How would the social media department ever take over for HR, well I was thinking about this the other day and the answer is relatively simple.  LinkedIn and Skype can turn any company small or big, into a player on the global market.  Companies can go after the exact employee they want and then do an online face to face interview within a couple of hours or days depending on everyone’s schedule.  LinkedIn has over 160 million members, and professionals are joining the network at a rate of 2 per second.  That’s 170,000 professionals every 24 hours joining a professional network.

These people joining are from every industry and many times are the best in their industry.  Other times they are new college graduates looking for a fresh start in their respective industry.   Still today 50% of people say they were hired from a personal connection and through networking.  We need to look at LinkedIn as a personal connection at a distance.  One cool feature of LinkedIn is it will tell you how many degrees of separation you are from that person.  You can almost always find someone who knows that person, and get a personal reference right away.

As of January of 2012 Skype had 31 Million users, but of course I simply used Skype as an example.  The interview could be conducted on several different platforms, such as Google+, or even face time on an iPhone or iPad.  This gives the social media department the ability to overstep the HR department, creating a one-to-one personal connection with virtually anyone.  Again this will give basically any business the ability to operate nationally or globally.

Maybe I am wrong and we will always need an HR department and I was just having a moment thinking how cool it would be for social media to take over another part of the world.  But, I do think there is something to be said for the power of LinkedIn when it comes to finding new talent and even new business.  It is personal connections and networking 2.0, but added together with a platform like Skype, I do believe some really great things could happen.

The post Could LinkedIn plus Skype Mean no More HR Department? appeared first on Clix.

You’ve started your new blog, made a couple of posts and made it look all flashy and stuff.  Now what?  How do you get people to interact with you on social media?  The first tip seems rather obvious, but might be overlooked if you’re new to blogging.  Display your social media icons prominently near the top of your blog.  This will make it easy for your readers to connect with you on your social networks.  I say this is a great idea.  Next you will want to create a Facebook page for your blog specifically, this isn’t the first thing I would do, but it makes sense, it might drive your blog readers to be your fan on Facebook, which ultimately creates more interaction.

Some of the other tips included generating traffic with StumbleUpon, which is a recommendation engine; again this should be good for your blog as long as you tag things appropriately for random people to find your niche.  Using the same concept there are a few tips about using things you might already be using to promote yourself, such as sending your RSS feed to your LinkedIn account and using Pinterest.  You can even add a pin it button to your blog, to make it easy for your users to share your content.  If you can get people you already engage with to interact with your new blog, then others might join in.

Other tips were to use link shorteners, even when you don’t need to; this is so you can gain access to metrics.  Metrics are always good; this way you know who is clicking and when they are doing it.  Other things you can do is to use your blog name as your username, this will promote your personal brand.  On top of that you should join many blogger groups on Facebook, this will hopefully lead other bloggers to link to you, if you have good content, which ultimately builds social awareness of your blog.

On that same note, you should show some love to other bloggers as well, retweet them, share their content on Facebook, or repin their stuff, and hopefully they will return the favor.  The last thing you should remember is to stay on Social Media, continue to post and read everything you can.  This will help you make and maintain relationships and get new ideas for your upcoming blog posts.

The post Socially Interacting with your Blog Readers appeared first on Clix.

Its no secret – my life would crumble without Google.  And though I haven’t come to rely on Google’s web browser as I have some of its other tools, I have developed a deep appreciation for it.

As a Google junkie, I love to explore and test the different tools Google Chrome has to offer, and some of the best tools come from its huge selection of extensions. Though not all of the extensions I’ve tried have blown me away, here are a few extensions I as a Social Media Strategist couldn’t live without.

Hootsuite is an integral part of my social media management toolbox. It allows me to monitor and update each of my client’s twitter feeds simultaneously.

A huge part of managing a client’s twitter account is updating it with relevant content. These updates often contain links that their followers would be interested in. Here’s where the Hootsuite extension comes in. Rather than copying the link and pasting it into Hootsuite, the extension allows you to tweet the link through Hootsuite without leaving the page or copying any URLs.

Simply click on the Hootsuite extension button in the top right corner of your browser, select the appropriate twitter account, type your message, and tweet!

While Hootsuite allows you to quickly share or schedule content to be shared, ocasionally, you’ll want to save content to share or schedule later. This is where Evernote comes in.  Evernote is a great tool for saving and organizing links, images, ideas, notes, and almost anything else you can think of.

