The post Artificial Intelligence Is Going To Destroy Social Media appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The post Facebook Was The Most Impersonated Brand In 2021 appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

However, not all companies harness the power of social media and develop a strategy with their B2B sales professionals in the mix.

Bernie Borges is one person that knows more than enough about B2B marketing and how powerful social media can be. As the CEO of Find and Convert, he is a content marketing expert for local businesses of all sizes. Furthermore, he specializes in B2B content marketing and was one of the authors of the first social media strategizing books on Amazon.

Today, he sits down with us to share his insight, stories, and knowledge for injecting B2B sales staff into the social media strategy.

While he touches on the “why” and overcoming challenges of pulling this off, one interesting aspect he discussed was the use of InMail and how it works with LinkedIn social media strategies.

What is InMail?

InMail is the process of sending someone an email but through LinkedIn. To do these messages, however, a company must purchase the credits through LinkedIn – the service is not offered free. The credits allow companies to send InMail then. So many credits earn you so many InMail messages per credit. The pricing frequently changes, so purchasing during a sale is always the best.

A company or person can send anyone an InMail message. There are no limitations to whom they can send them out to.  By purchasing these credits, the LinkedIn team guarantees the delivery of the InMail message to the recipient – even if that person is not a friend of the sender.

While you can send to anyone, LinkedIn does not guarantee that it will be opened or read. However, you still have the power to send your messages.

Getting the Most out of LinkedIn’s InMail Feature for Sales Team Members

When you start using your B2B sales team in the social media strategy, you must find ways for them to utilize their skill: selling.

Bernie recommends creating an InMail message and sending it to prospects. It is all about getting attention via InMail.

Create a Catchy Subject Line

The first step is to build a catchy subject line. Make it about the person, something that is personal, and get their attention. You are not mass mailing when you use these messages. Instead, you have the option for the personal touch that reaches out to that person and that person only.

Get to the Point and Do It Fast

Also, get to the point quickly. Keep the message short and reference someone that you both know. You could say something along the lines of “Hi, I am a friend of…” according to Bernie. It is an excellent way to open if you can reference someone else or something that you both share in common.

InMail Lets You Connect with People You Otherwise Cannot Reach

The important reasons for using InMail is that you and your sales staff can reach out to people that you have not connected with via social media. Sending a follow request only goes so far, but by sending them a personalized message you are on the path to connecting with that customer.

Making the Most Out of the Connection

Once the connection is established, you cannot ignore the cultivation factor.

Bernie recommends that you connect and then work to serve that person and be useful to their needs. You must be thoughtful and not hard-core sales. While you are there to sell, you should be offering compliments on their achievements, sending articles you think might help them, and flex your professionalism. Be casual about recommendations, but never recommend a product or your business. These sales tactics come later.

Instead, you are building trust and authority with that company – a critical step in converting them into your new customers.

Bernie recommends the five-touch formula. While there aren’t five steps, he just says it is a rule of thumb to use your judgment and ensure that your social media strategy involves enough steps to push someone through the buyer’s journey slowly. It is all about patience and persistence, says Bernie.

Naturally, a sales team member cannot connect with someone five times per day. However, they need to have a strategy in place so that they know how often to connect and cultivate.

InMail is Just a Piece of the Equation

While InMail is helpful, Bernie discusses other ways to incorporate sales into social media. Bottom line, when sales team members are involved in social media through commenting and messaging, they build the brand’s trust – and that is something that can increase revenue all around.

Learn more about Bernie Borges or gain valuable insights into B2B marketing by following his blog on the Find and Convert website.

The post Harnessing the Power of InMail for Driving Social Media Sales appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Despite LinkedIn’s reputation as the ultimate B2B platform, it has some kinks to work out. Feeds are becoming increasingly jammed with Work Anniversary notifications, and its limited user experience has some professionals up in arms.

We asked social media experts what they think about LinkedIn’s status as a B2B networking platform:

Q: LinkedIn is increasingly touted as THE “social selling” platform for B2B brands, especially in conjunction with ABM (account based marketing) AND our feeds seem to be increasingly cluttered with Work Anniversary notifications. How are you feeling about LinkedIn these days?

Andrea Hofer, Global Social Media Manager at Philips Healthcare: Each social channel is catered to different people and different facets of life and therefore we see different content being shared. Not a lot of people would share business content on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, but they would do so on LinkedIn or Twitter. Conversely, those wedding pictures are kept off LinkedIn to maintain a professional presence.

