Month: July 2012

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5 Steps That Helped Increase LinkedIn Search Appearances Five-Fold

Did you know that every minute there happen 177,000 Tweets, 700,000 Facebook messages, 2 million YouTube views, and 7,610 LinkedIn searches [well, according to this source, at least]? It is the latter that impresses me most, as with the former three stats, we’re talking an ocean of data, whereas with LinkedIn searches, we’re looking at a very focused type of activity — professional searches.

LinkedIn is “the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with 161 million members” aboard, and “approximately two new members” signing up every per second [source]. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? Per LinkedIn itself they are actually “on pace to surpass 5.3 billion” searches in 2012. Dividing this by the number of minutes in a year, we arrive at nearly 10,084 professionally-oriented searches a minute, or 168 searches every second.

Wouldn’t you, as a professional no matter what it is that you do, want to take a bite of this pie of (tremendous) opportunity?! So I thought too; and without any prior study or experience went in to improve my LinkedIn profile. And what do you know! With very little effort put into the optimization of my profile, my appearances in LinkedIn search results increased nearly five-fold in two months [going from 65 in the week of May 6 to 324 in the week of July 7]:

Surely many will want to know what exactly it was that I did. And that’s what this post is for… It was the improvement in 5 specific areas of the profile that led to it. Try doing the same and see it goes for you:

1. Optimize Job Titles

As you can see below, I focused on the core things that I do: affiliate marketing, affiliate (program) management, speaking, and consulting:

2. Fill out Publications

Whether you have a list like mine, or a more modest one, it doesn’t matter. Do enter them there, using the space provided for descriptions too.

3. Enter Honors & Awards

This is another great section not to overlook. Build your credibility!

4. Expand the Summary

Use this one to the max! Present yourself beautifully; and remember to use the keywords that you want to be found by:

5. Choose your Skills & Expertise

This is one of my favorite sections. Here you can choose both the already-populated “specialties” (the ones that other people chose before you), and also enter your own:

Good luck; and if you have your own LinkedIn optimization experience to share, I’d love to learn from you! The comments area under this post is all yours.

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Quantity of Quality: Thoughts on Optimum Number of Tweets per Day

If you’re on Twitter, like me, you’ve probably wondered more than once: How many Tweets are too many? What pace do my (current, and prospective) Twitter followers want from me? Hourly? Daily? Where’s that sweet spot?

I myself have been trying both frequent Tweets, and seldom ones, manual, and scheduled… And you know what? I’ve always been noticing that, as in anything, quality always beats the quantity. It may sound obvious, but hear me out. There are slow days, and days when the amount of useful data and high quality content is so massive that the task of content curation — be it on Twitter or Diigo, Paper.li or Shareist, or any other platform in-between — really becomes challenging. Do pace yourself in moments like these! Schedule the speed at which you’re going to be serving the information! A flood is never good. Not even when it’s a flood of high quality content. In fact, in these cases it is even harder to digest, and frustrating to follow (because the “end-consumer” can get quickly upset that they just don’t have the time to eat it all up).

I’ve come to the above conclusion based on my own experience (e.g. Twitter following either slows down, or sometimes even drops, when I dump too much data on their heads). But then I thought: wouldn’t it be also interesting to analyze how frequently some of the top Internet marketing influencers tweet? After some time spent researching, I’d like to show you how things look (the below order is merely alphabetical):

 

Of course, there are also such Twitter users (and tremendous influencers) as @Mashable (with nearly 3,000,000 followers, and an average of 29.4 Tweets per day), Gary Vaynerchuk aka @GaryVee (who is nearing his 1,000,000 followers, posting 35.2 Tweets every day), @ChrisBrogan (48.8), Scott Stratten aka @Unmarketing (57.3), and others who tweet at least once every hour. Most of these either have teams of people responsible for tweeting, or are obsessed (in a good way, but yes, obsessed!) with social media. And frankly, as a user, I find it difficult to follow their streams of consciousness, news, or whatever else. But since they bleed social media, we all expect them to tweet that much… Exceptions aside, it seems that 8 Tweets a day (or less) is that sweet spot. I’m at 14.6. Seems like I need to pace myself too… You?