Like the Hootsuite extension, the Evernote extension allows you to save content to Evernote without leaving the page. Again, simply click on the Evernote extension button, clip the desired content, add a description, tags, notes, etc. and continue browsing as usual. When you want to return to the content, again, open the Evernote extension, find the content and open it from there.

Even with Hootsuite and Evernote helping me keep my tabs organized, I am notorious for having an excessive number of tabs open. Hey, when you’re managing several social media accounts, you have be a good juggler. Unfortunately, I don’t always work from the same computer. Sure, I could open each tab one-by-one, but with the TabCloud extension, I don’t have to.

TabCloud saves groups of tabs so you can quickly access them from any computer. Simply click on the TabCloud extension and hit the save icon next to any open tab grouping you’d like to save. Then, when you move computers, open tab cloud and click on the tab group quickly open all saved tabs.

I wrote on this tool not too long ago, so I will be brief. InboxQ is a great tool for establishing yourself as an expert in a certain field on Twitter by helping you find people asking questions you are able to answer. The inboxQ extension makes finding questions fast and easy. For more on InboxQ, see my blog post on earning tweet-cred with questions.

What’s your favorite

Though I consider myself a Google junkie, I know I’ve only scratched the surface on useful extensions. What’s your favorite Chrome extension?

The post 4 Chrome Extensions Every Social Media Enthusiast Should Know appeared first on Clix.

1. Claim your vanity URL. Make your profile look more professional and easier to share by claiming your LinkedIn vanity URL. Instead of a URL with a million numbers at the end, it will look nice and clean like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinedougherty. You can do this by going here and clicking “customize your public profile URL” on the right-hand side. This will not only make your profile easier to share, but easier to remember as well for both you and others.

2. Search engine optimize your profile. You can optimize your profile to get found by people searching LinkedIn for key terms which you want to be associated with. Add these keywords to various sections of your profile such as your headline or summary.

3. Track company buzz. Company Buzz is a very helpful application that allows you to track what people are saying about your company and other related topics on Twitter. All you have to do is install the application and customize your topics to view top keywords, trends and tweets.

4. Be identifiable. Find out who’s checking out your profile by allowing others to see who you are if you view their profile. When you click the information under “Who’s Viewed My Profile” on your profile page, you’ll be able to view users who have looked at your profile, stats on your profile’s number of views, and its appearances in search recently. To change this, go into your settings and click “See what others see when you’ve viewed their profile.”

5. Take advantage of “Saved Searches.” LinkedIn allows users to create up to three saved searches. After you conduct a search, click the “Save This Search” option, this will allow you to save a search and easily run it again at a later time. You can also choose to receive weekly or monthly reminders through email once new members in the network match your saved search criteria. Just click on the “Saved Searches” tab on the Advanced Search options page and select one of your saved searches to run again.

6. Leverage the power of LinkedIn Groups. Did you know that if you’re a member of the same group as another user, you can bypass the need to be a first degree connection in order to message them? In addition, group members are also able to view the profiles of other members of the same group without being connected. Join more groups to enable more messaging and profile viewership capabilities, this will help with your overall connections as well.

7. Link your Twitter account to LinkedIn. Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter, and vice versa. The more activity you have on LinkedIn, the better! Learn how to connect your Twitter account here.

8. Use LinkedIn Today to keep track of industry news. LinkedIn Today is an great feature that provides you with the most popular stories that are shared on LinkedIn. Use it to stay on top of news occurring about marketing, the internet, computer software, etc. You can also sign up for email summary notifications of LinkedIn Today news.

9. Take advantage of advanced search options. LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature provides a much richer search experience. For example, say you want to find out if you’re connected to anyone that works at a specific company. Type the company name in the company field in Advanced Search, then sort the results by “Relationship” to see if you have any first or second degree connections to any employees.

10. Quickly turn your LinkedIn profile into a resume. LinkedIn enables you to turn your profile into a resume-friendly format in seconds with its Resume Builder tool. Just choose a resume template, edit it, and export it as a PDF that you can print, email, and share.

11. Post Company Status Updates: LinkedIn recently launched the capability for Company Pages to post status updates to their company followers (much like Facebook business pages can publish Facebook status updates). Start promoting your company’s presence on LinkedIn today to generate more followers, then start using the channel to share your content and messages. Check out HubSpots blog post on how to launch company status updates here.

If you want to take advantage of even more LinkedIn features and capabilities, you should think about upgrading to a pro account for even more awesomeness. All of the social media platforms can be extremely beneficial if you know how to use them in the right ways. I hope these tips and tricks help you in your future LinkedIn endeavors!

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