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How to create a LinkedIn boolean search with ease!

Posted on April 26, 2013 Posted in Linkedin, SEO, Social Media, Social Recruiting Leave a comment

As many recruitment professionals will agree, LinkedIn is an extremely valuable resource for researching and identifying potential candidates. However some of the common challenges with LinkedIn as a search tool may include:

- Limitations for displaying full name details

- Restricted search results based on ‘out of network’

Of course Linkedin will be very happy to remove these restrictions if you move to a paid for premium account or recruiter package… however lets face it not everyone is in a position to upgrade. This is where a good Boolean search could be very useful. Boolean searches are very useful whether you are searching Google, job sites or LinkedIn but not everyone is well practiced in creating the correct string that will bring up the relevant results – So how to create a Linkedin boolean search with ease? This is where ‘Recruitem’ comes into play. Its a great cloud based tool that provides a simple widget that takes input from drop downs and standard input boxes, this then builds up your desired search string that you can copy and paste into your search engine – a very simple and effective way to search for prospective candidates quickly.

You can visit their website at http://www.recruitin.net/.

In brief…

Step 1 : Enter your profile requirements into the recruitem search box

Step 2: Create the Boolean String by pressing “Find Your People”

This will return your Boolean string in the following box!

Step 3: Display results in google or copy and paste it into a text editor and take a closer look at the strings structure and dive deeper into the world of boolean searching.

We hope you find this tool useful – a great way to get your Boolean searches under way – visit http://www.recruitin.net/ to get started.

If you have any other ways for finding talent with ease then drop us a note or comment below!

10 Ways LinkedIn Can Help Increase Sales

Posted on January 10, 2013 Posted in Linkedin, Social Media 1 Comment

10 Ways LinkedIn Can Help Increase Sales

Before we dig into the detail let’s start with saying that your LinkedIn activity needs to align with your business goals & objectives: the standard questions such as:-

- Who are your ideal customers?

- Where are they located?

- What roles do they typically have in the company?

- Which sectors, industries, niches do they operate in?

From this point you can start to think about how to use LinkedIn to your advantage, to get one step closer to generating leads.

Complete Your Profile & Add your Picture – completing your profile information will help your visibility within LinkedIn – it sounds obvious but make sure you add ‘keywords’ to your profile so you rank higher in user searches. Just like SEO is important for website traffic – LinkedIn viewings are impacted by ‘profile keywords’.
Start Building Your Network initially by connecting with your colleagues, importing your email contacts into LinkedIn and of course reaching out to your current clients & suppliers. This will help to expand your network and provide visibility to 2^nd and 3^rd tier connections.
Join Relevant Groups that target the right type of customers, prospective customers, partners, suppliers & industry experts. There are groups that also focus on Industry Bodies, University Alumni and other associations which will help boost your network. Be careful to read group rules and the group description to make sure it’s for what you are looking for!
Use LinkedIn Contact Search – There are good search features in LinkedIn that you can use to target and break down results. At a simple level you can search by name but taking advantage of the advanced features will sort by company, location, job role / function, groups joined etc You can use the Boolean searching techniques too!
Research Target Companies – Need to create a new target list of companies? Search companies by industry, location, size etc – this is a great way to start creating your Target Account List.
Join Groups to Contact Members Directly - LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to connect to just anyone on the network and some users protect their account with various privacy settings. By joining a group however you are then able to send a direct message to another member (providing they have not blocked it) without being a first tier connection – a nice way to make an introduction.
Invite Connections to Your Own Group – send a message to your connections telling them the value of joining your group – provide relevant, valuable discussions – be informative – not pushy sales.
Be Active in Group Discussions – it’s not rocket science: providing useful comments and information to group discussions will undoubtedly raise your profile within the community and being recognised before approaching another user will increase your chances of being listened to. There is also an ‘Answers’ section in LinkedIn that you can search and contribute too – narrow down your discussions and target responses!
Add Your Company Blog and share updates to your connections. Boost your credibility with industry advice, company news and success stories.
Integrate LinkedIn with your CRM – Some CRM systems e.g Salesforce, Zoho amongst others offer LinkedIn integrations to help you find out more about your contacts and companies directly from the CRM interface – a good time saver that arms you with background information before you make contact.

