blog: “LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Google+ are all great places to post your videos—in fact I think LinkedIn and Google+ are going to be big destinations for online business video in the near future—which is the key point here: once you’ve created a video, you need to ensure you leverage it beyond your website. Don’t just hide it on your website, consider all the places where your target audience is online, stake your claim, and post the video there.”

via Tris Hussey on Twitter

What is the Job of Social Logins on Your Site?

Sam Harrelson on January 5, 2012

I wish Craig would have included his sources for which research he cites here…

Should You Use Social Login’s?: “Wondering  which social logins are the most popular option among users? Well, according to research, 42 percent of social logins use Facebook while the remaining alternatives are fairly equally distributed among Yahoo, Paypal, Google and others. If you can only select one form of social login…make it Facebook.”

Regardless, if you’re going to use social plugins for commenting, subscriptions, engagement, sharing etc on your site, I would hesitate to decide on just one to elevate unless you do your own careful research and heuristics on your actual site(s).

For instance, I have sites that receive the majority of their “social” traffic from Facebook and I have sites that receive virtually all of their social traffic from sites like Reddit and Twitter.

All traffic is not good traffic. Having passive visitors from Facebook that have nothing to do with performance marketing is grand, but doesn’t do much for the bandwidth costs of this site. Similarly, passive Twitter or search traffic that arrives at one of my niche book sites doesn’t do much for me (beyond pageview ego petting) compared to the Facebook or Amazon search traffic that supports and livens those sites.

So, as always, remember that your site is doing a job for people. Figure out what that job is for people and offer them the service that you would want if you were hiring your site to do a job for your mother. Limit their choices, walk them through the process, do friendly follow up and make them want to refer you and come back (as Jangro reminds us, make them yours).

Check your stats and see where the bulk of that traffic might be coming from and why and then decide if you want to elevate a social login (which you definitely should) service on your site.

More on Like-Jacking and Quality Traffic

Sam Harrelson on January 4, 2012

Last week I posted about the rise of “Like-Jacking” on Facebook and why digital literacy is so important. The WSJ covers the issue this morning as well…

Spam Finds a New Target – WSJ.com: “A common social-spam attack on Facebook, known as “like-jacking,” involves duping users into clicking on an image that looks as if a friend has clicked the “Like” button, recommending it.”

When I first got my start in the online marketing world, I worked at an email marketing firm that helped spark the “Free iPod” phenomenon in exchange for just an email address and zip code. It was amazingly profitable and I soon learned why. People want freebies.

However, the quality of traffic was terrible and the lists were sold and resold so many times that any value they might have had were soon distilled into the ether.

The same holds true for Facebook Likes and retweets today and the growing realization that all traffic is not good traffic (especially traffic derived from passive social traffic that is unqualified and not valuable).