We just finished up Day 4 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business that Howell Marketing is hosting with us.  We covered a lot of ground today – and I worked hard to make sure that the information was tailored to the questions that our crowd had yesterday in the Facebook 101 course.

The most pressing questions had to do with effective methods for using Facebook Fan Pages to market a business – a burning question in a lot of marketing minds right now.  I covered the Fan Page sales funnel that is a great method for drawing people to your Facebook presence, engaging them, and offering multiple ways for them to take action.

Here are the slides from today’s presentation:

Day 3 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business was an intro to using Facebook for marketing your business.  Since our surveys told us that most of the class already had accounts, we decided to skip the really elementary material and jump right into something really helpful: how you can separate your personal and professional life on Facebook.

Like all the other days of this seminar, we talked a great deal about strategy.  If someone doesn’t claim the saying “in all things, have strategy” then I’m going to!  Here are the slides from our class today:

Tomorrow we’re going to cover:

• Fan pages vs Groups
• Advertising
• How to grow your Page and add Fans
• Best practices for B-to-B organizations

LinkedIn recently announced a way to allow you to tie your Twitter status updates to your LinkedIn status.  That’s great news!  (Except for those of us who spent hours figuring out the best way to make that happen 6 months ago, of course).

With that capability from LinkedIn, you no longer have to use Ping.fm and a Ping-capable Twitter client (Twhirl ruled for this very reason, and Tweetie for iPhone did as well, but has recently dropped Ping.fm integration in their newest version).
Here is my thoughts on why you would not want to link your Twitter status to LinkedIn:

The audience and messaging is completely different!  The very conversational style of Twitter does not exactly trasnslate to the more static and less-interactive status updates on LinkedIn.  I personally struggled with this for a while before deciding to turn off the old system that I used to achieve this (using Ping.fm).   Many times I didn’t even think about it- but then I would login to LinkedIn and see that my last update was a picture at dinner or something from the previous night.  That wasn’t the kind of content that I wanted people to see on my profile, so I killed it.

This has a lot to do with our discussions in class this week on using Social Media for Business: the importance of maintaining your professionalism on social networks if your goal is to promote/use for your business.

One other thing we covered is the TweetDeck, which recently released an update that solves many of these issues for you.  The latest version (v0.32.0) eases these issues by allowing you to pick and choose which networks you would like to post to:  Multiple Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook (both personal profiles and pages you administer), and even MySpace.  Very cool – check it out!

Today’s class focused on more intermediate to advanced Twitter strategy.  We continued with the rest of our P.L.E.T. strategy for successfully using Twitter:  Listening, Engaging, and Tracking

We also talked about RSS and the power of giving people a ’stream’ of your content.  Here is a copy of our slides from today’s class:

Awesome first class in our Social Media Crash Course for Business series that we’re hosting with Howell Marketing Strategies! We covered the basics of social media:  why it’s important and why you should evaluate these tools and see if they are a fit for you organization.

The top 2 reasons were:

1. 3 out of 4 Americans are using Social technology
2. Social media marketing is like word of mouth…. on steroids

Here’s a copy of the slides that we presented to our 11/30 class: