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...

In my post titled, Social Networking Platforms Part 2: Facebook, I mentioned that I’d cover Facebook’s built-in analytics capabilities and external tools you can use to measure how you’re social media efforts are doing. And as promised, that’s what my next two posts will focus on.

Facebook’s built-in analytics, called Insights, are a great way to gauge your progress with this platform, both as you’re first getting started as well as long-term. And it’s free!

Insights on Insights

Insights give page administrators an Overview look at Total Likes, Friends of Fans, People Talking About This (total likes, shares, comments, etc. for your posts), Weekly Total Reach (number of  people who have seen content from your page) and total Followers as both total current numbers and as a percentage increase/...

There are a lot of social networking platforms on the web today—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Myspace, Meetup, myLife and the new Pheed to name only a few. Unless you have unlimited headcount, chances are, you can’t possibly create and maintain a social presence for your company on all of them, let alone more than one or two. That’s why, in this week’s addition to the partner social media series, I start addressing some of the most popular platforms—Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

I’ll say that with the caveat that overall Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and YouTube were the top five social media tools used by marketers, with Facebook leading the pack. But if you break it down by business-to-business marketers—like you and myself—marketers are more focused on LinkedIn, Twitter and blogging. That’s, at least, according to...

Social media—by now almost every company knows they need to get on board in some way, but many don’t know where to start. Many have started that Facebook page or put out a few tweets only to lose momentum. Others inspire envy in their seemingly effortless success with thousands of followers and comments galore.

To help you be the latter instead of  the former,  the Symantec Partner Digital Strategy team and I will be offering tips and tricks in a series of posts starting today, complete with guidance and case studies to help you better navigate how to use social media for your business and connect with your customers. We’ll start small and drill down over time.

And we’d love to hear from you—what are your own successes, challenges, what would you like to know more about. We also invite you to join us online on Twitter and Facebook.

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