If you’re creating Facebook content which includes a link, and suddenly find that the options to edit the automatically generated preview (the image, title, and description that comes with it) have gone away, you’re not alone. A Facebook “update” which removes this functionality is due to come into force today, 17th July.

What is Facebook Link Preview modification?

When you include a web URL in a Facebook post, the Link Preview is the box that comes up below it showing you how the link will be represented in your final post.  By default, it pulls the content that populates this from the metadata of the originating website.

So, the auto-generated information may or may not be a) attractive or b) accurate, depending on how the site you’re linking to is coded.

Previously, you could click into each of the various areas of the Link Preview and manually edit them to be something more informative.

So, a Link Preview might start off like this:

But you want to tailor that title, description and image to the particular audience you’re addressing, or to highlight one aspect of the article you’re linking to. So your edited version might look like this:

Leading to a published post which looks like this:

Once this function is deprecated (deleted, basically!) by Facebook, you’ll no longer be able to do this.

What we’re seeing as of today is that you can still click into the various areas and edit them, but when you Publish the post, they revert to the metadata. No clues, no error message, not very helpful –  and there will probably be a lot of frustrated social media managers out there today!

Why are Facebook making this change?

According to their own statement, it’s to cut down on misleading previews being posted. So presumably, spammers are creating links to inappropriate or other commercial sites and then editing the link options to make it look as though the link goes to an article very different from the actual content.

It’s a shame that they can’t deal with this issue some other way – for example, allowing people to report misleading posts individually and then banning the creators – but maybe that’s just too resource intensive. Anyway, for now the spammy users are spoiling things for everyone else!

How can I get around it?

If your own website, or the site you’re posting a link to, doesn’t have metadata which is appropriate for creating an attractive auto-preview, there should be a workaround – but it’s likely to involve giving up some of the benefits of the Link Preview function.

This MAY change at the same time as the Link Preview function is altered, but currently, if you upload images to your post PRIOR to pasting in the URL you want to use, Facebook won’t initiate the Link Preview function at all but will just leave your link as a basic, but clickable, text link.  That may be the best way for most users to control this for now; you won’t get as attractive a result as you would with the old function, but at least you won’t have a bunch of messy or irrelevant metadata  getting pulled into your post every time.

It’s also possible that some third party social media tools will create their own workarounds for this in due course, as Facebook’s announcement linked above suggests that the door may be left open for this. As of now, it appears that Hootsuite at least aren’t implementing any alternative . Please feel free to leave a comment if you have a better workaround or have spotted a third party tool which has a better solution!

Don’t click!

I’m sure we don’t need to mention that clicking on links in this kind of message (anything which seems “a bit odd” for that user) is a bad idea. Reporting the user for spam is also counterproductive since they almost certainly are unaware that the messages are going out from their account. DO, though, send them a message letting them know there’s something odd happening.

A contact told me my account is spamming, what do I do?

If you receive a notification from one of your followers that they’ve had a spammy message from your account, it’s likely that either your account has been hacked, OR an application that you’ve previously authorised to have permissions on your account has been hacked or has turned rogue. In either case, here’s what you do:

1. Change your password. If you can stand the annoyance of remembering more passwords, it’s a good idea to do this regularly anyway!

2. Check your Authorised applications. To do this, log into Twitter.com and click on the far right item in the top menu – your username/ avatar with a little drop down triangle next to it. Choose “settings” from the menu that drops down.

Then, click the “applications” tab:

That will show you all the apps you’ve ever authorised to access your Twitter account. If your account is sending out spam, we’d advise you to delete all but the apps you can’t live without. If the spam continues, you may have to delete those one by one too, until you figure out which one’s causing the problem.

Make your Twitter account safer in future

To help avoid this happening again, try changing your Twitter password regularly and / or making it more complex (include numbers as well as letters, and avoid obvious word choices).  It’s a good idea to check the Applications tab regularly, and  revoke access to any apps you don’t remember authorising, or no longer use.

