Skilled media professionals have the ethics and workflow strategies in place to excel in the digital age. It’s simply a matter of translating existing best practices to your platforms of choice.
Make the most of your social media presence by following these recommendations:
- Sign up for Google+ authorship.
Make your byline work harder for you. Once you’ve signed up for Google+ authorship, your articles will be personalized with your Google+ profile photo in search results. And, you’ll have access to some useful analytics too. Learn more here. - Link to your other social platform in your Google+ About section.
Be sure Google knows how relevant you are across the social media universe and your readers know where else to find your insightful posts. Include all your social media accounts in the Links section of your Google+ About page. - Link to your website above the fold of your Facebook profile.
Drive traffic to your site by including a link to your homepage in the first two lines of your publication’s About section on Facebook. Readers are more likely to visit and bookmark your site if it’s one click away. - Turn on your Facebook subscription feed.
Encourage readers to follow your posts without needing to Friend you. Add a Follow button to your personal Facebook page by clicking on Settings, Followers, then Who Can Follow Me, and from there selecting Everybody. - Make LinkedIn posts using the share button on your site.
This lets LinkedIn know that your site content is the first stop online for the latest and greatest information in your field and that it’s share worthy. The LinkedIn share button on your site also conveniently lets you use one click to share the same link as an update, as a post to multiple LinkedIn groups and to Twitter as well. - Personalize your LinkedIn URL.
Customize the URL for your LinkedIn profile to match your byline. This creates a stronger affiliation between your profile and your personal brand and helps turn up your profile in search results as well. - Filter your LinkedIn contacts.
Connect with experts more quickly by filtering your contacts into useful categories. Get started by hovering your cursor over Network, clicking Contacts, hovering over a single contact and clicking Tag. You can assign multiple tags to any given contact and of course many contacts to each tag. - Become a LinkedIn Influencer.
Soon, influencers won’t be limited to the 500 leaders and motivators that LinkedIn hand-selected. You’ll be able to publish blog-style content on the site and become recognized as a thought leader in your field too. LinkedIn is rolling out this feature for users gradually; so watch for it on your page.
And one more helpful reminder:
Each platform preferences complete profiles when in returns search results. More of the people you want to find you will be able to do so faster when your profiles are complete.
Media pros who took part in a recent workshop that I led found these particular tips worthwhile. Feel free to leave a comment with your best social media advice for journalists and editors.
Deanna Utroske is the Social Media Brand Director for New York Women in Communications and writes on women’s career issues, lifestyle topics and more. Follow her on Twitter @DeannaUtroske