Tap into Linkedin for Expanding Your Network

Businesses now understand the importance of using Facebook and Twitter for marketing. However many small businesses have failed to tap the power and reach of Linkedin.com, the popular social networking site frequented by professionals, career aspirants, business owners, corporate leaders and self-employed people.

Linkedin can be a powerful tool for online marketing and business needs. Unlike Facebook, Linkedin is not merely a social networking site where you can post comments or pictures. Rather Linkedin is a huge network of influential people from around the world who are there to establish contacts with people relevant to their business.

Here is why you must utilize this powerful tool for your business:

Build contacts

Linked-in lets you build a strong network of contacts. You don't need to know the individual in person to get in touch with him/her. Either you can send an introductory message or ask a mutual contact to introduce you to the concerned person. So this way, you can meet potential clients, business providers and experts in your business.

Increased visibility

Having a profile on Linked-in increases your visibility and credibility. People are more likely to do business with you knowing that you have a good number of acquaintances on Linkedin which others also know and trust. Besides, Linkedin pages are also indexed by Google. So if your public profile on Linkedin has a high page-rank on Google, it works great for your business.

Get feedback

Whether you want to know about the feedback of your latest product or service, you can post your business related questions on Linkedin. The Answers feature on Linkedin allows you to share ideas, post questions to your connections and give suggestions. In short, you get instant feedback.

Hire new people

Linkedin is an effective platform for sourcing new talent. Whenever you require new people for your organization, you can easily search relevant profiles on Linkedin for recruiting people. This saves a lot of expenditure on discovering or searching for potential candidates.

Linkedin is one of the effective tools for marketing your business. As a CEO or a senior executive, you need to meet new people in business and learn from them. You can join a corporate executive coaching or executive business coaching sessions where you can meet experienced CEOs, presidents and senior executives and learn from their mistakes. You can share your fears without any hesitation as in an executive coaching as everything is confidential and get honest feedback.

Tips to Conduct a Business Meeting Effectively

Meetings are essential but not all meetings are always successful. You may have sometimes got a feeling after particularly stretched out meeting, “What a sheer waste of time. Now let’s get started on work.” Meetings can go off the track if you don't plan well in advance. As the CEO, you need to be thorough and well-prepared to chair a meeting. Here are some tips to help you conduct a meeting which is effective and leads to some fruitful results:

Set a time limit

Set a time limit for the meeting. And make sure to inform everyone attending the meeting about the start-time and end-time. Be precise and try to cover all the topics within the set time. Don't stretch the meeting for too long. It gets boring and is wastage of time as well. Stick to the topics you need to cover in a meeting within a set time limit. This helps you to be more productive as well. You can take inspiration from CEO peer groups or CEO clubs where exact topics are discussed and solutions are provided by the experts within the set time.

Set an agenda

Be sure what you want to discuss in a meeting and set a clear-cut agenda for that. Send a mail to the attendees informing them about the agenda of the meeting and the planned start and end time. This will save unnecessary time of explaining to attendees why they are in a meeting and what needs to be discussed. Besides everyone who has to attend the meeting will get an idea about the topic and can prepare or review any stuff that is to be discussed.

You need to prioritize things. If certain topics can be discussed later on, you should postpone such things till the next meeting.

Be clear about the objective of meeting

Having a discussion on a subject is not enough. As a CEO, you need to clearly outline the objective of the meeting. A meeting is futile if you just discuss about the issue. You need to emphasize what goals need to be achieved and the results you are expecting from the attendees. Assign responsibilities to certain people and set deadlines for them.

Invite executives who are crucial to meeting

Don't invite everyone to the meeting. As the CEO or a senior executive, you need to figure out which people are actually required for the meeting. Calling employees for a meeting who don't have any role to play in the meeting is a sheer waste of time for the employee and the organization too as a whole.

Sum-up

Summarize the meeting by reviewing the actions that need to be taken and targets that need to be accomplished. Besides, identify once again who will be responsible for which task.

Generally for CEOs and top-level senior executives, a good amount of time is spent in meetings, making strategies and in discussions. How you utilize your time in a meeting influences your organization's future and growth.

As a CEO, you need to keep improvising and learning new things to stay ahead of competition. You can join a CEO club or a corporate executive coaching where you can share your ideas with the other experienced CEOs from the non-competing industries and get practical solutions. Being in a CEO corporate association would help you understand how to conduct a meeting effectively and get maximum results.

6 Tips for Using Twitter For Business Communication

Wondering what 140 characters of text can do for your business? If used smartly, Twitter can be a very powerful tool for marketing your business and enhancing your online presence. A business profile on Twitter with regular, informative tweets is a great way of keeping in touch with people who would like to know more about your products or services.