I personally often find my LinkedIn newsfeed more interesting than my Facebook newsfeed. The professional nature of the platform results in a lot of social cooling, but what I lose in personal stories I gain in the quality/relevancy of links shared. Additional post tagging/filtering options would increase relevance, such as life event, work anniversary, job opportunity, case study, etc. I have found that nothing beats LinkedIn for targeting the medical C-suite. Facebook may be cheaper, but you are not able to effectively drill down to that audience.

Jennifer Forrest, Director of Social Media at DEG Digital: I think there’s a misconception that LinkedIn is the only tool for B2B selling. Don’t get me wrong, LinkedIn is still the king of the B2B selling experience, but it’s not the only player. Facebook is the more efficient platform from an ad targeting perspective. But that misconception comes with a similar one about who B2B buyers are. They are still people who live and consume products in a B2C world on a daily basis. So, it’s not crazy for Facebook and other platforms to be viable options for B2B, but LinkedIn is still at the top.

Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade, LLC: I have a love hate thing going with LinkedIn right now. I love using it as a directory akin to the old white pages to research folks I’ve met or might want to connect with down the road. For that function alone it is unrivaled. But because I’ve met so many people over the course of my career and it seems that every single one of them have become publishers, my feed is more than just useless – it’s annoyingly so. I’d love to see them kill work anniversaries and maybe even birthdays and then figure out how to filter out the drivel that masquerades as useful content.

Q: Are you spending more or less time on LinkedIn, and if so, why?  

Stephen Monaco, Founder of Future Marketing Institute: LinkedIn feels lackluster to me ​now so I’m spending less time on it than I did in the past. Like so many others, I quickly grew tired of accepting invitations from people who then started pitching me within minutes of becoming a connection. This is off putting to say the least.

Brian Moran, entrepreneurial consultant: I’m not spending enough time on it and I blame LinkedIn for that. LI is arguably the best research tool for business (selling is 90% preparation and 10% presentation). LI tells me so much of what I need to know for the 90% part of that rule, and yet I could be doing so much more on the platform.

Joel Comm, Author, speaker, brand influencer: I spend very little time on Linkshare as it is mostly noise. I do enjoy Slideshare and find it the best way to deliver new content to the platform.

Jason Falls, Founder of Conservation Research Institute: When I spend significant time on LinkedIn, I get business. That said, I don’t care for its user experience much, so I don’t spend a lot of time there that I don’t need to. Still, the improvements they’ve added over the last two years are good, have improved the site and experience and are more conducive to people connecting with the right people for business purposes. The notifications are trivial … you can turn them off by notification type if you don’t like them. LinkedIn is still a fertile ground for me, anyway.

Forrest: LinkedIn has made huge strides throughout the past year from a user standpoint. It’s much more of an interactive experience than it has been in the past, making it easier to spend more time on the platform.

Neisser: I find myself spending more time on LinkedIn mainly to make sure I not only understand its capabilities for social selling but also to become a true expert practitioner of social selling. Not surprisingly, this is connected to Renegade’s growing Social Selling Training practice.

Concluding Thoughts

LinkedIn may not be perfect, but it’s still an effective networking tool for businesses. The platform’s research capabilities and huge web of professionals provide valuable resources for any B2B seller. If you can look past its limitations, LinkedIn may be worth its weight in gold.

The post Is LinkedIn the King of B2B Social Selling Platforms? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

According to Inc. contributor Janine Popick, the CMO of Dasheroo and founder of VerticalResponse, successfully marketing a small business on LinkedIn is more than possible—it provides small business owners with scalable rewards. For Popick, LinkedIn marketing is about directly engaging with your professional network. In other words, you should accept invitations from legitimate people, reply to inMails (LinkedIn’s internal email platform), and reach out and connect with those people in your industry that you should get to know. Another benefit of adding LinkedIn to your marketing strategy is free advertising, which you can access by simply joining a group and sharing content. Talk about content marketing!

For a detailed list of reasons why LinkedIn should be on your radar, check out the full article on .

The post Why You Should Market Your Small Business on LinkedIn appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Find a New Bae – or New Boss

With a new component called “BumbleBIZZ” (set for release in early fall) Bumble is aiming to make a transition from a Tinder-like dating app to a more all-encompassing social-networking platform.