Have you had trouble with your Twitter account spamming? Please feel free to share any other tips for preventing or dealing with this!

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Of all the social media platforms, it was LinkedIn that dominated the discussions, but in our informal chats afterwards it became clear that many of the attending professionals weren’t sure what exactly LinkedIn is, or is for.

They’re not alone

According to Google’s keyword search tool, there were 1.8 million searches in the UK, last month alone, for “what is linkedin”. So, here’s our absolute basics guide to LinkedIn – we’ll follow it up with a second part in the next few weeks, looking at strategies for the more advanced user.

What is linkedin?

So, to start with that question! LinkedIn is a platform to help you connect with people you know in a professional capacity – old or current work colleagues, suppliers, or networking contacts.

If you’re familiar with using Facebook, the easiest analogy is that it’s a “business” version of Facebook.

Beyond the basic functions of keeping in touch with, seeking help or assisting those in your wider professional network, you are also able to see your contacts’ contacts (LinkedIn calls those your “2nd level network”) or even their contacts (your “3rd level network”). If you’re comfortable doing so, you may ask your immediate contacts to introduce you to particular people who are relevant to your business.

In addition, the site hosts tens of thousands of special interest, sector and geographic forums (“groups”) worldwide, has a Q&A function if you’re looking for answers to a specific question, and even allows you to create highly targeted advertising campaigns.

Should we be there?

In May 2011, LinkedIn recieved just under 3.6 million unique visitors from the UK. So yes – LinkedIn is fast becoming a “hygiene factor” for professionals and businesses; potential contacts or customers are highly likely to look you up on the site.

If your business isn’t there, the details are poor, or the key messages are contradictory to the impression you give offline, that can be detrimental to your business.

Getting started

We advise all our business customers that they should have a complete, professional looking Company page on LinkedIN, supported by good personal profiles for at least their senior managers. LinkedIn is another shop window for your business, and one which goes beyond the standard corporatespeak that many fall into on their websites. That way, even if you don’t (yet) plan to use LinkedIn for specific business objectives, it will be working positively for you.

A quality company profile

The Company page should be properly linked to the employee profiles, and copy provided for the appropriate sections on each of your key products and services – if someone has made it as far as your company page, why waste the opportunity to show them what you can offer?

Fine tuning personal profiles

Employee profiles should include a clear, professional head shot, and be reasonably fully completed – not necessarily including every detail of their past working life, but giving a full picture of their skills and experience.

Most importantly, their background information – skills and past employment history – should ideally be phrased in a way which shows the value they add to your existing customers. A personal profile isn’t just the same as a CV!

For both personal and company pages, there are applications within LinkedIn which allow you to significantly enrich the profile, using everything from slide packs to blog posts.

Join the dots

Next, you should try to connect with as many relevant people as possible. One way to do this is to export your personal email database and load it into LinkedIn, which will then show you who you already know on the site. You’ll start to receive invitations to connect, so you might want to give some thought to your personal policy around this, too.

Once you’ve got a credible presence on LinkedIn, you’ve taken the basic opportunity to give yourself and your business a positive representation on the web, away from your corporate website. The next stage is to start using the site strategically – take a look at How to be a star on LinkedIn.

Need to look great fast?

We offer inhouse, private LinkedIn training courses – a few hours up to a full day, depending on what you need!

That’s now changed. As of mid November 2013, Twitter has begun rolling out their advertising programme to UK based businesses with more modest budgets.

Why advertise on Twitter?

Before we look at the costs and options, it’s worth thinking about why a business might choose to pay for exposure on Twitter rather than achieving it organically – through building a large follower base or creating shareable content.

The primary reason is likely to be time. Unless you’re well-known in general (a personal or brand celebrity) or are able to produce that once-in-a-lifetime viral content, getting significant visibility on Twitter in a short space of time is very difficult. So if you have a short notice launch, want to promote something a little different for what you’re known for, or are just impatient, then paid advertising is your best option.