This is a short post to help you get started – the key will be to write down a schedule for providing and distributing content as well as targeting a sensible number of companies and individual connections.

What else can you do in LinkedIn to boost your Sales Efforts?

Connect with us Here on LinkedIn

How Much Do Small Business Spend on Social Media?

Posted on November 7, 2012 Posted in Blogging, Facebook, Linkedin, Social Media, Twitter Leave a comment

A few short answers we have heard recently:-

“We do it when we need too”

“We’re all over it”

“Spits and Spats really – nothing for weeks as we’re too busy, but then we’ll be all over it for a few days!”

“I’ve no idea – Rachael in the office looks after that, I think she tweets some stuff”

“Social what?”

Its fair to say Social Media use is wide and varied across industries and the size of organisation, and each will be seeing different results for their input. One message that is coming out loud and clear is that it is VERY easy to spend a lot of time and energy on social platforms… and many small business owners are asking the question – and for what? We’re investing time and energy (i.e. Money) and seeing little or no return.

Its exactly this reason why its essential that companies don’t just walk blind into using social media and expect miracles.

Before hand ask your self these question

What are we trying to achieve as business with Social Media?
What Platforms do we need to be targeting?
Do we have the skills in-house to undertake the project?
Who or what department should have ownership internally?
Do we have the right tools for the job?
What are the success metrics?

This great little INFOGRAPHIC from our friends over at Virtual Response “How Much Do Small Business Spend on Social Media?” out lines some of the trends based on an online survey they recently ran. Some of the key points found include…

Small businesses:

Spend more time on social media, but many struggle with the added workload.
Focus on Facebook and Twitter, while adoption of Pinterest and Google+ remains slow.
Realize the value of content – but, again, time is an issue.
Find value in paying for social media tools.

How to use an INFOGRAPHIC

Posted on October 19, 2012 Posted in Blogging, Content Creation, Facebook, INFOGRAPHICS, Internet, Linkedin, Social Media, Twitter Leave a comment

The use of Infographics has been on the rise following a growing focus on Image and Video marketing as a way to cature the audiences attention. You can download the full white paper below but in brief here are the top ten tips to getting your Infogrpahics seen!

10 Tips for Promoting Your Infographic

Define Your Target Market - Who you want to target & what outcome you wish to achieve? Your ideal customer?

Sharing, Sharing, Sharing! - Include the social sharing toolbars. Don’t be afraid to ask your audience to share if they like it…

Add to Your Blog - Integrate within a blog post, explain your Infographic. Include a comments sections and interact.

Promote with ‘The Big 3’ - Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn – Promote the Infographic without being pushy. Schedule multiple updates , use varying titles & encourage comments.

Make Use of Your Other Communication Platforms - Expand to Pinterest , Slideshare , Scribd , Flikr, StumbleUpon etc – these choices will come down to your target market

Email campaigns - Why not put a little bit of life into your email communication – include the Infographic in your monthly newsletter.

Submit to PR platforms - Link to articles & press releases – write behind what the Infographic represents

Code it - Embed the Infographic with your code so it redirects back to the place you want your audience to go

What happens next? - Generate traffic is great but how do you capture a lead? What do you want the user to do?

Output examples;-

purchase something
download your white-paper
register for an event
enter a competition
join a mailing list
phone you for more information…

Infographic Sharing Sites - View, share and download – sites such as Visual.ly (http://visual.ly) and Industry influencers in your field - blogs can generate great traffic.

To share / Embed this infographic on your blog – simply copy the code below

You can also Download the full White Paper here

LinkedIn Statistics 2012 – What Is Important for Your Business?

Posted on May 15, 2012 Posted in Linkedin, Social Media 2 Comments

The leading Business Professional Platform standing at over over 160 million members worldwide but which statistics are relevant for your business?

Key Numbers.

