Five social media skills millennials don’t have

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, community manager, Content Marketing, Hootsuite, Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Listening

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Best Practices, Online Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media networks, social media tools, social sharing

Shared from Ryan Holmes

Don’t assume younger staff will know everything about running a clever social media campaign.

They’re the generation brought up on Facebook. Some have never known a world without the Internet. The innermost details of their lives have been exhaustively Instagramed and they get their news from Twitter, not TV.

But when it comes to using social media in the workplace, millennials – the generation whose birth years can range anywhere from 1980 and 2000 – can be surprisingly, even dangerously, unprepared. “Because somebody grows up being a social media native, it doesn’t make them an expert in using social media at work,” says William Ward, professor of social media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “That’s like saying, ‘I grew up with a fax machine, so that makes me an expert in business.'”

For students and recent grads, some social media 101 is definitely in order.

Lacking in critical areas

According to Ward, who teaches a series of popular undergraduate and graduate courses on social media at the university, millennials are lacking in a number of critical areas. While they’re very good at connecting with people they already know, they often fail to understand the professional opportunities and pitfalls posed by networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

“Companies hire millennials because they think they’re good at social media. Then their bosses discover they don’t have those skills and get frustrated,” Ward says, noting that social media expectations are often higher for millennials than for older workers, who may be just as inept.

For students and recent grads entering the workforce, some social media 101 is definitely in order. In particular, career-minded millennials desperately need to brush up on these five social media skills:

1. Knowing when not to share

Recently, Business Insider attracted attention for firing its CTO, Pax Dickinson, because of comments he made on his personal Twitter account. While Dickinson’s Tweets on women and minorities were especially offensive, the situation hints at a larger issue. Millennials sometimes fail to appreciate that personal profiles can have professional repercussions. Twitter, Facebook and other networks are largely public platforms; comments made can – and often do – get back to bosses. As the Dickinson case shows, few employers are eager to associate themselves with off-color or offensive content, even when it may be intended as a joke.

2. Using social media to actually save time

According to a 2013 Salary.com survey, the most frequently visited personal website at work is – you guessed it – Facebook. As networks proliferate – and millennial employees not only check Facebook but post on Twitter, browse Instagram and more – social media has the potential to be a devastating time-suck. Yet it can also be a time saver in the office. A recent McKinsey reportnotes that social media has the potential to save companies $1.3 trillion, largely owing to improvements in intra-office collaboration. Internal social networks like Yammer enable employees to form virtual work groups and communicate on message boards. Instead of endless back-and-forths on email, co-workers can post and reply in continually updated streams. None of this is revolutionary, but millennials are often still in the dark on ways Facebook-like innovations are being taken behind the firewall.

3. Understanding how to crunch the numbers

While millennials often have an intuitive understanding of what resonates on social channels (hard to go wrong with cat GIFs), quantifying what works and what doesn’t is another matter. Should the success of a Twitter campaign be measured on the basis of retweets, mentions, replies, referral traffic or sales leads? What are the best times of day to post on Facebook and what is the optimum post frequency? Which analytical tools are best for crunching the numbers? While social media is about authentic, human interaction, it’s also an arena where data can easily be collected and applied to improve results. Knowing what data to look for, where to find it and what to do with it separates real experts from mere social natives.

4. Mastering the multi-network shuffle

It’s one thing to be a Twitter guru or have a huge LinkedIn following. The real talent lies in orchestrating different platforms to work together and in understanding the niche each fills. Visual networks such as Instagram and YouTube, for instance, are increasingly the foundation of campaigns by social-savvy brands such as Nike, Red Bull and Mercedes. Catchy images and videos are, in turn, seeded onto traditional text-based networks such as Twitter and Facebook. From there, links lead viewers back to blogs and company pages, sending customers spiraling deeper into the sales funnel. Meanwhile, uniform hashtags across platforms help unify and track the overall campaign. Even millennials with deep social credentials often fail to understand the profound multiplying effects of integrating different networks.

5. Networking professionally on social media

By the time millennials graduate, many have dutifully filled their LinkedIn profiles with part-time positions, internships, extra-curriculars and academic accomplishments. But the network’s true job-finding power is often overlooked: Hiring managers and CEOs who would normally be out of reach are often just a connection or two away. In fact, you don’t need to be connected at all. A paid feature called InMail, for instance, enables users to send emails directly to any one of LinkedIn’s 277 million members. Truly enterprising job seekers can hunt down big fish like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Deepak Chopra, then send a pitch straight to their inbox. Notoriously footloose millennials – forever in search of the next job opportunity – might well take this tip to heart when searching for greener professional pastures.

The plug ‘n play myth

Of course, amassing these skills is no short order, and millennials aren’t the only offenders. “The real problem is that we expect people to know these skills without providing any training,” social media professor Ward says. As the number of social networks expands and platforms are used in more sophisticated ways, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone – even the most plugged-in users – to just intuitively get it.