Rather than having to wait for your audience to build naturally, and then start retweeting your content to their social networks, paying for advertising allows you to leapfrog your tweets directly into the timelines of your target audience.

Which brings us to the second reason you might consider paying for exposure: targeting. There are a range of ways in which you can target different Twitter users in the advertising scheme, allowing you to be much more precise about the kinds of people who’ll see your tweets or account.

What’s on offer?

The Twitter advertising platform is quite sophisticated, with a good range of options. Initially, you have to decide whether you want to promote your account (as in, appearing in the “Who To Follow” area of Twitter) or individual Tweets:

You then have a choice of how to target users – basically, this defines what criteria a user has to meet before your account or tweet will be shown to them.

As you can see, there are some pretty interesting choices there.  If you’re launching a consumer architecture practise, being able to target people who engage with Grand Designs on TV could have great potential; if you’re working in the B2B sector then being able to target everyone who currently follows the Twitter account of a leading industry publication could be very useful too.

Within those targeting options, you can  further refine by geography (although this is pretty coarse for the UK currently) and even gender.

For a Promoted Tweets campaign, you then need to choose which of your past tweets you’d like to promote – or let Twitter do that automatically based on popularity.

What does Twitter advertising cost?

As an example, we set up a campaign targeting anyone who’d used the word “renovation”, in the UK.  The budgeting section is where things get interesting – because you can set very low overall budgets AND a small daily budget. That means it should be easy to keep control of what you’re spending, and run a small scale (albeit possibly not entirely representative) pilot.

Here’s a screen shot of our campaign budget settings:

The slightly less promising item here is the “spend per engagement” bid. As you can see, this is what you will actually be charged if a user interacts with your Tweet in some way; and it is generally quite hefty.  If you compare with something like Pay Per Click ads, where (if you set it up right) a user could be searching for an immediate purchase, the typical bid amounts on Twitter seem quite high to us. I guess it will partly depend on the truth of the small print that “you will never be charged more than your maximum bid, and you usually pay less”.

Any other gotchas?

Just one – there are some interesting comments about who will and won’t be eligible for the advertising programme. We’ve found that a few of our newer clients aren’t, and it seems to be just down to the overall level of activity on their accounts, plus how long the account has been established. Twitter says:

“The most successful advertisers on Twitter tend to be those who are avid Twitter users. This means they have a history of sharing exceptional content and engaging with their followers. If you are interested in advertising but your account is fairly new, be sure to complete your account’s Twitter profile and spend a few weeks familiarizing yourself with Twitter’s best practises…”

This looks like an attempt to impose some quality control and avoid the “big budget newbie with an egg avatar” taking over the world…which seems fair enough.

Where is it?

You have to register for the Advertising centre, so to get started, go to https://ads.twitter.com/ and see whether your account makes the grade!

And today’s winner is….

All of these were launched with enormous fanfare, and often followed by a lot of talk about exponential growth, how they’re going to wipe out Facebook, and so on.

Some have done incredibly well at picking up users, but don’t see much activity after that. Others have made a big impact from an awareness point of view, but still have a relatively small number of users; these reasonably recent statistics suggest that Pinterest is punching well above its weight in that regard, still having only an estimated 200,000 users in the UK.

Don’t just panic. Evaluate.

For anyone in charge of an online marketing strategy, the big fear is always that the next “next big thing” would be perfect for them, and that they’ll be missing out catastrophically if they don’t jump on it. That’s still the only thing, in our opinion, which explains the growth of Google +. Actually, the far bigger risk is that you waste a lot of time on something which won’t help you meet your objectives, and potentially damage your efforts on other more established sites in the process – nobody can be everywhere at once.

