Facebook- Facebook is great for promoting events and joining groups to share your brand, ideas and products to those interested in your industry. One of the main characteristics of Facebook is leveraging the news feed feature. You can post to all of your profiles at one time, including Facebook, from Ping.fm.

LinkedIn- There are many features on LinkedIn such as the ability to announce your website or service, drive readers to blog posts, answer others’ questions on LinkedIn Answers and research potential clients or colleagues. There is no nofollow on LinkedIn links, so they can help build clean links to your company site, while also ranking in search engine results. For this LinkedIn is great for SEO. With Google’s new Social Search, your interactions on all these networks will help with search engine results if you’re strategic with your keywords and link postings. LinkedIn also works with Twitter – here’s a post that discusses it: http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/09/allen-blue-twitter-and-linkedin-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-chocolate/ Integrating your LinkedIn account with Twitter is done in the setup process or under Settings.

Twitter- Here is a great post from Chris Brogan on using Twitter for business. http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/ For selective Twitter updates (to post a message from Twitter to Facebook) end your post with #fb. For selective LinkedIn updates, end your post with #in or #li. If you’re going to use Twitter, a great application/client for using it is Hootsuite – Seesmic is also popular. It’s a free download, and will shrink your links, allow you to monitor your brand and keyword mentions. A great application/client for connecting with people is Mr. Tweet, and the for cleaning up your profile is Tweepi.

The Hashtag/Trending Function on Twitter – Twitter has recently become a source for news. People tweet something interesting for others who – instantly- pick up, retweet and move it forward – demonstrating a new form of a modern word of mouth. Eventually, and if a story or announcement is picked up by many, it goes viral and becomes a trending topic that appears at the right side column of the Twitter homepage along with many other websites which follow Twitter trends. It also becomes an interesting topic for bloggers and news publications to cover, not to mention helps search results, since Google’s new ‘live search’ has rolled out. One of the best web portals that covers Twitter Trends is “What the Trend?“. It shows trending Twitter topics along with when they have became trending, how long have they been trending, and why they are trending. *A Savy-strategy is to jump on with a current trend while bundling your trend, increasing the potential of a reforward via the stronger trend.

The Savy Agency is located in beautiful Bend, Oregon. Our local Twitter economy in Bend has grabbed on to the hashtag #inbend. You can find it on twubs: http://twubs.com/inBend Therefore, everything you tweet with #inbend will 1. perk the ears of our local economy and 2. post on twubs and in Bend searches. There are also others in Bend who use /inbend lists – Twitter’s list feature is brand new. And thus using the #inbend hashtags will probably get you added to these lists if the tag is being monitored by the list owner, which it generally is.

A recent study shows the following top 5 digital marketing budget spends -
Blogging (34%)
Microblogging (Twitter) (29%)
Search engine optimization (28%)
Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%)
Email marketing (17%)

As always, have fun out there…
Best,  Christina, The Savy Agency