But there are options for millennials hoping to brush up on social media skills. “There are lots of online training programs out there,” Ward explains, “though some are better than others.”

He cautions learners to stick to programs offering industry-recognised certification, like the most widely used offering, Hootsuite University, an offering from my company which has seen 50,000 people enroll since it was started in 2011 and is also used in 400 higher education programs.

For millennials competing in a tight market, these skills – unheard of just a decade ago – can mean the difference between finding and keeping a job. “Students using digital and social media professionally in an integrated and strategic way … have an advantage,” Ward says. “[They’re] getting better jobs and better internships.”

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering LinkedIn

13 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in LInkedIn

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Best Practices, Engagement, LINKEDIN FOR BUSINESS, LinkedIn Insights, social sharing, Strategy, Trending

With more than 259 million users, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals as well as one of the top social networks overall. Are you using it to its fullest potential?

While new social networks are sprouting up constantly, LinkedIn is a powerful platform that often gets underutilized or put on the back burner.

But the truth is, LinkedIn can be extremely powerful — especially when you’re aware of all the little hidden tricks that don’t get nearly enough exposure as they deserve. To help youmaster LinkedIn, below is our ultimate list of 35 awesome tricks you may have been overlooking.

We’ve divided these tips into three main categories — optimizing your LinkedIn presence,using LinkedIn for professional networking, and using LinkedIn for business and marketing. Click these links to jump to individual sections.

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Presence

1) Customize your public profile URL.

Make your profile look more professional (and easier to share) by claiming your LinkedIn vanity URL. Instead of a URL with a million confusing numbers at the end, it will look nice and clean like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelavaughan. Customize your URL by going here and clicking Customize your public profile URL down on the right-hand side.

2) Create a profile badge for your personal website.

If you have your own personal website or blog, you can promote your personal LinkedIn presence and help grow your professional network by adding a Profile Badge that links to your public LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn has a few different badge designs to select from, and you can configure your own here.

3) Make your blog/website links sexier.

Instead of using the default “Personal Website”-type anchor text links in your LinkedIn profile, you can change the anchor text to make those links more appealing to people who view your profile. So if you want to increase clicks on the website links you display on your profile, change those links’ anchor text to something more attention-grabbing than the standard options LinkedIn provides.

For example, if you want to include a link to your blog, rather than choosing LinkedIn’s standard “Blog” anchor text, customize it to include keywords that indicate what your blog is about, like “Inbound Marketing Blog.” Each profile can display up to three website links like this, and they can be customized by editing your profile, clicking the pencil icon next to your website links, and selecting Other in the drop-down menu.

4) Search engine optimize your profile.

You can also optimize your profile to get found by people searching LinkedIn for key terms you want to get found by. Add these keywords to various sections of your profile such as your headline or in your summary.

5) Show work samples.

Did you know LinkedIn allows you to add a variety of media such as videos, images, documents, links, and presentations to the Summary, Education, and Experience sections of your LinkedIn profile? This enables you to showcase different projects, provide samples of your work, and better optimize your LinkedIn profile. Learn more about adding, removing, and rearranging work samples here.

6) Add, remove, and rearrange entire sections of your profile.

LinkedIn also enables users to reorder the sections of your profile in any way you prefer. When in edit mode, simply hover your mouse over the double-sided arrow next to theEdit link for each section. Your mouse will turn into a four-arrowed icon, at which point you can click, then drag and drop to another position on your profile.

You can also customize your profile with sections that apply only to you. Find a full list of sections to add to and remove from your profile here.

7) Take advantage of Saved Searches.

LinkedIn allows users to save up to ten job searches and three people searches. After conducting a search, clicking the Save This Search option on the right allows you to save a search and easily run it again later. You can also choose to receive weekly or monthly reminders (+ daily for job searches) via email once new members in the network or jobs match your saved search criteria.

8) Quickly turn your LinkedIn profile into a resume.

Job seeking is one of the most common — and beneficial — uses of LinkedIn. Were you aware that LinkedIn enables you to turn your profile into a resume-friendly format in seconds with its Resume Builder tool? Just choose a resume template, edit it, and export it as a PDF that you can print, email, and share.

9) Find a job through LinkedIn’s job board.

Now that you’ve generated that awesome new resume from LinkedIn’s Resume Builder tool, you can use it — and LinkedIn’s Job board — to help you land an awesome new position. LinkedIn allows you to search for jobs by industry and location. It even suggests jobs you might be interested in based on the information in your LinkedIn profile. Save some job searches like we suggested in number 7 to get alerted when new jobs pop up, too!

10) Get endorsed.

Back in 2012, LinkedIn launched a feature called Endorsements, which enables users to endorse their connections for skills they’ve listed in the Skill & Expertise section of their profile — or recommend one they haven’t yet listed. These endorsements then show up on your profile within that same Skills & Expertise section, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Okay, so you can’t guarantee your connections will endorse you for those skills, but because it’s so easy for your LinkedIn contacts to do (all they have to do is click on the + sign next to a particular skill on your profile), you’ll find that many of them will do it anyway. Just make sure your profile is complete and you’ve listed the skills you want your contacts to endorse you for. It will definitely give your profile a bit of a credibility boost. You can also remove endorsements if you find people are endorsing you for skills that aren’t very applicable.

