I’ve written before about Facebook, and given that it has more than one billion active users and is the world’s largest social network, the opportunity for you as a partner is huge. Enticing potential customers with engaging content on Facebook can be a great way to build qualified leads and increase your firm’s revenues.

But what does effective social media content on Facebook look like? How can you craft compelling and interesting content for your Facebook page? In this post, I share a few tips and best practices on increasing reach and engagement through Facebook.

Develop a company voice and content calendar
Find a voice that feels natural for your organization. If your firm were a person, what would “you” be like? Authoritative? Helpful? Humorous? Once you determine your organization’s voice, stick with...

Hashtags—or # symbols, such as #SYMCPartners—are digital markers used to identify keywords or topics in a Tweet on Twitter. They were created organically on Twitter by users as a way to categorize and find messages more easily.

According to Twitter:

• People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in a Tweet to categorize the Tweet and help it show up more easily in a Twitter Search—think of it as you would a keyword entered into a search in Google or Bing—an identifiable word or phrase so you can more quickly find what you’re looking for.
• Clicking on a “hashtagged” word in any message shows you all other Tweets marked with that tag or keyword.
• Hashtags can be used anywhere in a Tweet—at the beginning, middle or end.
• “Hashtagged...

We’ve all read books or stumbled on to what seemed to be a great web site only to close the cover or our browser and find another topic. Why? Because the content, the story, what we were reading, just didn’t grab us or deliver on our expectations.

It’s not terribly different with social media. If the tweet or the post doesn’t resonate, readers/fans won’t like it or retweet it and eventually, they may stop reading that author altogether. This is one of the major things that makes our roles as social media managers—whether as part of a bigger job or as a dedicated gig—the most challenging, finding what our audience—our customer—will respond to, today, tomorrow and next week.

Ultimately though, it doesn’t have to be that hard, and we can always benefit from experimentation and refinement. Few companies enjoy the luxury of enough budget to do deep customer research, but customer research doesn’t have to be...

Happy New Year, Partners! Here's a fresh opportunity to recommit yourself and/or your company to efforts on social channels. And if there’s one place your company should have a social presence, it’s on LinkedIn. This channel keeps it strictly business…no pictures of what your colleague had for breakfast or their kid’s first birthday party (not that I'm against eating or celebrating!).

Chances are you already have a personal LinkedIn account – along with 175 million other users on the site. This week, I’ll share three easy, no-cost steps to help increase your company’s visibility on the site.

1. Create or update the LinkedIn page for your company.
If you don’t yet have a LinkedIn page for your company, create one – it doesn’t take that long and provides free online real estate for your company where others who are like-minded are...