Choose your weapons logically

If you were fighting a duel and a new five-ton rocket launcher came out, would you abandon your handgun for it? Probably not, because although it might be bigger and theoretically more powerful, it’s no good if you don’t have a huge truck to get it where you’re going. Social media is no different – you need to evaluate whether the “bigger and better” elements of a new platform are vital for the task in hand, and whether you have the resources to work with it anyway.

So, next time you’re told about an amazing new site you need to check out right now, ignore all the blather about growth and potential, and ask yourself whether you can answer “Yes!” to any of the questions below.

I know that (a section of) my target prospects are there, and I want to reach them

This is a great reason to add a new site into your strategy. If there’s reasonable evidence that a certain demographic, or business type if you’re B2B, is using a site – especially if you’re not reaching them effectively through the rest of your marketing mix – then it’s worth investigation.

For example, if you’re looking to improve your brand’s visibility or perception amongst younger, more educated, design-led people, then a clever Instagram  stream might just do the trick. Of course, Instagram just provides the opportunity, it’s down to you to come up with great content which’ll catch their imagination.

I know that many of my customers are there, and want to use it as a communication channel to my brand

The mobile phone companies’ (notable O2 and Vodafone) use of Twitter is a good example of this. They’ve done some great work building loyalty and community with their customers by being where those customers are.

The platform includes unique functionality which will be valuable

We’ve all been guilty of getting a bit overexcited at “cool” new functions, and the function might just be the key thing you need to move forward on a marketing objective.

A word of caution, though: firstly, make sure that it’s genuinely useful as well as cool – and that it’s realistic for you to make use of it. The Google+ Hangouts feature is an example of this – in theory, being able to run mini-videoconferences from within the platform is definitely cool. If you’re working in B2B marketing and have ten major clients and a relatively small pool of prospects though, the chances of getting enough people together at one time to make practical use of it may be slim.

Unless you know that the entire country has signed up overnight, you also need to be confident that you’ll be able to bring your customer or prospect community along with you. Remember that, if they’re not already there, getting people to sign up for a new site (and revisit it regularly) is a BIG ask in today’s oversaturated world. So be sure that that killer function is absolutely compelling.

The theme of this last week’s work with some new clients has been disappointment – feeling that they started investing time in social media because the world and his dog had told them it was a sure fire route to business growth, and it’s not turned out that way.  But as with so many things in life, the devil is very much in the detail – So here are our  top five social media failure points, and what you can do about them.

1. Inconsistency

This one’s really a failure to integrate social media properly alongside the other regular key tasks for your marketing. You’re set up on all the main social media sites, but only find time to check and update them sporadically. From your contacts’ point of view, that means you’re either swamping them with updates (“might as well post everything I can think of on Twitter while i’m here“) or absent and not holding your end of the conversation. You’d not dream of leaving your email inbox unchecked for a week or more, so why do the equivalent on social media?

The remedy: Decide how frequently it’s realistic for you to post – and stick to it. Even a regular monthly update on your Facebook page is much better than nothing for three months, and then three posts at once. Scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck are your friend here. Secondly, make your social media part of your regular schedule, or get someone else to do it for you. You need to be checking your incoming contacts daily as by tomorrow, they’ll very likely have moved on and not be listening to your response.

2. Lack of reach

Like any marketing activity, only a small proportion of people seeing your communication will either read or act on it – so good reach is vital. By “reach”, we mean a sufficient quantity of first degree connections (ie direct Followers, Likers etc) and a willingness for them to interact with you in ways which make you visible to their own networks ( a Twitter re-tweet, or commenting on your Facebook posts for example).
DON’T confuse reach with the absolute number of your Followers or Likers – here’s what happens if you do.

The remedy: Sit down and take a half hour or so to develop a “good follower” profile. What type of people, in what area of the world, do you need to reach out to?

This list will have something in common with your target prospect characteristics but probably won’t be the same;  remember to allow for influencers who may never buy from you, but who can be very effective in increasing your visibility. Then start building relationships with those people, rather than just increasing your follower count with meaningless numbers.