Using LinkedIn for Professional Networking

11) Use OpenLink to send messages to people you’re not connected to.

Aside from the exception of group members (more on that later), LinkedIn only allows you to send messages to people with whom you share a first-degree connection. But did you know some people let you send them messages anyway, even if you’re not connected? The ability to be part of the OpenLink network is only available to premium account holders, but it allows them to be available for messaging by any other LinkedIn member if they choose to be. OpenLink members will appear with an icon that looks like a small ring of dots next to their name in search results and on their profile.

12) Check in on Network Updates.

Found on your LinkedIn homepage, Network Updates are essentially LinkedIn’s version of the Facebook News Feed. Check this feed periodically for a quick snapshot of what your connections are up to and sharing. You can also sort by various criteria as well as customize your feed to show only the types of updates you want to see.

13) Be identifiable.

Allow others to see who you are if you view their profile. To allow this, go into your settings and click Select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile. Make sure you check off Your name and headline (Recommended). This allows you to take advantage of the next feature we’re about to mention …

14) Check out who’s viewed your profile.

How? With the “Who Viewed Your Profile” feature, of course! This tool, which is accessible in the main navigation via the Profile dropdown, enables you to drill down into which other LinkedIn users have visited your profile page (so yeah, exactly what it sounds like). In fact, LinkedIn gave this coveted creeper feature a facelift in February 2014, so the information it provides is better than ever.

Has someone been checking out your profile that you might want to connect with? This might be the “in” you’ve been waiting for to connect. (Remember, if you don’t make yourself identifiable via our tip in number 13, you won’t have access to this feature. It’s a two-way street!)

15) Export connections.

Want to transfer your LinkedIn connections to another contact management system? LinkedIn enables you to easily export your connections. Under Network in LinkedIn’s top navigation, just click on Contacts, click the settings gear icon on the top right, and clickExport LinkedIn Connections under Advanced Settings on the right. You’ll have the option of either exporting as a .CSV or .VCF file.

16) Easily find new connections — or connect with old ones!

Speaking of connections, the Network tab in the top navigation offers a variety of tools to grow and connect with contacts in your professional network. Click Add Connections in the drop-down menu to import contacts from your email accounts, and use the Contacts tool to connect with suggested new contacts, stay in touch with current connections, keep track of your communications, and get notifications when contacts in your network change jobs, have birthdays, or when you haven’t chatted with them in a while — on desktop or in the Contacts mobile app!

17) Leverage the perks of LinkedIn Groups.

Did you know that if you’re a member of the same group as another user, you can bypass the need to be a first-degree connection in order to message them? In addition, group members are also able to view the profiles of other members of the same group without being connected. Join more groups to enable more messaging and profile viewership capabilities.

18) Take advantage of Advanced Search options.

LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature provides a much richer search experience. For example, say you want to find out if you’re connected to anyone who works at a specific company. Type the company name in the company field in Advanced Search, then filter the results by “Relationship” to see if you have any first- or second-degree connections to any employees.

19) Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter.

Ever since the LinkedIn/Twitter breakup of 2012, you can no longer automatically sync your tweets to publish on LinkedIn (or even selectively by using the hashtags #in or #li in specific tweets). But don’t fret — the opposite is still possible! So if you’re ever posting an update to LinkedIn that you’d like your Twitter followers to see as well, you can easily syndicate that update to Twitter by selecting the Public + Twitter option in the Share With dropdown before clicking Share in the LinkedIn update composer.

20) Leverage @mentions in your status updates.

In 2013, LinkedIn rolled out the ability to tag or @mention other users and companies in status updates — much like the way it works on Facebook and Twitter. Want another LinkedIn user or company to see your status update? Include the @ symbol immediately followed by the user’s/company’s name in your status update. As a result, that user/company will get alerted that you mentioned them, and their name will also link to their profile/page in the status update itself.

Using LinkedIn for Business/Marketing

21) Optimize your Company Page.

The design of Company Pages has changed a lot over the years. Make sure yours is set up correctly and optimized for the newest layout. We’ve published an entire free ebook about optimizing your page for the latest design, so check it out. Also, keep in mind that as of April 14, 2014, LinkedIn is no longer supporting the Products & Services tab of Company Pages. Unfortunately, this means your product recommendations will also be going away. Learn how to save copies of existing recommendations here (which must be done before May 30, 2014). This also means you’ll want to set up and take advantage of LinkedIn’s new Showcase Pages instead, which leads us to our next tip …

22) Create targeted Showcase Pages.

