79% of the United States population has a social media profile. I really don’t even need to go further. I could end the post right here with this statistic. If 79% of the population is somewhere, do you want your business to be there? If you answered "yes," then your business, no matter the industry, should use social media. Simply being present and intentionally representing your brand, on a platform which 79% of the population lives, is beneficial. A strategic social media strategy can also play a major role in the success of your inbound marketing strategy.

How your business can successfully use social media is an entirely different conversation. Some industries have really seen obvious success on social media. To name a few: restaurants, retail, real estate, entertainment and fashion. Many of these industries have a visual product, yet all of them still require informative content to be effective. Yes, some industries are more effective than others with social media marketing, but with intentionality, effort, and commitment, any company, in any industry, can benefit from social media marketing.

Social media is an essential piece of your inbound marketing strategy. Once you’ve created valuable content, social media is a great way to deliver it to your target audience. In addition to being an effective content distribution channel, it can also help you increase your brand awareness and visibility, connect with your audience, capture leads for your business and even drive referral traffic to your website.

Before you begin seeing results from your social media efforts, however, you must start with a solid social media marketing strategy. Below we’ve shared a few tips for businesses that need to start building your strategy and leveraging social media as an effective inbound marketing tool. These tips are the foundation of a successful business social media strategy to help get you started and get you going in the right direction.

I'm starting today's blog post off with a few stats:

• 74% of B2B buyers choose a company that is first to help them with useful content
• 50% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn when making purchase decisions.
• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.
• 7 out of 10 professionals describe LinkedIn as a trustworthy source of professional content.
• 1 out of 3 professionals on the planet are on LinkedIn.
• 200 conversions per minute are happening on LinkedIn.

Okay, great. Let's all give LinkedIn a big pat on the back. Those are some intense and super interesting stats to a person in the B2B marketing and sales industries... or they should be. If you aren't interested in capitalizing on these stats, you can stop reading. If you are interested in a 'hack' to help you capitalize and capture some of this focused attention from LinkedIn, keep reading. 

Did you know that there are bloggers out there who get most of their traffic from social media? You could achieve the same feat for your business, also, but to do that, you will have to be strategic, deliberate, and creative. Not everyone who has a following on social media is able to translate this into substantial traffic to their blog.

Over the past few years, Facebook has changed its algorithm and the way that it shows pages to those who "like" a page. When Facebook first launched pages, most (if not all) of those who “liked” a page would see the posts of the pages they liked in their feed. As more Facebook pages came online and Facebook was pressured to monetize its platform at a more rapid pace, the algorithm was modified so that most of those that liked your page would not see the post unless it was boosted.  

In 2012, Facebook said that the organic reach from a brand page on Facebook would be close to 16%— but recently that percentage has dropped even further. Some experts have estimated that the percentage of followers who actually see any given post is anywhere between 2% and 6% of the total number of people that like your page. So is it worth it to spend time and money focusing on increasing the number of "likes" on your page when only 2% to 6% see the posts? It is if it’s free and easy to do. So here are 3 steps to increasing the number of "likes" of your Facebook Page.

I do a lot of networking in my local business community, and inevitably at each of the meetings I attend, someone will ask me about what I do. I give my company’s “elevator pitch," which includes, “helping companies generate leads for their salespeople, utilizing digital marketing tools and tactics such as blogging, social media, and search engine optimization.” Today, most people understand what I am talking about and mention something about either reading blogs or having a blog.

Facebook recently announced the latest update to the algorithm that drives the feed that users see on Facebook. With the latest changes made by Facebook, you'll see posts from your friends in your feed more often, and you'll see posts from publishers and news outlets less. However, when a news article is shared or liked by someone, it will then be recognized by the algorithm and Facebook will begin to display more of that type of content in that person’s feed. Note that there are settings within Facebook to adjust which pages or friends’ posts you see first—but most users don’t know that even exists.

The goal of writing a blog or creating premium content is to get them shared so they can reach prospects in your target market. With all the content that's out there, how can you craft content that people want to share?

HubSpot Research and BuzzSumo recently released a report analyzing 175,000 B2B and B2C blog posts, looking at how to optimize content for the maximum amount of shares per social network. The study looked into the differences in social shares, content length, and performance on social networks between B2B and B2C posts and broke down the data. Here's what you need to know.

Twitter supposedly has some exciting (yet unofficial) news to announce about their 140-character limit for tweets . (Well, it’s exciting if you are a digital nerd like me and many of my colleagues at LeadG2.) While the news is not public and Twitter has not made any official announcements about it yet, Bloomberg reported that a source leaked the details of an upcoming plan to change the way characters are counted on tweets. 

Writing insightful articles takes time and energy, and you want to get the most out of what you've written. After you spend time researching your topic, writing down your thoughts, editing and proofing, you want to share it with the world—or at least share it with your 500+ LinkedIn contacts and the public. So you may decide to share your thoughts with your LinkedIn network by making a LinkedIn published post… Awesome… You get a few likes and a few shares, and all is good in life. 

Sound familiar? If you are publishing using the LinkedIn long form post format, this might be similar to what you have been doing and hopefully getting some results from. LinkedIn long form posts are a great platform for “blogging” and communicating your ideas and thoughts to those within your network as well as your extended network on LinkedIn.  However, if you are only publishing to LinkedIn and doing nothing else, are you really getting the most out of LinkedIn long-form posts? I say “no”... and here’s why.