You may have started to find that people you follow on Twitter are appending the hash-tags #in or #li to their tweets.

Basically, what has happened is, Linked-In (www.linkedin.com) has started integration with Twitter allowing its members to make their Twitter feed available to their Linked-In profiles.

Unlike many similar integrations, Linked-In allows you to select all Tweets to display or just the ones with the #in hash-tag appended.

A word of warning, Linked-In say that you can append #in or #li in their newsletter, but in the settings it only mentions #in, so if you want to feed your tweets into Linked-In be safe and stick with #in.

As an example, I just tweeted the following post. You can then see it displayed in our Linked-In status without any copy/paste or other nonsense. Very cool!
Don’t forget, appending the #in hash-tag to your Tweets will save you time as you don’t have to post the same status to Linked-In also.

Feel free to connect with me on Linked-In at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/fasttrackit

With so many different ways to market our companies, services and products online nowadays it's often difficult to know which we should spend the most time on.

It would be nice if we had a framework, a guiding tool, to help us decide which way is best.

A very easy way to start to define your online marketing strategy is to follow our framework guidelines. We call this the Internet Marketing Landscape and at this stage it covers content only. i.e it does not cover advertising such as pay-per-click, banners or search marketing such as SEO etc.

The landscape starts with 4 main dimensions;

1. Conversations
2. Profiles
3. Sales
4. Support

You can think of these dimensions as quadrants of the bigger picture. Our aim is to slot our online marketing activities into 1 or more of these, the more dimensions they hit, the more valuable they are.

Let's take a commercial website as an example. This is certainly part of the sales dimension but it's only a one way communication channel so it doesn't sit in support or conversions, just sales and profile. How about our linked-in account? Well this sits in profile and possibly, a little bit, in conversations but not support or sales.

Our blog crosses all dimensions, it has the ability to sell, support, encourage conversations through comments and also provide profile information. In actual fact blogs, if used well, are one of the strongest components of the landscape. What about Twitter? Well again it's a great conversation platform, it can also be used for support but we aren't using it for this.

Most businesses will use many different online strategies and systems, some may use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and others won't use any of these. The ways in which these systems are used are also quite different so it's important that you map your own businesses onto the landscape.

Once you're done, you should look for the items which cross the most dimensions. In our example above, our blog is the strongest. So we should look to publish content to it as frequently as possible, next is our website, so again we should look at updating the content on our website on a regular basis.

However, this is not to say that you should neglect things like eBay or Amazon, which produce sales. The landscape is more about allocation of resource for updates, so that you can divide your online marketing time and budget accordingly.

Are you getting the most out of Linked-In?

Many people in business have a Linked-In profile nowadays but many are not getting the most out of the service!

Some people see Linked-In as just another website where they can promote themselves or their companies. Well this is certainly the case but it also comes with features that are not only passive but proactive in lead generation.

The real value of Linked-In is your connections and the 2nd and 3rd removed connections. i.e. You connect to your business contacts that connect to others who connect to yet more people. This is called your “Network of Trusted Professionals” whom you are able to connect with either directly or through introductions.

As an example, if you have 50 direct connections this could translate to around 500,000 trusted professionals that you can leverage through introductions. (These figures are for illustration only)

Getting in contact

Lets say that you are looking to partner with a company on a particular project or are interested in connecting with a particular business sector. Linked-In provides you with a search function which allows you to find people based on criteria you provide.

From the results you have 2 options;
1. Be introduced to these people through an existing connection of yours or
2. Send an In-Mail^TM

Introductions are free to all users and can be quite effective especially if you are trusted and well-known by the individual who’s introducing you.

In-Mail^TM don’t require any intervention by your connections and can be sent to any Linked-In member that allows In-Mail^TM messages. However, this service is charged for but comes with a guarantee of response. E.g. If you don’t get a response from the member within 7 days of sending your message, Linked-In credits your account with an In-Mail^TM message. The chaps at Linked-In say that In-Mails^TM are charged for because they help reduce SPAM and therefore In-Mails^TM are normally considered by recipients of them as more of an opportunity than just junk.

Building your profile

Linked-In is a significant website, that is to say that it is trusted by major search engines. If you are a member of Linked-In and you search for yourself in Google, your Linked-In profile is very likely to be found. Likewise the information you have loaded into your profile will be associated with your profile page and if your profile links to your own website you could be adding value to your website as a result.

Your profiles completeness is recorded in the bottom left hand corner of your Linked-In home page, try to get this as high as possible by completing as many sections as you can.

Get Recommended

Recommendations are great tools in assisting your sales process and Linked-In provides you with the ability to ask for recommendations and approve those recommendations before they are published on your profile.

Once you have some recommendations on your account you can direct prospects to your profile and show them that these recommendations have come from real customers and business partners and show more credibility in your company.

Answer Questions

Linked-In provides a facility for any member to ask questions. Other members can then answer these questions and be scored by the answers they give. If you provide the best answer, the person that raised the question will normally flag you as the expert and this will be displayed on your profile.

Answering questions adds value in two ways;

1) Questions and answers are picked up in search engines such as Google and will be displayed to Internet users that are asking the same questions.
2) If you get flagged as giving the “Best Answer” you will be considered an expert in that field and again this can be used to add further credibility to your profile.

General points for social networking

Generally networking websites are great for distributing your message and getting in-front of a wider audience. Some are more effective than others and we feel that Linked-In is one to interact with at least once a day.

Others such as Facebook, Twitter, StubmleUpon and Digg (to name just a few) are also useful but are less business focused but can be used to increase the traffic to your website and in some cases improve your websites visibility in search engines.