Showcase Pages are niche pages that branch off your main LinkedIn Company Page. They allow you to promote specific products or cater to your individual marketing personas, providing a more personalized experience for your Company Page visitors. LinkedIn users can also follow specific Showcase Pages without having to follow a company’s main page or its other Showcase Pages, allowing your business to tailor the page closely to the audience specific to the page. To create a Showcase Page, click the Edit dropdown at the top right of your Company Page and choose Create a Showcase Page. For more information about creating Showcase Pages, check out our beginner’s guide.

23) Post Company Status Updates (and target them!).

Make the most of your LinkedIn Company Page by publishing company status updates for all your page followers to see. This will give LinkedIn users even more reason to follow your Company Page, growing your LinkedIn reach. To learn how to enable LinkedIn Company Status Updates, read this post.

Been using Company Status Updates for a while? Why not step it up a notch and leverage the power of segmentation with LinkedIn’s targeting options, which enable you to target your status updates to the Network Update feeds of specific users. Page admins can target their updates by criteria like company size, industry, job function, seniority, geography, or by including/excluding company employees. In fact, according to an internal LinkedIn study,companies have shown a 66%+ increase in audience engagement as the result of targeted updates.

24) Use Pulse to keep track of industry news.

Pulse is an awesome section of LinkedIn that provides you with the most popular articles shared on the social network. Follow specific Influencer contributors, publishers, or topic-related channels to stay on top of news and stories in your industry. You can also sign up for daily or weekly email summary notifications of Pulse news, or instant notifications when Influencers you’re following post something new.

25) Use LinkedIn’s Trending Content tool, too!

Get a sense of which types of content are most popular on LinkedIn in your industry withLinkedIn’s Trending Content tool, unveiled in March 2014. The interactive tool highlights the most popular content being shared on LinkedIn for various audiences and topic segments. Monitor this to understand what content your company should be creating and sharing on LinkedIn to generate the most engagement.

26) Use LinkedIn to generate leads.

In an internal study of HubSpot’s customer base, we found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate (2.74%) of the top social networks, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).So yes — LinkedIn can help you generate leads. To get the most out of LinkedIn for lead generation, promote and share links to your landing pages in your company status updates, where appropriate in LinkedIn Groups, on your Showcase Pages, and in calls-to-action placed in posts you publish via LinkedIn’s publishing platform (see number 32 coming up).

27) Experiment with LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Updates.

If you’re looking to complement your organic marketing efforts with some paid advertising,LinkedIn Ads aren’t a bad choice to consider. We wrote about why B2B marketers might want to cozy up to LinkedIn ads, and one of the biggest benefits is … you guessed it … the targeting options! LinkedIn’s PPC ads let you target specific job titles, job functions, industries, or company size, to name a few options — you know, the people who are more likely to need what you sell. If you want to get started with LinkedIn’s advertising platform, here’s a simple guide to setting up your first LinkedIn ad campaign. To learn specifically how to use LinkedIn’s newest form of advertising — Sponsored Updates — this is the post for you.

28) Use Group Statistics for better targeting and marketing.

Another little LinkedIn gem that not a lot of users or marketers are aware of is the fact that you can access statistics for any LinkedIn Group — even groups you’re not a direct member of! To access the Group Statistics for a specific LinkedIn Group, click on the group, then click the i icon in the group’s top navigation. Then click Group Statistics in the About section.

Not only do LinkedIn Group Statistics tell you how many members are in a group or how active those members are; they also provide other key insights about the group’s members such as locations, seniority, function, and industry. Use this data to analyze the makeup of a group before you decide to join, identify which LinkedIn Groups you should target in your LinkedIn Ads, help guide you in the best ways to segment your Showcase Pages, or gather insights about your buyer personas to help you do better marketing outside of LinkedIn.

29) Create your own industry LinkedIn Group (or subgroups).

Or you could just create a LinkedIn Group (as well as subgroups if you’re so inclined) of your very own, like HubSpot did with our popular Inbound Marketers Group. Create a group based on an industry-related topic, and become a LinkedIn Group administrator. You can then use this group to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, grow a community of advocates, generate new marketing content ideas, and even acquire new leads!

30) Email your LinkedIn Group.

Acquire new leads from that group, you say? That’s right! One of the perks of managing a LinkedIn Group is the fact that you can literally email the members of your group — up to once per week. These emails take the form of LinkedIn Announcements, which are messages sent directly to the email inboxes of group members (if they’ve enabled messaging in their settings). This is a prime opportunity for generating leads from LinkedIn, particularly if you’ve built up a robust group of users. In fact, at HubSpot, our best performing LinkedIn lead gen days are usually the days on which we’ve sent a LinkedIn Announcement. Here’s how to get the most out of your LinkedIn Group emails.

31) Poll your (or another) LinkedIn Group.

In addition to emailing, you can also poll your group members. Just go to the group in which you want to publish a poll (it’s up to group managers to decide whether everyone can publish polls regardless of group membership), and in the Discussion section of a group, click the poll icon (it looks like three horizontal lines) within the discussion composer.