This new feature matches individuals to others in similar professional circles. Like with Bumble’s dating feature, women must message first — and within 24 hours of being matched. CEO Whitney Wolfe says that this makes it “easier for women to set the tone in a potential business relationship.” Unlike Bumble’s business networking competitor, LinkedIn, where conversations and connections are more formal and professional, BumbleBIZZ hopes to engage potential cohorts in a more casual and immediate manner.

With merely a swipe, individuals who have the potential to influence and advance careers can be within reach. Whether the user is looking for help, an intern or a new coworker, BumbleBIZZ can connect them to others in the field. The algorithm behind this program takes into account the location, “industry, current job, education, and other relevant details” to match profiles of similar interests or professions to benefit both parties.

Dating-Style Networking Has Its Challenges

Individuals searching for a job, connection or internship may feel more confident connecting to individuals on BumbleBIZZ than on LinkedIn due to its casual vibe. However, employers may not be equally invested. They may feel as though they are wasting time swiping through photos as opposed to dissecting resumes and reading emails from individuals who are taking more time and care to reach out themselves.

It will be interesting to see whether there is a good balance between individuals searching for opportunities with those that can provide them. Similarly, workers on BumbleBIZZ must find the app legitimate enough to actually follow up on their new connections, which may be quite a hassle depending upon how many matches they make.

Another challenge facing this new function is keeping a solid wall between the Bumble features. Bumble has stated that the business profiles will be “kept distinct from their dating profiles,” although it will be interesting to see just how they are separated. If the profiles are not distinguishable, there is a danger of matching romantically with a potential boss — a terrifying thought, to say the least.

Lastly, most professionals don’t include a photo with their real-life resumes so as not to bias the selection process. However, physical attraction may weigh in on matching decisions on BumbleBIZZ due to the inclusion of numerous photos in users’ profiles. Similarly, people may wish to display different photos and interests on their dating profiles than on their professional profiles, so they should be afforded the ability to customize each one.

This leads one to wonder: how extensive will the professional profiles be? What criteria will hiring managers use to decide on whom they will swipe right versus left? CEO Wolfe herself stated that the process is “less about your resume and more about who you are.” That said, it appears as though BumbleBIZZ will lead workers to connect based on personality rather than by focusing on credentials. Is this strategy most advantageous for scouting new hires? Time will tell.

There may be current limitations to BumbleBIZZ due to its matching algorithm and the platform’s original focus on dating. However, BumbleBIZZ certainly has the potential to change networking for the better — as long as the guidelines are clear and it distinguishes itself enough from its competitors.

Is BumbleBIZZ worth all the buzz? Let us know in the comments, or chat us up on Twitter.

The post Introducing BumbleBIZZ: Tinder Meets LinkedIn appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Unfortunately, the cardinal rule of the internet is “if it can be spammed, it will be spammed.” With no mechanism to ensure users only endorsed skills they could actually verify, users quickly abused Endorsements to the point of irrelevance. Recruiters for the most part consider Endorsements “silly and meaningless”. Using Endorsements as an engagement tool is a little tacky, as the request for reciprocity is implied even when it’s not explicitly stated.

So should you just ignore Endorsements? Maybe, maybe not…

Why do Endorsements Even Exist?

There’s evidence that they may boost your profile in LinkedIn’s algorithm when users are searching for someone with those skills. So even if recruiters ignore them once they reach your profile, they might make it a little more likely they’ll find it in the first place.

Endorsements give LinkedIn scalable skills data about their users. Even if the quality of that data is crap, they’re not going to give that up. At least, not until they have something better.

It’s important to bear in mind that just like the keywords tag and search engines, eventually the sheer volume of spam Endorsements will outweigh any algorithmic value they might have. In fact, it’s possible LinkedIn is already devaluing Endorsements from connections you’ve never worked with.

Even with these problems, Endorsements won’t likely be going away anytime soon. So you might want a plan for managing them. Or a rationale for opting-out of them.

Escaping the Clutter

Since January, you can edit and manage Endorsements on your profile. One possibility is to opt-out of them completely. If you’re not quite ready for that, you can at least opt out of getting annoying prompts and emails related to Endorsements, making them a little more bearable. You can also move the Endorsement section further down your profile page, below the more relevant information.

