22 October 2014 By Northern Lights
We’ve done dozens of workshops in the last few months– for clients and in open programmes, both in the UK and the UAE, for 20-100 people and also one-to-ones. Here are your top 5 questions – and our answers. Email us if you have your own burning question and we’ll be happy to answer – we may even write a blog to cover more detail.
For most businesses in B2B (business-to-business) the most useful for researching, targeting and building relationships is probably LinkedIn.
In the last year, most businesses have started using Twitter – though only a few use it strategically, so this can work well if your targets are one of these.
Blogs have to be the best way to engage with quality targets (by inviting them to guest blog and contribute) and to get you to the top of Google.
Google+ can’t be ignored because Google over-ranks content and is determined to make this the ‘next LinkedIn’.
But actually, the power of social media is to use a number of platforms strategically and inter-link them.
More details in these blogs
– What is the best social media platform – part one?
– What is the best social media platform – part two?
As a general rule we would say don’t try to delete negative comments (say on Twitter or comment on a blog) but respect their viewpoint and engage with them. We had a comment on one of our blogs disagreeing with the advice we gave – we thanked her and then put on social media that we would love to get wider views on the topic. We then went back and summed up what others were saying and thanked her for raising the subject. This sort of response tends to feel professional.
If you believe someone – a competitor, say – is posting negative comments under a false identity, you can contact the owner of the website and they may investigate and remove: they want their sites to be credible.
This month the Telegraph published an article on what Google is – or isn’t removing – under the European Court’s ‘right to be forgotten’ rule.
The best way to improve your online reputation is to post useful information regularly – a blog is ideal for this. Jason Freidenfelds of Google says in the Wall Street Journal: “Generally the best approach is to put up information that is useful to real users—not to game the system, but to provide information people would find genuinely helpful”.
More tips on how to do this
– 10 step guide to online reputation management – part one
– 10 step guide to online reputation management – part two
Before writing your profile, ask ‘what do I want it to achieve?’. Are your priorities to win new business, forge strategic partnerships or be invited as a guest speaker?
You would write slightly different profiles and use different keywords for each of these.
Read our ‘Director LinkedIn profiles – how to write them’
Perhaps the quickest way to explain this is for you to type in the following to a Google search
– How to write a director’s profile on LinkedIn
– Where should internal communications sit
– How to measure the ROI of B2B social media
What is coming up top or nearly top of these searches? It’s Northern Lights? We don’t pay for traditional SEO yet come top of Google searches because of the useful content we write. And we win business from this.
For help with blogging contact Victoria Tomlinson or to buy our blogging ebook ‘How to write a top-ranked business blog’ click HERE
We are working with a number of Emirati leaders, particularly women, but the principles apply the world over.
Leaders need a clear identity – or personal brand – that reflects and supports their business (or university or charity or whatever) and demonstrates their particular expertise and passion. A phrase we get leaders to think about is “what am I the ‘go to’ person for ….”
This will help you then to write and say your ‘elevator pitch’ – a 20 second introduction that will spark interest and make you memorable.
Once you have this, how do you use it?
More thoughts in this blog on Personal branding in social media