3. The PR trap

We still see lots of businesses who haven’t understood the difference between social media and their other marketing channels, and constantly post old-style “push” marketing content. If most of your content could be summarised as “look how great we / our products are” then this may be your problem. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, gets a social media account so that they can receive advertising, so your contacts are most likely tuning you out completely.

The remedy: This all comes down to value. You need to be offering something of value to your contacts BEYOND what they’d get from reading your corporate website or trade magazine advertorials. So, brainstorm all the types of content you could post which provide some kind of value. For example, are you tapped into industry developments and able to be their first port of call for breaking news? Can you search out content which helps them solve problems (like this article, for example )?

That’s not to say some of your content can’t subtly promote your key marketing messages, but put yourself in your contacts’ shoes: a photo captioned  “here’s Emma in her pyjamas at 5am because we’re leaving for X trade show” is much more fun to read than “we’re exhibiting at X trade show on the 12th of June”.

4. Tumbleweed

AKA, total lack of engagement. You’ve got a good, relevant following, but they don’t converse with you or advocate on your behalf. Your @mentions Twitter tab is empty apart from spammers, and your Facebook page is a one-way conversation with yourself.

Remedy: This one isn’t easy, we’d be the first to admit. People are busy, and often they’re happy to read but don’t feel the need to engage.  To help make them reach for that “reply” button, compelling content helps (see above), as does asking the odd direct question and making them think less hard about responses – yes, sometimes that does mean you’re going to end up talking about what you had for lunch. What’s so bad about that – would you refuse to discuss anything but hardcore strategy in a face to face meeting?

5. Bad Manners

You get past all the previous tests but relationships don’t progress beyond an initial contact. They comment or reply to you once, or maybe just follow you and say Hi. Then you turn them off with what they see as poor etiquette, and you don’t hear from them again.

The remedy: Make sure you’re polite and considerate at all times. On Twitter for example, consider greeting new followers IF they’re genuinely relevant and of interest to you, and starting a conversation. Check their bio before you respond . Our names are clearly in our bio, but we lose count of the responses addressed to “Rose” – not a huge deal, but not endearing either. Think about your followback policy on Twitter (and following Facebook comments by Liking the originating page). Thank people who share or otherwise pass on your content. And obviously, always reply to messages or Facebook comments!

We hope these help you in the direction of a great social media presence, and if you’re still struggling, why not book one of our private consultancy and training sessions? One of our clients this week summed up the benefits perfectly:

“I really enjoyed {the session} and found it extremely useful.  It was so great to have you focus completely on our business and make the real time changes to our pages.  I felt you really understood our products, market and strategy.”

– more music to our ears!

NOTE: as of today (31st January 2012), the below is only of concern if you’ve upgraded your personal Facebook profile to the new “Timeline” format. If you haven’t (or Facebook hasn’t yet done it for you, as it will do eventually), you need to come back and check your privacy is intact AFTER the change

Reading through today’s social media news, I came across an article just published on the Guardian’s website, asking “What if your Facebook Timeline was read instead of your CV?“. Not a huge concern to me personally, I tend not to post anything hugely personal and / or incriminating on Facebook, plus I was pretty sure I was on top of my privacy settings. But the mention of changes around the introduction of the Timeline format gave me a nagging doubt, so I thought i’d revisit my settings and just, y’know, double check.

Oh. Where’d my Privacy settings go?!

First of all, the way your privacy settings are organised within Facebook seems to have changed. They used to be all in one place, and relatively easy to see what was set to what – plus, there was a “view as stranger” link so you could double check what your profile actually looked like to someone outside of your friend network. I was in a hurry, admittedly, but I couldn’t find that now, and there are settings which go down into several levels of complexity under both “Account Settings” and “Privacy settings” – these are both to be found under the drop down arrow at the top right of your screen.