If you’re not going to opt-out, you’ll be relieved to know you can now remove and reorder Endorsements on your profile. This is a good way to eliminate duplicate skills, as well as skills you don’t have, or don’t want to emphasize. Congrats! Here’s your opportunity to ditch that endorsement for “Fax Machine Repair” your smartass former coworker gave you.

Taking a little time to curate endorcements can elevate them above pure visual clutter.

Practice Mindfulness

Endorsements may be the equivalent of those “Senior Superlatives” we all remember from high school — a popularity contest, not an accurate assessment of your real strengths. But as opposed to ignoring them, being intentional about whether and how you’ll use them, and taking a little time to curate can elevate them above pure visual clutter.

A little mindfulness can improve almost anything, even meaningless professional compliments from near-strangers.

The post LinkedIn Endorsements: Worthless or Worth a Second Look? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

This article is my latest “bug LinkedIn” entry. My latest finds center on counting. They’re very visible. I’ll show you two instances, and toss in a screenshot of a special slip-up.

(See also My Search for Relevance on LinkedIn, on search-relevance deficiencies, posted in March 2014; my April 2014 via-Twitter reporting of incorrect rendering of HTML character entities, here and here, since fixed although a very similar error in LinkedIn e-mail notifications remains unresolved; a February 2013 Twitter thread about the lack of needed LinkedIn profile spell-checking — do a LinkedIn search on “analtics” (missing Y) and you’ll see what I mean; and my July 2012 LinkedIn, Please Take on Group Spammers, still very much an issue. And the flawed algorithm I reported in my July 2014 article, LinkedIn Misconnects Show That Automated Matching is Hard, remains uncorrected.)

So what’s new?

How Many Moderation Items?

LinkedIn groups are a great feature. I belong to quite a few, and I moderate several.

Check out the moderation screen to the right. The Discussions tab is displayed, indicating 35 items in the Submissions Queue pending approval — the same number is shown next to the Manage menu-bar item — except we don’t see any pending discussion submissions, do we? We do, however, see a tick box next to… nothing.

Counting bug #1.

Actually, I can explain this error. LinkedIn provides group moderators a Block & Delete option under the Change Permissions drop down, as shown in the right-middle of my shot. A diligent moderator will use it to ban group members who repeatedly submit off-topic content. I’ve used Block & Delete. Each time I use it, while the submitted items disappear, they’re still being counted. My guess is that they’re still in LinkedIn’s database, but now flagged with a “blocked” status.

So we have a bad counting query that can be easily fixed. All LinkedIn Engineering has to do is add a condition — if in SQL, in the WHERE clause — so that only non-blocked moderation entries are counted.

How Many Connection Requests?

Counting error #2 involves connections requests. It’s a two-fer — two errors, actually. I can’t explain them, but I can show them and describe them.

First, check out the Inbox image, which shows a connection invitation that I’ve already accepted. Note the “1st” next to the person’s name. The second image confirms that he and I are connected. Look closely at his profile and you will see “Connected 1 day ago.”

The second image also the drop-down under “Add Connections,” which, again erroneously, shows a pending connection invitation from the person I’m already connected to.

But that’s not all! Did you notice the little plus-person icon in the upper-right of each of those screens? Did you notice the number displayed in a red background? It’s 3. Now, how many connection requests do you see under Invitations in the drop-down of the second image. I see 2.

Counting error #2.

Placeholder

And finally, a lagniappe, an extra for those who have read this far. Check out the item under “Ads You May Be Interested In” in the image to the right

Placeholder?

A Loyal, Paying User

Finally, let me reassert that I am a loyal, paying LinkedIn user. Did you notice the word “premium” next to the “in” logo in the screenshots I posted?

There’s always room for improvement, and of course, LinkedIn capabilities have advanced light years since I wrote, in InformationWeek in 2004, “LinkedIn is the only social-networking system I looked at that currently deserves enterprise consideration.” Myself, I may be a more astute industry analyst and better writer now, in 2015, than I was then. Here’s to progress!! … and also to getting even the little things right.

The post Counting Bugs at LinkedIn appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Why should you read on? Not only because (I’m guessing) you have a LinkedIn profile, but also because in an “omni-channel” world, data matching — also known as data integration, data fusion, record linkage, and synthesis — is central to meeting everyday social and enterprise business challenges.

Two Mismatches