Big News in the Social Media world!! As we’ve talked about often, Facebook is rapidly becoming THE go-to tool for Social Media Marketing. Businesses are jumping on the bandwagon and bringing entirely new facets to the art of client interaction.

Facebook, has finally provided something that businesses have been requesting for some time: a migration tool to convert a personal Profile into a Facebook Page.

Why would you want to do that? Profiles are for meant individual people, they aren’t suited to meet your business needs. Pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures with better communication, more opportunities for expression, and improved relevancy.

Gone are the days of using a personal profile that was setup with a business name and “friending” as many people as possible. The most prevalent issue with this strategy (aside from violating Facebook’s Terms of Service), is that a personal profile has a 5,000 friend limit.

The migration tool allows you to convert that personal profile into a Page, and carry all of your friends over there with you. This is far superior to creating a new Page for your business and “Suggesting to Friends” using Facebook’s admin tool, which typically has a very low conversion rate.

Be aware though, not all content will make the transition. From Facebook Developer Blog “Be aware that when you convert your profile to a Page, your profile pictures will be transferred, and all of your friends will be automatically added as people who like your Page. No other content will be carried over to your new Page, so be sure to save any important content before beginning your migration.”

It’s a smart move to utilize this exciting feature and bring the full power behind the Facebook network to your business. We can help you make the transition and get the most out of your online marketing.

The Auto DM is a greatly debated subject in the Twittersphere.  Some people don’t mind them, some hate them with a passion, and there is obviously a huge number of people that are using them.  If you’ve attended the recent workshops on my PLET method for Twitter, then you’ll know that I’m an advocate of some of the features that SocialOomph affords (such as emailed tweet keyword searches).

However, I get really burned out on seeing a “nice to tweet you” or “thanks for joining my Tweeple on Twitter” messages. It’s not authentic, and it annoys me; but my purpose for this post is not to debate the validity of the Auto DM. There are plenty of other sites for that purpose, like StopAutoDM.com. My goal here is to show you how to [at least] opt out of the Auto DMs that are powered by SocialOomph:

1)  Log in to Twitter.
2)  Follow @OptMeOut.
3)  Wait for @OptMeOut to follow you back. @OptMeOut will send you a DM to tell you it has followed you.
4)  Then send a DM to @OptMeOut. (You can write whatever you want in the DM, it does not matter.)
5)  After sending the DM, unfollow @OptMeOut. (This way your opting out remains private since you won’t be in the list of @OptMeOut’s followers. We will unfollow you as well.)

Pretty simple!  This will at least block some of the silly messages.  Good luck!

I was asked to speak to NPA Worldwide, a global organization of personnel professionals, in a workshop for recruiters.  Social media and recruiting go hand-in-hand, especially in today’s climate where finding the ideal candidate is the name of the game.

Fortunately, social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook provide some amazing tools to allow recruiters to target potential placements.  We all post such detailed personal and professional information about ourselves in online profiles that can all be easily searched, that means that finding that ideal candidate is (or can be) easier now than ever before.

Time
One obvious issue that was discussed is the time investment required to be successful in social media.  Several of our participants today voiced concerns about the level of involvement needed. My thoughts on the large time investment are this:  if you are spending tons of time on LinkedIn and you know that it’s working, then that’s obviously well worth the effort.   In order to justify the time, you have to be monitoring your social media efforts and quantifying your results.

PLET
I presented my PLET method for using social media, which covers the basics that everyone needs to know if you’re going to successfully take advantage of these new media channels: Post, Listen, Engage, & Track

Here are some examples that I covered for how recruiters can use this methodology:

• Posting information is crucial, and content is still king! But don’t just throw out your job posting like every other recruiter does- find some way to “hook” people and get their interest. Keywords are crucial, but finding your (online) voice and letting your personality show through are important.
• If you aren’t measuring it, then you can’t improve it (or for that matter, know if it is worth your time investment).  Measuring the effectiveness of social media efforts is a must – so using tools like URL shorteners (bit.ly) that allow you to see how many clicks you’re getting to job postings can go a long way towards helping you start to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
• Listening for opportunities is one of the chief ways to take advantage of online tools.  Google alerts to monitor for lay-offs or openings is a free way to extend your ability to know what’s happening.  We also discussed the importance of organizing all of that kind of information, and using RSS feeds with Google Reader is a brilliant way to not only organize, but it will give you the ability to do searches as well.
• I talked a lot about the great tools that Google provides, and Analytics was another one.  Knowing that your site or blog is getting increased traffic from wherever you are spending your time promoting is just as important as knowing if people are hitting your links.  The reason we can be so good at online marketing is because we can measure it on such a granular level!

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: