Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Many of you probably already have your own profile on LinkedIn. It’s a great tool, you can pull your blog feed directly into your profile, can network and make new contacts and it’s a social networking site to take advantage of.  However, have you set your company up on LinkedIn too? Follow this link to get started: www.linkedin.com/companies

You will only be able to add your company if you already have a profile that includes the e-mail address for that company. In other words, LinkedIn needs to see you as a current employee. Add the name of your Company and your e-mail address, then click Continue.

Next, you can walk through and add items like your website address, description, industry and part of your address. Once you have added this info, you can then add your logo by uploading an image. Next add your locations, any financial information you wish to share, and your company blog.

Finally, once you are finished, your company can now be found during searches. Also, if someone hovers their mouse over the company name in your profile, a pop up window appears showing some of the information about your business.

Make sure you don’t miss out on this free opportunity to promote and market your business some more!

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So, back in January I did a post about using Twitterfeed to import your blog posts (RSS Feed) into Twitter and Facebook. Although I am not TOTALLY going back on my word, I have found that it doesn’t seem to work so well for Facebook. Works great for Twitter though, so still using it for that. However, I found that at times it would log me out of my Facebook account and lose connection. It could be because I have three Facebook accounts that I am constantly logging in and out of? Also, it would only update either my Profile or my Page, not both. So, I had to search for something else. (not sure what an RSS Feed is? Check out this blog post to learn more).

Social RSS seems to be doing the trick for me. Log into Facebook and then click on the following link: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=23798139265

It will take you directly to the application for Social RSS for Facebook. This application allows you to pull in your blog feed directly into Facebook. If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins that will do this for you, but I haven’t yet found one that has the same settings and flexibility of this app.

Once at the application, you will need to put in the settings. First, you can enter in a Description. Put in a little bit about you or your business. This is going to be used on your Facebook Profile, not your Page (more about how to set that up in a moment). Let people know about what it is that you do, or what your RSS feed is about. Why would it interest me? Who is it targeted at?

Next you can put in a website link. You can make this your home page if you wanted to. You will put the actual RSS Feed link further on down in the settings. Now onto the settings for the feed itself. If you need more guidance just hover your mouse over the title of the field and it will give you more info. These are all required fields and the tag can be something simple. The field is no more than 5 characters so just put in a combination of letters and numbers that makes sense to you and what the feed is about. This is really more critical if you have more than one feed. I just used an acronym of my business name, seemed simple enough!

The Title I just used my company name. When a new post is published to your wall, it states: New Story from, then the Title you entered, so put in something that makes sense. The URL is that of your RSS feed. If you are not sure what it is, click on the orange rss icon from your blog and it should take you to the url. If you are still not sure, ask a friendly web designer, I am sure they will tell you for free!!! Do not just use the url of a regular web page, it won’t work that way. The Alternative URL will be used when someone clicks on the Title of the feed. I have it taking people to my About page for more information.

Next click the Display Options tab.This allows for more settings to determine how the new posts from the RSS feed will look. Here are my settings below, feel free to copy, or use your own. You can click on the other two tabs but I haven’t changed anything on those. Finally, click on Add to Profile.

This will ask you if you want to add Social RSS to your Profile. You can add it to the boxes tab, or the Wall and Info Tab.

Once you have done this, click on Application settings from the top right of Facebook. Click to Edit the Social RSS Settings. Select your Profile settings, and also click on the Bookmark tab. By Bookmarking Social RSS, this means it will show up when you are on the Facebook home page. You will see it listed underneath News Feed, Messages and any Applications you have book marked. This makes it easier to get back to in the future.

Once you have this all configured, the next time you publish a blog post, you will see it listed on your Profile. Below is how mine looks.

And finally, if you want it to appear on your Facebook Fan Page, click on this link: http://apps.facebook.com/rss-connect/pageinfo.php?ref=tb If you have more than one page, it will ask you which one to add it to. Click to Add Social RSS and then you will be taken to the same settings page as before. It’s a pain to set it up twice, but you only need to through this once, and that’s it. I kept two windows open, one with my Profile settings and one for my Page and just copied and pasted from one to the other.

Had success with any other applications posting your RSS Feed to Facebook? Let us know about them below!

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Although there are many factors to consider when trying to get your website listed higher in the search engines, backlinks are important.  A backlink to your site is a link one someone else’s website that goes directly to yours. Consider Site A links to Site B. If you are Site B, you have a backlink from Site A. Got it?

