How long have you been online for? Whether you’re a newcomer or you have been around for a while, it’s essential you keep your online presence fresh and up to date. You should be doing this regularly, however it can be easy to for time to fly by unnoticed. Working in your business often means that updating your online presence can fall to the bottom of the to do list.
Why is keeping your online presence fresh and up to date important? Quite simply, thanks to technology and the ability to research people and businesses before we engage with them, it is a missed opportunity if we don’t keep our online presence fresh.
Here are 6 tips to help you Spring (or rather Autumn) clean and optimise your business online presence. All in under 30 minutes.
1. Profile Photos
Every Social Media platform you are on has the space for you to include one. For starters, you need to make sure you have a profile photo. For personal profiles, make sure your photo is clearly identifiable as you and is the right size. Programs like Canva are great image editing tools as they have templates for you to resize to the optimum. This point may seem obvious, but consider that everyone changes regularly, and keeping you easily identifiable can make the difference between building trust, and getting a client, or, not.
For business profile photos in most cases using your logo is a good option.
2. Complete Bios
Go through your settings for your personal page and your business pages and complete every option available. The sections given are there for a reason. And typically completed profiles are naturally given more visibility through better search ranking. Also, consider that a completed profile has other benefits including building trust and communicating your business purpose, location and services.
3. Get Recommendations
Recommendations and reviews build trust. They also increase your visibility organically with people you are connected to. They are also a valuable way to increase the visibility of your word of mouth. Go to your amazing fans (you know the ones that are your repeat customers and are regularly in contact with you) and ask for a couple of reviews or recommendations. Depending on where your ideal audience lives, direct them to either your Facebook Business Page or LinkedIn Personal Profile.
4. Add Your Keywords
Keywords are the words you want to be found for and are also the words your customers are using to find you. Make sure these are added into your profile and bio descriptions. It’s amazing how well this can work to increase your traffic.
5. Get Connected
Increase your connections. The more people you are connected with on your personal profiles that are connected to your business profiles can increase your visibility with new audiences. Both Facebook and LinkedIn give recommendations. Go through these and add people. The important point to remember here though, the best results are to connect with people you know. If you don’t know them, but want to connect, send them a message explaining who you are and why you want to connect. When I do this I also ask to catch up in person as well. It’s about quality not quantity.
6. Get Published
A great way to increase your online presence is publish a blog post. A blog post can also take the form as a LinkedIn Pulse article or a Facebook Notes article.