Twitter is easy-to-use micro-blogging site which helps everyone from business owners and CEOs to companies and marketing personnel to keep themselves connected with their target audience with short, insightful posts.

Here are some top benefits of using Twitter:

• The popularity of Twitter has ensured that a major part of your target audience is on this social networking website, sharing and discussing ideas, products, services, experiences and opinions. Once you start posting on your products and services or offerings with catchy tweets, you may start attracting interested followers. You can thus keep your followers updated on your business offerings, plans and products.

• Follow people who are tweeting on topics and issues that concern your business. Retweeting these posts, posting responses and offering solutions help increase visibility of your profile and business. You can even send direct messages to followers who are interested in your business offerings.

• Your competitors too are on Twitter. Follow them, go through their tweets and you may get some good ideas about how to respond to customer queries, announce business expansion plans, launch new products and interact with the target audience. Being on Twitter is an easy way of monitoring your competition.

• Twitter is also SEO-friendly. By posting a tweet along with a URL, you can redirect the traffic to the targeted landing page. And if you have your company's blog, you can advertise the blog posts on Twitter.

• You can use Twitter on your mobile device as well.

• You can use Twitter for recruitment purpose too. Tweet about the job requirement and you may soon receive responses from potential candidates.

Twitter is easy and very convenient to use. Best part is you can market your brand or business openly. Twitter allows you to keep your products, services, brand and business out there for everybody to see.

Twitter is of course, like any other social networking site where you can reach out to many people at once through the virtual media and keep yourself informed about the latest developments in your industry. But when it comes to knowing more about managing your business effectively, a face-to-face interaction with your peers or fellow business owners is always a preferred option.

Seek the company of experienced entrepreneurs through CEO clubs and CEO associations or join a reliable CEO peer group in your city. Attending an executive business coaching session is also a good way of getting hand-on knowledge about how to manage your business better.

How To Market your Business On Facebook

In my last blog post, I had talked about why you must consider using Facebook for promoting your small business. In this blog I will be discussing about how you can use Facebook to the maximum advantage for your business.

Create a profile and a Fan Page

Facebook is free. You can create your profile and in the 'About Me' section you can mention about what your business is all about. Do include your photo in the profile as it lends credibility and the people looking for you can find you easily.

A profile on Facebook is basically ideal for personal use. However, a regular Facebook profile page would not work for a business. You are allowed to make only one account and use your real name for creating the profile. For business purposes, you must create a Fan page. A Fan Page can be created for a business, celebrity, event, some products, books, movies or anything. You can customize the Fan page by providing details about your business and put the logo of your company or a photo of your brand in the profile picture. When you write about your business, use crispy language to attract people and hold their attention and provide them with all the latest updates about your products, services, special offers, discount schemes and so on. 

Build an online community

Unlike a profile page, you do not send friend requests here. But you can always invite your friends or customers to ‘like’ your page. You can post about the new events related to your business such as launch of a new product or opening of a new branch and share useful tips or relevant news items with your customers.

If you have written a new blog post or have updated your website, you can post the urls on your Fan page with a catchy wall post.

You can also participate in the discussion boards, create questions for making your page more interactive, upload videos and photos and add your company’s YouTube channel. All these interactive features allow you to build a strong online community and stay in touch with your existing and potential customers. 

Be active on different groups

Apart from your own Fan page, you should also search for other groups which are relevant to your business and industry and join them. For instance, if you own an apparel shop, you can join various groups related to the textile industry. Once you join the group, you can take part in the discussion forums and share interesting tips and ideas.

Facebook is just one of the ways for marketing your business. In order to create a strong niche for yourself in market and establish a strong brand, you need to make efforts consistently and have patience. After all, a strong online presence is not built in a day. You have to work towards it. You can also be a part of interactive CEO Club or executive business coaching sessions where CEOs, presidents and senior executive meet once per month for a half day. In CEO Conference you can learn new ways and strategies to take your business to a higher level by discussing new strategies for utilizing social media optimally.

Benefits of a Facebook Business Page For Small Businesses

You must be having your personal profile on Facebook. But if you are looking to promote your small business on the web, the Facebook Business Page can prove to be a very effective platform.

Today, Facebook is the biggest social networking site with billions of users all over the world. Facebook is a sort of a big platform for business owners to advertise about their business. If used properly, Facebook can be a boon for reaching your target audience and boosting visibility for your small business.

Facebook is appealing

Facebook is very user-friendly. It is easy to use and appeals to all age groups of people. It is not complex like other software applications. Instead, Facebook offers quite an informal and casual approach to interact with your friends and customers and attract new potential customers.

Management is in your hands

Facebook gives you the freedom to manage your business page on your own. The entire control over the page, its content, images, and applications rests in your hand. You can control what you post and display or hide comments from customers. Besides you can post photos of the new products you are going to launch.

Instant feedback

The best part of Facebook is the instant feedback you receive from people. If you have launched a new product or a service, you can directly ask your fans on your Facebook Business page about their response or start a discussion or a contest, or announce a free offer.

If your customers are satisfied with your products, they would happily offer positive response and share your posts further with their friends.  The interactive nature of Facebook helps you to get some vital insights into customer behavior, their needs and their response towards your product.

These insights help you to work towards improving the quality of products by using the suggestions or recommendations offered by your customers.  You can also ask members in your  CEO Club or CEO Association for suggestions to improve the quality of your products and market it well on Facebook.

Search Engine Optimization

Facebook is extremely beneficial in terms of search engine marketing and optimization. You can post back links to your website as well as link your Facebook page from your site. If promoted well, your Facebook business page can appear in Google searches for relevant keywords. In short having a business page on Facebook extends your presence on the World Wide Web.

In order to stay ahead in competition these days, you have to stay updated and use Facebook for advertizing your business and your products and services. You can take the help of  CEO peer groups  or   CEO Clubs where members from non-competing industries can give you some good ideas on how they have used Facebook for boosting their sales, enhancing their brand visibility and promoting their business.

Tips To Build Strong Networking For Small Businesses

One of the most important things for small businesses is to develop a good network which will help their business to grow and flourish. Networking with the right people can get you good business whereas with the wrong people it is a complete waste of time. Here are some of the effective ways to build a strong networking with the right kind of people:

Do social networking

Internet is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to build network. Build a profile on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus to build connections with the right people and groups that are relevant to your business. Participate in the Q&A area or discussion forums, give your suggestions and post your queries. You can also create separate Facebook pages for your company's profile, its products and services. You can also join Twitter for advertising about your products.

Attend conferences

You can attend conferences or seminars which give you opportunities to make valuable business connections. You can also participate in a trade show and exhibit your products.

Be tactful

Steer clear of self promotion in the first meeting. It sends a wrong impression when you start a conversation with a business card. Rather talk about world-affairs or economy in general but do not promote your business. And end your conversation with an open-ended question which will prompt the person to provide you information about their business. And once you hold a healthy conversation, then hand over your business card which will not only give the recipient important contact information about your business but also reinforce your brand in the potential customer's mind.

It is essential to establish network with as many people as you can but it is equally important to build connections with the right people. So figure out who your potential customers are and focus on them. You can also join a or CEO Association in Atlanta

or anywhere else where you get to meet experienced entrepreneurs with whom you can share your concerns without any hesitation and get expert advice.

But keep in mind that a  CEO corporate association is not a place to build network. Rather it provides you a platform to conveniently share your ideas in a secure environment where what you discuss is never leaked out of the room and get practical tips to build a strong network from the experts themselves.

Practical and Proven Tips To Expand Your Business

When you first launch a new business, you have to do a lot of research - reading books on business, seeking advice from counselors, investing a lot of your time and money. And now that your business is well established, you can expand your business further to reap higher profits.

But keep in mind that expanding business requires as much effort and research as starting a new business. So here are a few tips to help you expand a small or medium sized business:

• Expanding business requires more staff. So make it a point to hire the most efficient employees who can take your company to new heights. Besides you can also recruit interns from college and universities who are dedicated and work for free just to gain experience. Hiring such interns will save you money and besides you may also come across really talented people who are willing to learn and can be an asset for your company in future.

• The Internet has made it so much easier for small and medium sized companies to reach wider market. A well-designed website can help you showcase your products and services to your potential customers far and wide. Besides the usage of Internet helps you advertize about your business in a cheaper way. For instance, you can publish your press releases in free press releases distribution sites or start a Business Page in a major social networking site such as Facebook.

• Another way to expand your business is by diversifying your products and services. For instance, if you manufacture hair oil, shampoos and other hair care products, you can start manufacturing other cosmetic products as well such as moisturizers, lotions and creams. The idea is to manufacture or sell complementary products or services that allow you to generate multiple streams of income from different sources and increase your profit margins. 

• Apart from all this, keep one extremely important point in mind. Don't spend all your savings and revenues in expanding the business. You never know how beneficial the expansion of the business would be, and spending all your resources on one thing can be a fatal mistake.  Be cautious not to spread your resources too thin, and save a tidy amount as reserves.

Be wise and expand your business step by step. You can take advice from other CEOs and experts by joining  CEO Clubs or  CEO Associations . At  CEO Clubs in Atlanta  or anywhere else, CEOs and executives from non-competing industries meet and here you can discuss your problems and share your ideas to expand your business without any hesitation.