There are several options to choose from. Which one would be right for you?

In this article, we cover what you actually get for your money and how you might use some of the enhanced features.

Let’s take each area of the business upgrade in turn and run through it.

Here's what you get for your money, but what does it all mean and how are you going to make use of it?

#1: InMails per Month

An InMail is simply an email that can be sent to anyone on LinkedIn, whether they’re in your network or not. Before you say, “Why don’t I just call and get the person’s email address and use that for free?”, the LinkedIn InMails work much better. In fact, LinkedIn actually states that InMails are 30% more effective than using regular emails.

They’re more successful because they’re less of a cold, spammy email, the person to whom you’re sending it instantly knows that you’re part of the LinkedIn community and the receiver can also simply click on your name and check you out very quickly. If they like what they see, they may respond favorably.

The really cool thing here is if you don’t get a reply within 7 days, you get the credit back to your account where it can sit for up to 90 days. In effect, you get a refund.

I’ve used InMails very successfully and my secret to you is keep the content light and be yourself. No carefully crafted company content here. You may simply want to send a message of congratulations to a CEO who just won entrepreneur of the year, or some other little snippet that you’ve picked up in the news.

You can then put a quick one-liner at the end to say something like “Now you know I exist, if you ever need any help with (insert industry), you know where I am.” All you’re trying to do is put yourself on their radar for the future, so don’t overdo it! Remember, they can very easily just click on your profile and see what it is you do.

#2: Profile Organizer

This is a great tool if you’re doing a lot of research on LinkedIn. Ideal for recruitment, or simply prospecting, you can create folders and add profiles to them.

You don’t have to keep rerunning a search and wondering where you are with the search results, as the profile organizer also allows you to make notes and add contact details only visible to you about each profile. When you go to your profile organizer, you can see what messages you’ve sent as well as the notes and what folder they’re in.

Makes it easy to "file" people.

#3: Premium Search Filters

With the upgrade, you can find exactly who you’re looking for in half the time, view their full profile and then make contact with InMail. With the free version, your search is limited and you’re much more restricted. It can be time-consuming to check through each profile for criteria you’re looking for.

You get the extra search functions (highlighted with the gold logo).

#4: Profiles per Search

With a pro account, you’ll get up to 1000 search results. This is very handy if you use LinkedIn a lot. In the free version, you get a maximum of 100 results per search, even if there are thousands to choose from, and LinkedIn will automatically pull to the front people within your network. By network, I mean your first-, second- and third-degree connections. The search function will then look for profiles outside of your network if it needs to.

#5: Saved Search Alerts

Another labor-saver that you can set up is when someone either changes their job role or joins LinkedIn and matches the criteria you’re looking for, you get an email. Almost like a Google alert, you simply get the information in an email.

Set up an alert to make search easy.

#6: Introduction Requests

Introductions are available with the free account also, but with the upgrade, you’re allowed to have 50 outstanding at any one time.

Introductions simply allow you to send a message to someone you’re not connected to, via someone you are connected to. You can write a note for the person you’re trying to contact (person A), and write a separate note for the person you want to pass it on (person B). The beauty is that person B can see what you want her to pass on to person A, and make a decision whether she’s happy to do so. Person B then has the option to send it on or decline.

You can send an introduction to people in your second- and third-degree network. The only thing I don’t like about this is the message doesn’t appear in your regular email box (i.e., in Outlook), it only appears in your inbox in LinkedIn. So you need to visit your inbox on LinkedIn regularly.

#7: Profile Stats

Now I really like this as it gives you a good insight into how people are finding you. You can see who has viewed your profile (as long as they’ve not opted to be known as “anonymous user”), the keywords that were used to find your profile and the number of times you appeared in the search. That’s great to know so that you can tweak things on your own profile if necessary.

How often do you appear in someone's search?

#8: Expanded View

Sometimes you may do a search and the results come back with PRIVATE. This happens when the person you’re searching for is out of your network. Even with the upgraded version, you won’t get to see the expanded profiles of everyone on LinkedIn.

What you will get though is the full name of your third-degree connections; whereas the free users will only see their third-degree connection’s first name and last initial. You can’t ever see the full name of those people out of your network unless you’re searching via their name.

A workaround is to simply Google the current position information and, very often, you’ll find your answer. You can then search for the person in the usual way on LinkedIn and send an InMail.

No more secrecy.

#9: Open Link

Allow people to contact you.

Another option to consider is whether to use the Open Link icon or not. On my profile I want people to contact me. So by having this little icon present, it allows anyone on LinkedIn to get in touch with me without having to use an introduction or an InMail, so it’s free and easy to do.

#10: Sneak Peeks

When any new features are due to come out, you get a sneak peek of the upcoming features. Very cool.

The beauty of the upgraded version is that you can simply try it out to see if you like it. There’s no contract, so if you change your mind, you can revert back to the free version. Although you may wish you hadn’t. You get quite used to the extra functionality.

For more on LinkedIn, read the 26 Tips to Enhance Your Experience on LinkedIn and find out How LinkedIn Apps Can Promote Your Business.

Do you have a new or improved idea for a LinkedIn feature? Are you currently using the upgraded version? Leave your comments in the box below.

As more professional LinkedIn users create Twitter profiles, I believe this application will become more and more powerful for building influence and visibility with your network connections.

The primary benefits of the LinkedIn Tweets application are:

• Follow your LinkedIn connections on Twitter
• Post status updates simultaneously to both Twitter and LinkedIn
• Monitor and interact with your Twitter streams from within LinkedIn
• Create a LinkedIn-specific Twitter list

Before we look at some additional ways to leverage the Tweets application, make sure you’ve first added your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

Add Your Twitter Account to Your LinkedIn Profile

Click “edit profile” and “add Twitter account” next to the Twitter field. This will create a link directly to your Twitter account on your LinkedIn profile for all visitors to see if you choose to display it on your profile.

