Tag: marketing

Net gains (1)

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Can customers find you on Google?

Here's a test: type your name into Google and press search. Does it find you? Are you on the first page?

If, like me, you have an unusual surname, you are at an advantage here, so let's make it fairer and try a slightly revised test. Type your name and profession – journalist, actor, musician or whatever more specialist job description you like to use – into the Google search bar. Does Google find you? Are you on the first page?

Online presence

Adding a web presence is becoming increasingly important. No matter what we do for a living, we need to make sure the people who might want to buy our services can find us easily online.

There are a whole host of things you can do to boost your web presence. You certainly need your own website, you probably ought to blog, and you need to make sure all your online profiles are up to date and, wherever possible, linked together. That means making sure your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger and other profiles are up to date and linked together.

Google Profile

Perhaps the first profile you need to update is your Google profile. Google is the most popular search engine so it makes sense to start by getting your profile within its sprawling empire is correct. If you have not already done so, register your Google account and complete your profile. Provide as much detail as you can and make sure you make your profile public.

You will have the opportunity to link your profile to your YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts and many others. You can also add your own blogs and websites. Consider linking direct to pages that are about you or contain your CV. Separately, you can add links to relevant websites. These may be clients or other examples of your work.

All of this means having up-to-date accounts on social media outlets such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. We'll look at all of those next.

Finding your way through the jungle – the different types of social media

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Whether you're a big fan or a 'rabbit in the headlights' when it comes to social media, the phenomenon is here to stay and developing apace.

For freelances, it can be a productive and cost-effective way of marketing yourself - especially as many of your target audience will be using this form of communication. This means it's worth trying to get your head around the possibilities and keep up with the changes.

So, what about an overview as a starter for ten?

There are varied types of social media and it's become an umbrella term for a wide variety of online platforms and ways of communicating.

Wikipedia’s entry on Social Media is helpful here as it cites Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, who created a classification scheme for social media types in their article, Business Horizons (2010). The grouping of the different forms into types is particularly useful in thinking about social media platforms.

According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media:

  • collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia)
  • blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter)
  • content communities (e.g. Youtube)
  • social networking sites (e.g. Facebook)
  • virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft)
  • virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life).

Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.

The following clip gets a little deeper into the idea.

If you are reading this and would like to comment, please let us know which types of social media you're using and which ones you would like to learn more about so that you can use them for your business? If we get feedback we can look at scheduling Lunchtime and Twilight training sessions.