Social Media Presentation to Partners in Wealth Group
Another big thank you to the folks at Partners in Wealth who invited me to speak about social media during their May luncheon at Ouisie’s Table. You can check out the slides from my presentation on slideshare. I also thoroughly enjoyed their other presentation that day regarding Financial Assistance to Grown Children: How to Give without Promoting Dependence – lots of good seeds planted even for my young children. Following are a couple highlights from my presentation regarding why non-profit board members need to participate in social media and using social networking sites to drive traffic to your blog.
One of my first questions for this group which included several retirees was how many folks participated on the board of non-profits in the room and I noticed several hands. Many Arrow-Tips readers are probably well aware of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for non-profits, but have you thought about the many ways LinkedIn can help with your favorite non-profits? Think about all of the people that you know that you may not even realize could be useful to your pet charity. Here is an example – say your charity requires catering for an upcoming fundraising event and you would like to find restaurant owners that are willing to provide discounts. The event manager conducts a LinkedIn search on the restaurant industry and voila, a list comes up of local restaurateurs with 2nd level connections (see thumbnail below). After a quick perusal of the list, our event manager discovers that one of the charity board members is directly connected to one of the restaurant owners and now she has a warm introduction to help secure the connection.
Of course, our event manager will only be able to find board member connections if they actually have a profile set up on LinkedIn. Now you might be thinking that the board member could easily make this referral without Linkedin and you would be correct as long as the board member knows what all the event manager’s needs are – not a very likely scenario.
We also discussed driving traffic to your blog. Many bloggers post links to their most recent blog entries on Twitter or in their Facebook status updates, but here are three other ways to drive traffic to your blog from other social media sites.
- LinkedIn Answers– Monioring questions on LinkedIn in the Question/Answer forum will not only give you a way to establish your expertise in a given topic, but could also give you a way to direct questioners to your blog if you have a post that answers one of their specific questions. I’ve also created blog posts based on my answers to LinkedIn questions. You have the option to list a blog link when you post your answer and answers can be edited after the fact if you write a blog post after the fact.
- Networked Blogs– Networked Blogs is a Facebook application that allows you to create a page just for your blog. Facebook users can fan your blog on this page and the page can be set up to publish links to your blog as new posts are published. I was surprised how much traffic was generated to Arrow-Tips from this application.
- Other Blog Comments – In most cases, when you leave a comment on another blog, you can provide a link back to your own blog. For blogs with synergistic themes to your own, this technique can be especially helpful.
Another big thank you to Jim Waters of Partners in Wealth for inviting me to speak with their clients and partners. Coming up this month, look for a post regarding online back up services and more in my Using SharePoint to Communicate KPI series. Until then, happy hunting!
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