Then enter your question/answer choices and schedule for how long you’d like your poll to run. (Hint: If you’re trying to increase membership for your own LinkedIn Group, make use of the Group + Twitter sharing option that allows you to share your poll on Twitter to generate more traffic and activity to your poll/group.) Use polls to generate blog and content fodder, collect feedback, conduct research, attract new group members, or get ideas for new marketing offers.

32) Experiment with LinkedIn’s publishing platform.

You don’t have to be an influencer to publish a new article to LinkedIn Pulse. Publishing is now available to all users, ever since a February 2014 feature announcement. Experiment with how this feature can support your marketing goals by creating content for the platform and promoting it via your Company Page. Learn more about it here.

33) Recruit new talent.

Looking to fill a position or two on your marketing team — or anywhere else within your company, for that matter? Then be sure to build out the Careers section of your Company Page, which you can use to promote your available job openings. For more robust Careers section customization options, you can also purchase a Silver or Gold Careers package, which allows you to add a large, clickable cover image that can be transformed into a call-to-action. This image can direct users to a specific job, a list of jobs and opportunities located on your website, or examples of your company’s culture. The Silver or Gold packages also enables dynamic, customizable modules (that display different version of the page based on viewers’ LinkedIn profile), analytics on who is viewing the page, direct links to recruiters, video content, etc.

The look and feel of your Careers page depends on what information and images you choose to include, such as a list of jobs, people at your company, a summary section for your careers, what employees are saying about working at your company, and recent updates. Furthermore, if you’re actively recruiting candidates with specific skills and expertise, don’t forget about LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature (see number 18)!

34) Add the Company Follow and LinkedIn share buttons to your website/content.

Promote your company’s LinkedIn presence and help grow the reach of your Company Page
by adding the Company Follow button to your website. Furthermore, consider adding theLinkedIn Share button to your various content assets like blog posts, emails, and landing pages to extend the reach of your content to LinkedIn users. To build these buttons and more, check out our cheat sheet for creating social media buttons.

35) Analyze your LinkedIn marketing performance with Page Insights and LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score.

So … how are your LinkedIn marketing efforts faring? Use LinkedIn’s Page Insights to evaluate the performance of your Company Page. Page Insights offers data into the effectiveness of your page’s status updates, engagement, and reach, as well as information about your page’s followers — demographics, where they came from, how your following has grown over time, how your data compares to other companies, etc. Access your Page Insights by clicking the Edit dropdown at the top right of your Company Page and selecting View Page Insights. For even more analytics about how your LinkedIn marketing efforts are helping you generate traffic, leads, and customers, you’ll need a closed-loop marketing analytics tool like HubSpot.

Furthermore, LinkedIn offers a “Content Marketing Score,” which measures member engagement with your Sponsored Updates, Company Pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates, and Influencer posts (if applicable)” and ranks you against your competitors in those same categories. You can request your Content Marketing Score from LinkedIn here.

by Pamela Vaughan

Courtesy of Hubspot Inbound

16 Free Tools That Make Content Creation Way Easier

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Bloging, Content Marketing

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Best Practices, Community Management, Engagement, social media tools, social sharing

Photos, Images, and Screenshots

1) Awesome Screenshot

This Chrome extension allows you to capture three sizes of screenshots: the visible part of a page, the entire page (even below what you see on your screen), or an area you select. That’s not bad, but the real power of the tool is what comes next: cropping, adding notes and callouts, and the ability to print or save to your desktop or Google Drive.

2) ThingLink

I’ll be honest: I had a little too much fun using this tool. It allows you to upload an image andadd little icons that appear upon hover. Readers can interact with these icons, which range from images and videos you embed to links and messages you can create. You can also embed or share the image.

Two subtle but awesome features to add: First, you can embed without needing to mess with code to resize it. It gives you a simple sizing option. Love that! Second, after embedding, it seems to add a little “source” link in the bottom right, so you get proper attribution when others use your work or share it.

Below is one I created using a photo from a HubSpot scavenger hunt. (Note: I encountered some issues with the image on iOS, but some readers later told us the image worked fine on mobile.)

3) PlaceIt.net

PlaceIt serves a very specific purpose: It allows you to upload images of your site or product into real-world environments of people holding phones, tablets, and laptops.

For example, here’s one of the HubSpot website that I added onto an image of someone holding a phone, which PlaceIt provided me. The tool automatically altered the image to make it appear natural with the angle of the phone’s screen (which saved me time learning and/or editing in more advanced software to get the angle right).

placeit-1

It’s important to note that you’ll have to pay per image to get really large or high-resolution versions (though I found the above image just fine for blog and product page content). The paid downloads also remove the PlaceIt watermark from the bottom right.

4) HubSpot’s Free Stock Photos

We created these because we as a content team found searching for and buying stock imagery to be a huge pain in the butt, as was the challenge of deciphering legalese for different use cases. I have a liberal arts degree. Shakespeare and Nietzsche were easier to read than whatever legalese stock imagery companies give me. All I want to know is whether to cite or not cite a stock image of a laptop. Does that need to be this hard?

