Sarah Santacroce is a certified social media, internet marketing, and virtual event specialist. She enjoys every aspect of small business marketing. Through her own business, Simplicity, it is her mission to help other small businesses and solopreneurs increase their visibility and use social media tools as part of their marketing strategy.
Sarah draws on 12 years of experience in Business Administration, in fields ranging from Employee Training to Public Relations at big and small companies. She became interested in Online Marketing and Social Media to promote her own business and after lots of research and numerous classes and webinars she is now offering that knowledge to other small- to mid-sized businesses who struggle to find their place on the web.
In this blog, Sarah draws on examples from her own blog to give knowitall.ch visitors a few tips for managing their own businesses.
By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity
Wow, I didn’t expect that one. LinkedIn has made a few changes recently that annoyed many of us. I’m referring to the disappearance of the skills directory and the activity feed on our profiles for example. And in fact this annoyance many users immediately was reflected in LinkedIn’s stock price: huge drop in recent months.
But this might change again with this recent addition of publishing options for everyone.
What is the ‘LinkedIn Publishing’ Platform?
If you have subscribed to receive updates from a bunch of influencers, you are already experiencing the publishing options first hand. You have subscribed to receive posts from these influencers, without being connected with them. Well, LinkedIn is now giving the opportunity to all of us to publish posts and have people subscribe to regular updates from us.
Photo by phanlop88, www.freedigitalphotos.net
By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity
Should I pay for a LinkedIn Premium account? This is a question I get asked on each & every LinkedIn webinar. It’s of course a very valid question, since the monthly investment is not exactly peanuts.
Let’s see what you get more when you pay:
Full list of ‘People Who Viewed Your Profile
As a free member you can only see the last five people to have viewed their profile. Premium members on the other hand get the full list of people from the last 90 days.
I often reach out to people who view my profile to see if they are interested in connecting. Often times they were just too shy to ask. If you’re on LinkedIn every day like me, then you don’t necessarily need to see the full list since you’ll always see the last 5 people who visited your profile.
By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity. Free image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
On my “13 Simple Techniques To Get More Leads with LinkedIn” webinar one of the participants asked:
“Should I accept invitations from people I don’t know?”
Good question. The more connections, the bigger your reach. So technically it’s a good business strategy to accept everyone’s invitation. But yet, I don’t recommend this approach. In this post I’m sharing:
My very personal LinkedIn Connections Strategy
“A contact only becomes a connection when there’s some kind of exchange between the two parties”. Click here to share this quote on Twitter
It’s not just a numbers game.
Yes, it’s true that your reach increases the more connections you have in your network. But just like on Facebook, the numbers alone won’t guarantee your success. Even though LinkedIn is a business network, don’t forget that “people do business with people”. So if you just have numbers in your network, and not real connections, you won’t get anything back from your marketing efforts.
So Sarah, what’s your LinkedIn Connections Strategy?
By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity
If you are a small business owner who has an e-mail list and sends out newsletters, tap yourself on the back. You are doing one thing right already ! Despite all the Social Media hype, E-Mail Marketing is still a very important marketing channel. There are a few mistakes that I see regularly in newsletters though, so I thought I’d write them down:
Lack of regularity – Small businesses sometimes think that they can just send out a newsletter once every six months and expect a good “opening rate” (number of people who actually open the e-mail). Sorry to disillusion you, but if I signed up to receive your newsletter 6 months ago and never hear from you again until half a year later, I probably won’t remember who you are and just delete your e-mail. So, continuity is key to build that trust with your readers. I would say one newsletter per month is the bare minimum.
Too much info – This is kind of related to point one. The same people who send out their news only once every 6 months expect me to read their 3 page long e-mail. Most likely they will loose me after the 2nd paragraph. So not a good technique either. I recently announced to my subscribers that I will increase the frequency of my news exactly for that reason. I have too much content, articles and tips to share with them and each newsletter gets too long ! Keep it short and to the point.
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