How to check what’s private on your Facebook profile

Not reassured at all so far, I decided to take the quick route. Because I have a couple of dummy accounts used for training, I can easily log into those, search for myself and see how much of my timeline was visible. That may not help others much, as Facebook makes you log in before you’re able to search for someone, so you either need to:

• create a dummy account (strictly against Facebook regs but frankly they’re asking for it by making all this so tricky) – just set up a hotmail address and register using that, or
• enlist a friend who you’re not connected to on Facebook to use their account to search for you.

If that “view as stranger” button IS still there somewhere, please do post directions to it in the comments!

Edit: Thanks to Ellie in the comments and Celia on Facebook, we’ve located the “View as” option. From your timeline screen, it’s under the cog icon on the top right, as per the image below – so no excuses now for not checking what your profile looks like to the rest of the world!

And here’s what’s NOT private…

In my case, EVERYTHING. Bear in mind, I work in social media, I am as aware of functionality changes as probably most people outside of Facebook itself. Plus, I know i’ve set everything to “friends only” in the past, and checked externally that it was working as it should be.

When my profile switched from the old format to the new Timeline, all of my previous (private) posts were published as fully public.

Which means, if the new Timeline has made everything I’ve posted in the last four or five years public, it very likely has made yours public too. You DO need to check, or at least go through the process below unless you don’t mind the entire Internet viewing your entire status history.

How to fix it

Using the drop down arrow at the top right of your screen, go to “Account > Privacy Settings”.

About half way down the screen there is an option “Limit the audience for past posts”.  When you click on “manage past post visibility” you’ll get a warning message come up, with a button “limit old posts“. That’s the baby you want.

Once i’d clicked that, viewing my profile from the dummy account gave me exactly the result I wanted – my basic details were still visible, but my status updates weren’t.

Spread the word

I’ve never joined in the general yelling about Facebook and privacy invasions, because personally I thought that the old settings were manageable and if you’re old enough to use the site, you’re old enough to take responsibility for your settings.

BUT. This time, it seems to me like a deliberate attempt by Facebook to get around my previous settings. When those updates they’d just published with my timeline were made, it was totally clear from my privacy settings that I only intended them to be shared with friends, not to be made public. Maybe there was something in the teeny print around swapping to the Timeline format which said “oh, by the way, we’re going to totally disregard your past privacy settings”, maybe not – but I have to say, Facebook – I’m not impressed! If you want to make sure your friends aren’t accidentally “exposing” themselves to the world, feel free to send them the link to this post!

Facebook does allow you to create a “custom” URL for your page – like www.facebook.com/RoseMcGrory – but until a few days ago, anyone setting up a new Facebook Business page would have to wait until they had at least 25 “Likers” before Facebook allowed them to set that unique name and address for their Page.

That’s now changed, so that you can set a custom URL straight away (and look out for a LOT more over the next few weeks – there’s a big conference for Facebook developers tomorrow, where we’re expecting many new developments to be unveiled). Here’s how to do it, and some of the things to consider when you do.

How to set your business page name and web address

Using Facebook in Admin mode for your page (Account > Use facebook as page, and click the Switch button next to that page)

1. Click the Edit Page button on the top right of the screen.

2. Click “Basic Information” from the menu that appears on the left (indicated below)

3. Click “Create a username for this page” (indicated below).

4. You’ll then be given a box into which you can type your choice of username – the bit you’re adding is what will come after the “www.facebook.com/” so in our case, it’s just “RoseMcGrory”.  Use the check availability button  – if you have a business name with commonly used words in it, you may find that someone else has already claimed that address and you’ll need to have a rethink.

Once you get the popup confirming that your latest choice is available – DO NOT hit “confirm” until you’re absolutely sure that’s the name you want. Previously, you could amend the username until your page had a certain number of Likers, now you are stuck with it for ever!