So how do you know who is linking to you? Well, there are many sites out there that can show you this information, but a simple quick and easy way is to go directly to the Google Search Engine. Simply type into the search box – link: www.domainname.com where domain name is your domain. See below in the example for my website.

First glance and it looks like there are over 1,400 links back to my site. Technically this may be true, but many of those links are actually within my own site. One page linking to others. Once you get through all of those, you can see other sites that have added a link to their pages back to one of yours. This could be from another blog, a forum you visited and added your information to, or a site just showing you some love! It’s a good idea to know who is out there and linking to you. A lot of the sites listed when I do my search, I already know about. However, I often find someone linking that I had no idea about either! Sharing links is good, if it makes sense for your website. Consider a list of other local and trusted businesses, or offer a shared link for those that meet certain requirements.

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Last blog post, I referenced Xobni, a great free tool to use within Outlook. In this blog post, I wanted to let you know about some other free tools that can be found online and used in running your business.

If you have Microsoft Office 2007, and have either Word or Publisher, you will know that you can save a document as a PDF, pretty quick and easy. PDF documents can be used when putting together a contract, creating project plans or any time you want a document that can be ready easily by someone else. For those of you not up to date with your Office products, there is another tool out there you can use. Primo Pdf is available for download to your computer at no charge. Once downloaded, Primo works like a printer would. With the document open that you wish to convert, simply click on the print button within Word or Publisher.

The screen to the left will open. Next to the path by Saved As, you will see a little button to the right. Click on this and you can select the desktop, or a folder to where your PDF can be saved. Click on Create PDF. If you have the Post Process set to “Open PDF” it will open up for you to review. Your PDF can now be used and e-mailed to others if needed.

There is also a service available that will do the exact opposite, convert a PDF to a Word document. This is provided by the same people that make Primo PDF, NitroPDF Software . With this, you go out to their website (visit site here), find the PDF document you wish to convert, select if you want it as a .doc file or Rich Text Format, then enter in an e-mail address that you want to have it e-mailed to. The e-mail takes about 10 to 15 minutes to get to you, but the conversion is pretty good! NitroPDF Software also have a convert PDF to Excel version that is also free.

Back in July, I did a post on Mozy, a service that allows you to back up your files for free. Learn more about Mozy.com and how you can use their services to have piece of mind, knowing that your private, confidential and critical documents (or maybe your precious family photos) are backed up each night, sitting waiting in the event that your system crashes and you need to recover them.

YouMail has been around since 2007 so still fairly new, but well worth checking out. Many small business owners work out of their home, or travel around so much that a cell phone is their mode of communication. Having your cell phone as your business phone is ok, but it means you lose a lot of functionality that a regular land line has. YouMail provides you a method to set up different voicemail messages that can be assigned to different callers.

Creating an account is free of charge. You set up your cell phone to work with this service. Once set up, YouMail is where you will get your voicemail (can easily be programmed with a speed dial number like you have now) but one of the great things about it, is that you can have several different voicemail messages set up. Consider this, those annoying blocked call numbers, a standard voicemail message can be set to inform the caller you don’t accept blocked or unrecognizable calls. Or, the pushy sales man that just won’t stop calling, add their number online and set their voicemail message to a “this number has been disconnected or is out of service at this time”. Perfect to get your number off their call list! You can also set it to get an e-mail or text each time you get a voicemail, and by paying a fee, can even get voicemails transcribed and sent to you in text format. You can also record your own messages and easily switch between them online, one for regular hours, one for weekends, one for the holidays and so on. Much easier than having to rerecord messages for each scenario as it arises.

Finally, another company that offers a variety of cool tools is Each of their services allows you to grade a marketing area of your business. You can grade your Facebook Business Page, your WebSite, a Press Releases and Twitter accounts. Grader.com is by a company called HubSpot. Below, you can see where I entered my Twitter account and got a grade of 89 out of 100. They take into consideration a number of factors, quality of posts, number of followers, of those you are following, and the number of updates made.

Website Grader allows you to put in your url, and also add other websites you want to compare yourself against. This is great if you want to see how you compare with your competitors. How are others in the same business as you stack up against you.

Hopefully all of these tools will be ones you can actually use and will add value to your day. Let me know if you find anything, or know of any other tools that we could all benefit from.

