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Social media contacts. Who owns them?

It’s been an interesting week. I’ve just finished with a project that involved creating a website that is fully integrated with all the social media touchstones – Linkedin Company Page, Facebook Business Page, Twitter etc. – and I’m about to roll out a company wide integration of individual social media accounts.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The client is asking employees to either sign over “ownership” of their existing Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook accounts along with all the contacts contained within, or create new profiles for each of the networks and not use their existing social media contacts for business purposes.

This client is a fairly large player in the Canadian recruiting industry and the position they have is that social media contacts have the same value as the Rolodex of yesteryear. So it only stands to reason that when somebody leaves the firm, they don’t get to take all the business with them.

So who really owns the contacts you make at work? Is it even possible to successfully segregate your previous contacts? Is this just an issue with the recruiting industry? Surely, the same arguments can be made for sales reps in any industry. What about media? If a journalist with a substantial social media following leaves a newspaper or television network, do they have to hand over those followers?

Let’s say you are a new employee and you have been busily working LinkedIn for a number of years prior to coming on board. Is it proper to a)require you to turn over potential leads to your new employer without compensation and b) can you work effectively starting from scratch on LinkedIn, knowing the contacts you’re making are most likely temporary and non-transferable?

If you choose not to transfer clients from your old account, what do you do when an opportunity comes up and you think you may have a good fit – but contacting that person means you won’t ever be able to contact them again if you were to change jobs? What if it’s your brother in law?

And when you leave the company – and eventually most of us do – those Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin company accounts don’t come with you, leaving a big hole in your digital footprint – by stripping a valuable chunk of the work connections we now take for granted.

Using LinkedIn to conduct business and find leads is changing the way companies in all industries operate. As more and more of them become aware of the power of Linkedin, this issue is sure to get a bit more play.

Growing Your Facebook Business Page

5:09 pm/in Consultant and Speaker Marketing /by Aidan Crawford

If you’re like me, then you like to keep a very high wall between who you are and what you do.

Because of this I have a very strict rule about becoming Facebook “friends” with business associates and potential clients.

This allows me to keep a big part of my life private. It also allows me to be myself without having to wonder about potential “career limiting” comments by friends or even by me. In short walling off this little part of my digital world frees me from professional persona.

And who really cares about pictures of my kids anyway?

But there is a significant proportion of Facebookers who have no problem mixing business and personal. That’s why so many speakers and consultants have 500 or more “friends.”

But what every business needs is to move those contacts to a custom fan page.

And the reasons are simple.

1- if you tie your blog to your personal account, not every “friend” will see it.
2- you can add custom applications to engage your “fans” in ways that you can’t do with a personal page.

So the first step is to build a Facebook Fan Page. But it’s not enough to just create a default page. You need to brand it.

I’ve recently created a Fan Page for Short Circuit Media.

Click here to visit it (and don’t forget to Like it).

The first thing you’ll see is a custom landing page with an introductory video. The big call to action is to “Like” the page.

This is important. Remember above when I said that not every friend will see your blog postings? Well if someone is a “Fan” your blog postings WILL show up in their feed.

You’ll also see on my page that I am giving away a free site evaluation when somebody “Likes” the page. An incentive is always good.

So now that your page is all set up, where do you go trolling for followers?

Well there are three places; Email Contacts, Facebook and Linkedin.

Linkedin allows you to export contacts. Here are the steps:

Go to Contacts>>Connections
Scroll to the bottom right corner of the screen and export.

Simple enough.

Now to move them to your new fan page.

In the Get Started page go through the steps.

– Click on Tell Your Fans
– Select Other tools
– Import the CSV file you just created in Linkedin.

Now don’t get too crushed if not everyone becomes a fan. Most won’t. But you may get a bunch. And that’s enough to get you started.

Linkedin Marketing for Small Business

5:44 pm/in Consultant and Speaker Marketing /by Aidan Crawford

Every site – including this one – has multiple share buttons that allow visitors to share content with friends and colleagues.

With over 700 million users, Facebook gets a lot of attention.

But what do you share on Facebook? I know for me, I’m likely to share newspaper articles, pictures and videos from YouTube that amuse or entertain me.

What I’m not likely to share is a link to help you market your business website.

Don’t get offended. My friends and family just don’t care about professional speakers, consultants, or widget factories. So why would I pass your site along to them?

Now I might be inclined to share your site on Twitter, if there is something interesting, that my followers might also find worth looking at.

So that leaves Google+ and Linkedin. Now I don’t use Google+ very much at all. But I can see how it could become very valuable if it ever hits critical mass. Especially since it actually does effect your ranking on the big engine.

Linkedin marketing is a much more practical way to promote your business in the social media world.

Simply by placing a Linkedin button on each page of your site, you are inviting visitors to share your site with professional associates and groups.

If you are a small business having your blog post or product end up on a group, or shared to a number of professional contacts by a visitor, has the potential to be a very profitable endorsement.

You can even set up your social media machine to automatically post your content to Linkedin by tying your RSS feed to your professional profile and Twitter account.

So what are you waiting for? Here is the link to add the Linkedin Share Button to your site.

https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share-button

If you need help implementing this, you can always send me a note.

Posts

Growing Your Facebook Business Page

Linkedin Marketing for Small Business

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