Things to consider when naming your Facebook Page:

You need to make sure your URL is as user friendly, memorable, and idiot proof as possible, so that you don’t lose potential “Likers” along the way because they can’t find your page. Make sure you think about

Length

If you have a very long business name, a shorter form will be less cumbersome for customers to use; and don’t be tempted to stuff the URL with keywords at the expense of useability! “marketinganddesigninLeicester” might cover all the bases, but isn’t going to be easy for your users!

Spelling and difficult words

Again, if there are keywords you’d like to use but which are prone to mis-spelling – a problem we have all the time with the “McGrory” part of ours – you might consider going for an alternative naming route. This cuts down on the chances of a customer putting a typo in, getting a “page not found” message, and giving up.

Translation from “heard” to “printed”

The classic issue here is with the use of underscores, hyphens, and other punctuation marks. www.facebook.com/brilliant_marketing_ltd is great on the page, but as soon as you have to pass it on in a spoken format, there’ll be trouble – many people don’t know the difference between an underscore and a hyphen, and you’ll have to go to great descriptive lengths to make sure they get it right.

Keywords vs Company name

We’ve heard conflicting opinions about whether including the keywords your business targets for search purposes, for example “social media training UK” for us, has any benefit from an SEO point of view (any SEO gurus reading, please feel free to comment!).  If you’re going to do this, do consider both useability and also consistency; while you can use a long URL on Facebook, you couldn’t keep that username consistent on Twitter, for example, because of the length restriction.

One final point – it seems that, at least for now, you may only be able to get an immediate custom URL for one page. If you manage many pages with few likes, choose carefully which one to change first. This may just be a way for Facebook to prevent an avalanche of URLs being registered and may change soon, but if it doesn’t, anyone needing multiple new-page custom URLs will need to talk nicely to their friends who haven’t yet used up their Admin allowance!

Onwards and upwards

So, you’ve seen how LinkedIn can support and accelerate your professional networking efforts. Your business has a credible and effective company page, and your personal profile is complete and ready to go.

Here are our top tips for using LinkedIn effectively and strategically.

1. Rock your recommendations

The Recommendations feature is a great way of substantiating your own statements about your abilities, but only if you use it well. Be scrupulous in only requesting recommendations from people who can truly comment on your work, as it puts people in an awkward position if you ask for a recommendation and they barely know you, or have worked with you very briefly.
On the flip side, be discriminating about who you recommend, and particularly try to avoid an “I’ll do yours if you do mine” approach – readers can easily see whether all of your recommendations are reciprocal, and this may undermine the credibility of both the recommendation and your personal integrity.

2. Connect consistently.

Do you want your network to consist of colleagues and regular contacts, or are you happy to connect with people you’ve met briefly at a networking event – or perhaps someone you have never spoken to, but share a common interest group with?  There’s no right or wrong answer to this; in some industries, a small, “close contacts only” network might work best, but remember that the larger your connection list, the more likely it is that someone you want to approach on a professional level will be within your wider network.
You may see people using the acronym “LION” in their profile heading – this stands for “LinkedIn Open Networker” and indicates that they are happy to connect with all comers.
You might want to include a short statement about your connection policy within your own profile, especially if you’re restricting to a small group for some reason.

3. Perfect your profile.

On the top menu, click “More..” and then “Get more applications”. This will show you a number of apps which can be added to your profile, ranging from being able to upload presentation to connecting up your blog so that new posts show on your profile. Certain professions, such as the Legal sector, have a number of sector-specific applications. Have a look around and add anything that will give additional depth to your profile and help to show off your strengths.

4. Be clever with your Groups.

Join a manageable number of relevant groups, but think out of the box a little – rather than hanging out where all of your sector colleagues are, give some thought to the kinds of groups your prospective customers might join, and get involved in those too.

5. Be a brilliant contributor.

Respond to discussion threads in your groups – but make sure you stick to your areas of knowledge and experience if you’re going to give advice or make bold statements, because you can be sure someone out there will call you on it if you don’t!
Avoid posting “naked” links – those with no commentary about what the link is to and why it might interest your fellow Group members – especially if those links are at all self promotional, ie to your company website / press releases. That section of the group is called “discussions” for a reason! Posting a lot of links to what is basically advertorial just looks low rent, and doesn’t do anything to enrich the value that your fellow members get from the group.