Anyway, with our stock photos, you can find free resources to bolster your content marketing efforts — whether it’s a unique image needed for an ebook or that perfect photo you want to attach to a blog post. (And if you want some for your holiday campaigns, oh boy do we have you covered.)

5) Skitch

Skitch is a free app that helps you communicate more visually. It lets you mark up images, digital assets, PDFs, and other files with arrows, callout boxes, text, and more. Although it’s free, it does require you to open an Evernote account, but that’s also free (and a great tool to use).

Skitch proved to be incredibly powerful because you can do it all in one place. (I work for HubSpot. I like all-in-one things, apparently.) In this example, I opened the program on my desktop and used the “Screen Snap” button to easily take a screenshot of the HubSpot home page, which opened right in Skitch for editing and exporting without needing to use other tools.

hubspot_skitch_example-1

Writing and Fonts

1) Word2CleanHTML

If you like drafting blog posts in programs like Microsoft Word, Evernote, or Google Drive, this tool can be your best friend. Why? Because apparently the CMS software execs all got together years ago and decided that drafting anywhere but inside their tools would lead to formatting madness for writers when you paste in your text: paragraph breaks come through too large or totally absent, font stylizing is gone, and, for some reason, your copy keeps turning bold and huge when you delete the line before it.

I kid, of course, but this tool is still awesome. Simply paste in your draft, click one button, and then copy the resulting HTML straight from the tool. When you paste that into your CMS (most will have buttons reading “HTML” or “</>” in their tool bar above your draft), it will appear nice and clean. No hair pulling or swimming through code needed.

2 and 3) Google Fonts and DaFont

Great for grabbing new and different fonts to spruce up your site pages, presentations, ebooks, and more. These are two sites worth bookmarking. Nice and simple!

Design Help and Assets

1) Canva

Oh, how I love Canva. The time and resources it takes to learn design and/or pay for design assets and/or get inspired to create beauty from scratch can be really difficult when you’re staring at a long list of to-dos. Canva, which launched earlier this year, offers a library of pre-made templates and assets that you can manipulate while also adding your own imagery.

Here’s a quick example I created in almost no time:

hubspot_canva_example

Canva charges you $1 for more “premium” assets and graphics found through their image search, but they have so much to choose from, there’s plenty of value for free. (Besides, designing important assets would cost you much more than a few dollars through other means.)

2) Infogram

This tool is similar to Canva but focuses more on infographics and data visualization in those graphics. And, in keeping with our theme, it accelerates your content creation process and helps you circumnavigate the larger, more complex design programs. (Up next, they’re apparently planning to launch “the world’s first video infographic creator.”)

They also offer compatibility with Microsoft Excel through Infogram Charts, and their infographics are responsive with mobile and tablet screens. (I can sense all of you nodding vigorously. I am too.)

3) Haiku Deck

Incredibly, the world is now turning PowerPoint presentations into compelling, beautiful content. While SlideShare and its distribution power has a huge role in that transformation of boring old slideshows, Haiku Deck actually helps you create them. This is a great tool for when you need quick, simple layouts, some big, beautiful images, and some font and typography help.

The only caveat I’d add is this: If you need to create very detailed slides, this may not be the tool for you. It’s wonderful for telling stories and creating speaking aids, but the board may not appreciate the beauty behind the big stock images and sexy, modern layouts and fonts. Just a thought!

4) HubSpot’s Resizable Icons Collection

Another challenge we face on the content team, just like with stock photos, is searching for elegant icons that resize without getting all fuzzy. So, because we’re sorta nuts like that, we created a collection of 135 of them.

Free icons? To that I say:

general-icons-26

And also:

free-icons-1

Because I can. Because I have free icons.

5) HubSpot’s Ebook Templates

Creating ebooks can help you add more value to your audience while also moving them further along the buyer’s journey. But they can be significant time investments and require not only a solid idea, but the ability to both write and design.

But, if you’ve read this post closely, we enjoy taking something hard and making it easy 🙂 So, naturally, we created a free sampling of customizable templates for your PDFs.

Using them saves our team the time it takes to start our designs from scratch, and because the templates are customizable, we can make each one unique and improve our reader experience each time.

Other Helpful Tools

1) Storify

Storify’s claim to fame has long been embedding Twitter conversations or individual tweets into your blog posts. However, you can create a ton of content easily and without much time needed by pulling in posts from most major social networks, plus links, videos, GIFs, and more.

It’s a great way to (literally) frame a conversation, then embed that onto your blog or site.

For example, let’s say I wanted to pull in a conversation about the hashtag #inboundmarketing. I just search under the Twitter option in Storify, drag and drop the tweets I want to include, and — presto — content curated in very little time:

2) Click to Tweet

This is more of a handy tool than it is a prolific content generator. Nevertheless, it helps you quickly and easily create tweetable links and text comments.