The total number of members as of March 31st 2012 has reached 161 million worldwide. This number has grown by approximately 45% year on year.
The US holds the largest population of LinkedIn members standing around 63 million. In the UK the user count is still growing – a large number of the population at more than 9 million members.
The calibre of connections is high within this platform – boasting 39% of members at Management Level or higher – the chances of getting to true decision makers is good.
Many members are employed by large companies of 10,000 employees or more – 44% of the user base.
A large number of industries & sectors are represented in the platform but the top 3 consist of High Tech, Finance and Manufacturing.
In terms of gender & age there are more males at 58% – and the majority of members 68% fall into an age range of between 25 and 54
The most popular job functions include, Sales, Operations, Entrepreneurs and the strongest growing demographics is graduates.
There are in excess of 2 million company LinkedIn pages and this is a focus for LinkedIn as they have improved the functionality to display services, allow followers etc
With over 1 million groups there is a massive scale and opportunity fro collaboration and lead building – this number just keeps growing.

Further Hot LinkedIn News…

LinkedIn agree to acquire Slideshare for in excess of $100m – the popular content sharing community platform that enables users to upload presentations to share online – many of which are companies embedding the slideshare functionality directly on their website – for the official press release visit LinkedIn

LinkedIn continues to grow by mobile. Some may say it has been a while in coming but they have brought a hugely popular iPad app into play – with LinkedIn’s traffic increasing as it is , surely the addition mobile usage from the iPad will keep the momentum going – you can read more about this at VentureBeat

LinkedIn Today – the platforms News Aggregator growing referral traffic at 45% quarter on quarter according to a report from Forbes – a nice mix of current news that meets your interests without the overload!

And to leave you with a nice Infographic – here an image sourced from Infographicslabs

How LinkedIn Works by Infographiclabs

Why adopt a corporate social media strategy??

Posted on April 23, 2012 Posted in Blogging, Content Creation, Facebook, Internet, Linkedin, SEO, Social Media, Social Recruiting, Twitter Leave a comment

Social media networking sites started off traditionally as places where people could interact and keep in touch online, and depending on your age, likes, dislikes, country of residence etc… you had many online social networking sites to pick and choose from all touting for your click to create your profile and connect with friends, family and / or like minded people.

Since the mid 90’s we have seen the rise and fall in popularity of many social networks including the likes classmates, friendster, friends reunited, bebo, myspace, mylife… which all tended to serve very different markets and user demographics. Many at the time said social networking was simply a fad… and so ignored any potential they could have offered! However with the introduction of facebook, twitter, linkedin, google+, pinterest etc… there does appears to be a much wider adoption of social networking sites which goes well beyond demographics and niche groups! When it was launched in 2003, Facebook was used predominately by college and university students, and “the younger generation”, now in 2012 its very common to have whole families interacting on the site… according to some reports women aged 42 and over is one of the the fast growing demographics using Facebook.

It’s fair to say that the fad doesn’t appear to fading at all, in fact the following stats would make most argue the opposite is true!

Facebook now has 845 million monthly active users
Linkedin has over 150 million members in over 200 countries.
There are now more than 200 million tweets a day, thats 200% growth on last years report!
Google+ could hit 400 million users by the end of 2012.

Social networking, sharing, engagement, interacting, blogging what ever you decide to call it is not only here to stay but it will continue to evolve and grow as new technology is adopted, lessons are learnt, users expectations grow and companies fight for our attention!

Its exactly for these reasons a corporate social media strategy needs to be defined… as yes, it is a mine field. A platform you invest heavily in today may not be around tomorrow so don’t put all your eggs in one basket, have a clear well defined social strategy that can be adopted across any platform and that takes into account…

Corporate goals
Company’s or brand’s reputation
Monitoring (Whats working, whats not, whats being said about you)
Lessons learnt from companies who didn’t think before they acted (of which there are many examples, some very entertaining especially as it hasn’t happened to you!).
And for me the most important aspect… The customer (Listen, engage, respond to needs, discuss, converse)

Your competitors are already using social media…
Your employees are already using social media…
Your customers are already using social media…
Are you???

Social Media more than just a fad? – http://bit.ly/I5F3xE
Some great info-graphics on social media – http://bit.ly/HX4Mrf

Linkedin Introduces Endorsements

The leading Business Professional Platform standing at over over 160 million members worldwide but which statistics are relevant for your business?