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A friend of mine posted a question on Facebook, asking where she could advertise at a low cost, or even better, for Free! I have found a few sites that allow you to post your company profile, with a short bio and a listing of the services you provide. There are the old faithfuls, of Kudzu, Facebook, Google Maps, Yahoo Local of course, but sometimes it’s hard to find solutions that are quick and cost effective to use for the small business owner. I am looking for very cheap, preferably free! Below is a list of some that I have used that might help:

Local.com – There are two sides to this site. The first is to post an ad in the classified section. This runs for 30 days and is then removed. I found the categories to be a little limiting but it’s free and another way for people to find you. The other way is to add your business to the listings for people to search through. Local Promote allows you to list your services, website address, contact info and more. This is not removed and does offer an upgrade for a special offer of $49 a month at the moment. This allows you to add your logo, up to 5 photos and promises you will be found at the top of search results for some of the major search engines.

Superpages.com – This site allows for a fairly comprehensive submission of your business to their listing. However, to add your logo costs $25 a month and at a costly $22 a month per format, you can add bold, colored fonts or italics to your listing. I can target the area my business is listed (in my case it’s Dacula) but it would be an additional $77 a month to have it listed and targeted to the rest of Gwinnett County, $254 a month to the Metro Atlanta area and $384 a month for the whole of Georgia, so big differences there! You can see my profile page by clicking here.

GenieKnows.com – I hadn’t heard of this site before but it’s similar to the other two in that you can list your business at no charge. It also allows you to add quite a lot of information about your company which is good to see. I added my company but was dissappointed that I wasn’t able to then review it once complete. Instead, I received an e-mail to let me know that it could take up to two weeks for it to display. “All submissions are subject to review” which is probably a good thing!

Talk Gwinnett – Talk Gwinnett is the local site for the Gwinnett Gazette. Another free site but with a very basic listing available. Pretty much you can have your e-mail address and basic contact information. To add your website address is $10, to add a logo is $10 and to add a description is $5! You can submit your company in up to 3 categories for free, then it’s an additional $5 per additional category. It’s free, but all in all, not going to do much for my business.

Domestic Sale.com – Free again! This one allows you to add a long description, an e-mail address, link to your website, contact info and even a logo at no cost. However, I found that once I had uploaded my logo, it totally distorted all of the colors so much so that it doesn’t really look like my logo anymore. Aside from that, you can post a lot on this site at no cost.

Yahoo Local – With this one, I thought I had already created an account. When I did a search, I came up in the listing but with very little information. It seems that through searches and hits on the internet my site was then listed and I hadn’t needed to do anything. I signed up to modify the listing and add more information. Once this was done, it stated that it would take up to 5 business days for the listing to be updated. Not sure how they will verify I am who I say I am though! When I set up my business page with Google, they provide two options to verify you are the business owner. One is to call you on the business phone, the other is to snail mail you a postcard with a code on it which you enter into a website. So, we shall see if Yahoo believe me and just go with it!

urbanGwinnett – This site is local to the Gwinnett County area and allows for the submission of your business. You can select the category you wish to be listed. With not too many listed at the moment, you can actually have the monopoly of a whole category if you pick wisely! Visitors can write reviews, e-mail you and also see a visual of your website directly on the urbanGwinnett website. A well run informative site, worth posting as it is totally free!

Switchboard – This site is powered by Superpages.com. Similar in layout and content, it’s free and allows you to add basic information to this listing, before adding on cost for additional elements.

LTTA – Lawrenceville Tourism and Trade Association – If you are a member of the LTTA, you are automatically submitted into their Membership Directory. If you are a small business of 1, it is only $50 for the year, a great price. This also gives you other benefits, the ability to leave your business cards and brochures at the LTTA office, and be invited to their networking and social events. If you aren’t a member already and are local to the area, be sure to check it out!

Although there are many more, finally I will end with the best!

NEW Lawrenceville – this is a community run website. If your business is local to Lawrenceville, Georgia, simply visit the site and use the form to submit your business. With up to 200 words available for your company bio, and the ability to have your phone number, e-mail address and website listed, along with your logo, this free service is well worth taking advantage of. Even better, you can also submit articles that are of relevance to Lawrenceville and can include your business sales, promotions and events. Can’t get better than that!

If you know of any others, let us know! info@purplestarconsulting.com

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