Remember the statement I opened with? “Robots haven’t replaced the writers.” Maybe I’m hoping it’s a tweetable quote that gets people to share my post. But rather than hope and pray you copy that text, open Twitter, compose a new tweet, and paste the phrase, I can just make it easier for you by doing something like this:

“Robots haven’t replaced the writers.” (Tweet this quote.)

Setting this up took all of 30 seconds. On the Click to Tweet site, select “Basic Link” and type out the text you want people to tweet, then add your post’s URL. I recommend shortening the URL with a service like bit.ly or goo.gl so you can both save characters and track clicks to your link.

Click to Tweet will generate a link for you that you can then add into your post however you like. In my example above, I decided to write out that copy and hyperlink the last part. If you can hyperlink text, you can use Click to Tweet.

3) HubSpot’s HTML Hacks for Marketers

The last resource I use often is a visual guide to several quick but useful hacks a non-developer can use in their work. We created this along with Codecademy, which aims to make learning code easier and simpler for all.

The hacks listed detail how to make small changes to HTML like altering headers and spacing, creating text in block-quote form, and inserting social share links. (My personal favorite is the hack to change font colors.)

Written by Jay Acunzo – Shared with permission Hubspot

Jay’s a Senior Content Manager at HubSpot, an ex-Googler, and co-founder of Boston Content, a community of 300+ content marketers & producers.

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INFOGRAPHIC: Why Is Facebook’s Social Share Percentage Dropping While Pinterest, Twitter Rise?

09 Monday Dec 2013

Tags

Best Practices, Marketing, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, social sharing

Posted by leonidesignoryblog | Filed under Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter

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The Hootlet: Social Sharing for Lazy Professionals

07 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook, Google+, Hootsuite, LInkedIn, Multi Channel Marketing, Pinterest, Twitter, Uncategorized

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Best Practices, Community, Engagement, hootlet, links, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, social sharing, Tools & Apps

I have to say I love Hootlet. For me personally it is a blessing of time saving.
If you’re like most business owners, you probably spend a lot of time each day searching for valuable content that you’d want to share with your audience on your social networks. Even though you can copy and paste each link into the status update window, it’s a slow manual process, especially when you’d like to share multiple pieces at a time.

On a different note, social media research is a major part of any serious marketing strategy, but it’s often ignored and businesses are missing on valuable information about their brands. The Canadian social media management company, HootSuite, has been developing a really cool feature that addresses both challenges – social sharing and research – with one tool: the Hootlet.

Featured image credit: Ssango

The Hootlet

You’ve probably heard of the Hootlet add-on extension for Chrome and Firefox when it was first launched in 2009. The new updated Hootlet version takes social sharing and research to a whole new level. Its primary function is to simplify content sharing via HootSuite and distribute the content to multiple social networks and even schedule your posts.

In essence, Hootsuite’s Hootlet is an effective tool to:

– Search social media content next to your Google search

– Share content while you surf, without leaving the web page you’re on

– Highlight text in a page and share it directly to your social media accounts

– Discover relevant geo-located social media content

– Cross promote images and videos

– Schedule posts on your social networks from any web page

Whenever you find a page that’s worthy of a share, click the owl Hootlet button on the top right corner of your browser window and the Hootlet compose box will appear. It will automatically add the title and a shrinked URL into the share box.

Next, you can select the social account to share the article to, schedule or use the AutoSchedule feature to automatically pick the optimal time to distribute your content.

The Hootlet interface has been revamped with a modern streamlined design:

A New And Improved AutoScheduling Feature

With the previous Hootlet version, if you had the AutoScheduling feature activated in the HootSuite Dashboard, it would automatically assume that it would apply to all “on the go” shares. Now, if you want to share a post right away, you must deactivate the “AutoSchedule” option in the share box and then hit “Send Now”.

While “AutoSchedule” allows you to space out your posts when you don’t care about time intervals, there are still posts you’d like to share immediately. The new version of the Hootlet allows you to “Schedule” or “Send Now” without needing to deactivate the “AutoSchedule”.

Extended Sharing Capabilities

Before, when you clicked on a post’s sharing buttons, the Share box included a custom HootSuite button that allowed you to share that post via HootSuite. Posting visual media to social networks has always been difficult. Now, the sharing capabilities have been extended to Instagram and Flickr images, Pinterest pins and even YouTube videos.

What makes the Hootlet so effective is that it’s more than just a sharing tool. Each time you share a web page, the new version will also allow you to select text on that page, click the “Share” button and have the highlighted text appear as the text you’re sharing, instead of just the title.

Anyone can share links, but it’s the unique spin that you give to your posts that makes your content special. Quoting from a web page and commenting on it will make all the difference between your posts and other people’s. Similarly, quoting some text from your own article and sharing it is another way to get even more tweets for your post, after you’ve tweeted it once using the article title.

You can also choose which features you want to turn on. First click on the top right Chrome settings button:

Next, click on “Extensions” and then select “Options”, under the Hootlet extension:

Now you can customize your settings:

Related and Geo-Located Tweets

When conducting a Google search, you’ll see an option box that shows tweets related to your search. The tweets are displayed to the right of your search and can provide valuable insights. Let’s say you’re searching for trends in your niche by typing your keywords in Google and the Hootlet will provide relevant tweets based on keywords, location or business listing.

For instance, when searching Yelp for local information, you will see what others are tweeting about near to the location that you’re viewing.

These geographically related tweets can help you discover new customers, influencers and new business opportunities. You can reply or retweet messages directly from your current window.

Google Maps Integration

With the new Google Maps integration, you can type in an address and pull out tweets near your location that people have shared recently. This feature is especially useful for local businesses that might want to see what’s new in their area or track Twitter promotions focused on in-store campaigns. This feature is also useful for live events promoters or even media journalists covering a local news event.

Easy Cross Posting

There are a few other Chrome extensions (or services like Buffer) that do these different tasks, but the Hootlet is the only one that enables cross posting. Whether you’re on Pinterest or Flickr and want to share images to Facebook or Twitter, you can use the Hootlet to easily share that information.

The HootSuite dashboard is especially useful for small businesses who can spare no more than an hour or two each week to set up their weekly social media calendar. The Hootlet offers a great way to get everything done.

Final Thoughts on Hootsuite’s Hootlet

The functionality offered by Hootlet provides a unique social sharing experience to your daily browsing efforts. Now you have one tool to perform all your social searching, sharing and scheduling directly from the web browser.

The Hootlet extension lets you search social media content as easily as you browse Google, post content directly from web pages, select text and automatically create ready-to-share messages, search location relevant tweets and share visual media effortlessly.

I’ll give you four reasons why I’m sure you’ll love the new Hootlet:

– You’ll never have to leave your browser window to share content

– It literally consumes 5 seconds to schedule a post.

– You can auto-schedule your posts

– You get the automatic ow.ly URL shortener and analytics

No more copying and pasting content that you want to share with your fans and followers! Thanks to the new Hootlet , social sharing is as easy as one click and all your links are trackable via your Owly Stats.

The updated Hootlet extension can be located on the Chrome Web Store and you can watch this video to see how it functions in practice.

Shared by permission, this post The Hootlet: Social Sharing for Lazy Professionals appeared first on LatestCrunchs.

Shared from Ryan Holmes

Lacking in critical areas

The plug ‘n play myth

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Optimizing Your LinkedIn Presence

1) Customize your public profile URL.

2) Create a profile badge for your personal website.

3) Make your blog/website links sexier.

4) Search engine optimize your profile.

5) Show work samples.

6) Add, remove, and rearrange entire sections of your profile.

7) Take advantage of Saved Searches.

8) Quickly turn your LinkedIn profile into a resume.

9) Find a job through LinkedIn’s job board.

10) Get endorsed.

Using LinkedIn for Professional Networking

11) Use OpenLink to send messages to people you’re not connected to.

12) Check in on Network Updates.

13) Be identifiable.

14) Check out who’s viewed your profile.

15) Export connections.

16) Easily find new connections — or connect with old ones!

17) Leverage the perks of LinkedIn Groups.

18) Take advantage of Advanced Search options.

19) Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter.

20) Leverage @mentions in your status updates.

Using LinkedIn for Business/Marketing

21) Optimize your Company Page.

22) Create targeted Showcase Pages.

23) Post Company Status Updates (and target them!).

24) Use Pulse to keep track of industry news.

25) Use LinkedIn’s Trending Content tool, too!

26) Use LinkedIn to generate leads.

27) Experiment with LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Updates.

28) Use Group Statistics for better targeting and marketing.

29) Create your own industry LinkedIn Group (or subgroups).

30) Email your LinkedIn Group.

31) Poll your (or another) LinkedIn Group.

32) Experiment with LinkedIn’s publishing platform.

33) Recruit new talent.

34) Add the Company Follow and LinkedIn share buttons to your website/content.

35) Analyze your LinkedIn marketing performance with Page Insights and LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score.

by Pamela Vaughan

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Photos, Images, and Screenshots

1) Awesome Screenshot

2) ThingLink

3) PlaceIt.net

4) HubSpot’s Free Stock Photos

5) Skitch

Writing and Fonts

1) Word2CleanHTML

2 and 3) Google Fonts and DaFont

Design Help and Assets

1) Canva

2) Infogram

3) Haiku Deck

4) HubSpot’s Resizable Icons Collection

5) HubSpot’s Ebook Templates

Other Helpful Tools

1) Storify

2) Click to Tweet

3) HubSpot’s HTML Hacks for Marketers

Written by Jay Acunzo – Shared with permission Hubspot

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The Hootlet

A New And Improved AutoScheduling Feature

Extended Sharing Capabilities

Related and Geo-Located Tweets

Google Maps Integration

Easy Cross Posting

Final Thoughts on Hootsuite’s Hootlet

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