If you’ve got a point to make about something you know well though, absolutely do start a discussion thread. If you hit on something interesting and / or controversial, these threads can take on a real life of their own! Here’s a thread we started about the commercial value of Twitter followers which drew over  141 comments, and drove a significant amount of traffic to our website over almost a month. “Follow my Facebook page / Twitter account” threads – are we all kidding ourselves?

So, those are our tips for starting to become a LinkedIn superstar. What have we missed, that’s worked really well for you?

So, what’s new in the new Business Page and how can you make the most of it? Here are the key things you should be doing…

1. Post on other pages AS YOUR BUSINESS.

This is the biggie for most people – for the first time, you can directly post onto another page as your business, rather than your personal profile. To do this, just use the Account > Use Facebook As option from the menu on the top right, and choose the “switch to” button next to the page you want to post from.

From a strategic point of view this change is enormous, and something many people have been asking for for a long time. It allows you to completely separate your business and personal life on Facebook (yes, we know all social media is personal, but there’s personal and personal – everyone has at least one shot of themselves in fancy dress / with an unfortunate Sixth Form haircut that they don’t necessarily want to share with the whole world!) and provides enormous opportunities to promote your brand when interacting with other businesses.

Just one note – to keep that personal element, don’t just become a logo! Remember to sign off using your own name when posting as your business; people still want to know who they’re talking to and it’s just polite.

2. Add some images.

Not for absolutely every business perhaps, but in the new format any visuals you upload will be showcased across the top of your Page.  If you don’t have beautiful looking products, consider putting in some shots of your staff or even your premises – it’ll all help build rapport with page users.

If you already have a lot of photos uploaded against your page, you may want to control which ones appear in that top banner – to do this, just hover over a shot and click the “X” that appears if you don’t want it included in the showcase selection. Unfortunately, despite some very cool demo uses of this feature, it’s not currently possible for Admins to totally control the order that the remaining shots appear in.

3. Get your Wall Posts under control.

By default, Facebook now displayes wall posts in order of “activity” – presumably a new algorithm taking into account newness, number and size of comments, likers etc. In some ways this is great because a lively debate will always be promoted to the top of your Wall to be seen by all.

However, on a busy page it can make it very difficult to spot new posts at a glance, which could mean you accidentally ignore comments. To get the old, chronological order back, look in the menu in the left hand column (beneath your branding). There’s an option called Admin View under the Wall link, which if clicked will put everything back in order of posting.** Edit – from roughly 2nd March 2011 this has been revised again and the Admin View option removed. To reinstate chronological order now, look for a little downward-facing arrow next to your page name at the top right of the wall. This will allow you to switch between “most recent” and “top posts”

4. Optimise your branding

The change in overall layout has slightly reduced the size of your main branding area, on the left hand side of the page. The new area is 180 pixels by 540, so you may want to resize any custom branding properly in a graphics package, and re-upload it.

If you don’t, Facebook tends to attack the image with its own resizing function which can sometimes leave graphics looking rather the worse for wear.

5. Check your notifications

Take a look at the top left hand corner of your Business page. You now have the same set of icons as for your personal profile! These will notify you about new Likers and any new interactions with your page, making it much easier to get at this information than before. Wall posts used to be easy to spot, but comments on photographs, for example, much less so unless you loaded each one to check.

Facebook is also generating these notifications as emails, so as a side effect you may also find that your Inbox is becoming overloaded. If you want to switch these off and just check the page, switch back to your personal profile, go to Account > Account Settings, go to the Notifications tab, and under the Pages section there’s a link for “change email settings for individual pages” which will allows you to control this.

We hope that’s helpful, and do let us know how you get on with the new format!