To share your tweets in your LinkedIn status, I would recommend that you choose the “Share only tweets that contain #in” option rather than allowing every tweet to flood into LinkedIn as a status update. Typically, one or two daily status updates in LinkedIn will be sufficient—you don’t want to overdo it.

Share tweets that can add value to your LinkedIn connections!

Install the LinkedIn Tweets Application

Go to “Applications” in LinkedIn and search for the Tweets application to install on your profile. Once installed, you’ll be able to visit your Twitter page on LinkedIn by going to the “More” menu tab and clicking on “Tweets.”

With Tweets, you can now display your most recent tweets on your LinkedIn profile.

How to Utilize the Tweets Application to Build Social Influence

Below are three important features of the Tweets application that you can use to help you grow your Twitter connections, gain intelligence about what your LinkedIn connections are tweeting about and promote your connections through their tweets.

#1: Identify and follow all of your LinkedIn connections on Twitter within the Tweets application

Go to the “Connections” tab to see who you’re NOT following on Twitter and follow them. You may not find a substantial number of your connections on Twitter, but go ahead and follow those who are! Most likely they’re going to follow you back.

#2: Create a dynamic Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections

From within the Tweets application, LinkedIn makes it easy for you to create an official dynamic Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections. Go to the “Connections” tab and on the left-hand side you’ll see “Save as Twitter List.” It may take a few minutes for this list to populate, and by default it will be a private Twitter list. The newly created list will show up within the Tweets application where you’ll have the ability to view the stream in real time.

This is a great tool in and of itself. Rather than manually having to go through and create a Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections, it’s done in the click of a button and always up to date. I can’t think of a better way to make Twitter more relevant to your existing professional network! If I had very little time to spend on Twitter, this is where I would focus my efforts.

Consistently monitoring this unique Twitter list can give you tremendous insight into what your LinkedIn connections are thinking and spreading online. People tend to update Twitter much more often than LinkedIn.

#3: Look for engagement and promotional opportunities through LinkedIn Tweets

The Tweets application actually functions as a Twitter client. You can tweet, reply, retweet or even share posts as messages with any of your LinkedIn connections. However, the real power comes from being able to update your LinkedIn status simultaneously, along with tweeting, replying or retweeting.

Remember, promoting and connecting others is a very effective strategy to build social influence! Don’t underestimate the power of consistent status updates, and the reach that those particular updates can have. When you find a tweet in your LinkedIn Twitter stream that’s relevant, or could be interesting, entertaining or helpful to your broad LinkedIn network, this is where you’ll want to engage and promote.

Ideally, you’ll want to retweet the important post(s) from your LinkedIn connections within the Tweets application and go a step further by checking the box to share the tweet as a status update. The retweet will then show up as a status update to your entire LinkedIn network and it will hyperlink to the individual’s Tweet page within LinkedIn, giving others an opportunity to follow that person on Twitter.

Not only have you promoted the content to your LinkedIn network, but you’ve also provided your connection with extended visibility in both networks and will potentially help him or her gain some new LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers.

This is a retweet from the Tweets application that I also shared as a status update.

By clicking on @ducttape from within the status update, the link travels directly to his Twitter page in LinkedIn.

You could spend time reviewing your other Twitter lists from within the LinkedIn Tweets application and engaging with those individuals as well. If you find something relevant that your LinkedIn network connections can benefit from, again retweet it as a status update. Follow up with that individual to let him or her know that you also posted the tweet as a LinkedIn status update because you thought your network could benefit from seeing it.

Ultimately with any social network, you want to be viewed as a resource who can be relied upon to share and spread quality information. If you can marry this with promoting those professionals with whom you’re already connected on LinkedIn, you can build social influence by helping your connections increase their visibility. This is a win-win.

For additional tips on leveraging Twitter and LinkedIn together, read “How to Prospect Using the Combined Power of LinkedIn and Twitter.” Consider downloading the Free LinkedIn Guide for Professionals from HubSpot as well. This is another very helpful resource for taking advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer for growing your professional network.

Have you incorporated the Tweets application into your profile? What are some other ways to utilize this application to build influence on both networks? Share your feedback in the comments box below.

Be honest. Do you follow up on every LinkedIn connection request you get? No, probably not. I’ll bet you click “accept” and that’s as far as you go.

When someone requests to connect with you and you simply click “accept” and make no effort to carry on the conversation, you’re both simply saying hello to each other and it stops dead there. The only thing you gain by doing this is a string of connections that don’t have any real value. You become a connection collector.

So how can you use social etiquette to really make your LinkedIn connections valuable and stand out from the crowd at the same time?

Follow the 4 steps below and watch your reputation grow.

View LinkedIn as your own boardroom of connections versus your coffee shop connections on Twitter or Facebook. They tend to be managers, directors, business owners, CEOs and the like.

#1: Send Personalized Connection Requests

When you first send a possible contact an invitation, do it from his or her own profile page by clicking the Add to Your Network link.

We’ll use Paul as an example. By adding Paul this way, rather than simply going to the Add Connections tab, you can send a personalized message such as “Thanks for the coffee yesterday! It was great to catch up.”

This gives you the opportunity to remind Paul where you know him from. This is particularly useful if you’re getting back in touch after a long period of time, say from an old job or your school days.

If you simply send a connection request from the Add Connections box, there’s no facility to personalize your message.

This might be a quick and easy way to add a handful of new connections, but spend the time and do it right by adding your personal touch to each one by following the steps above.

#2: Reply When Accepting a Connection Request

All too often, I receive the standard email from LinkedIn that says a connection request has been accepted, but I rarely then get a short message from the new connection saying “Hi.”

So what should happen? Well, the same thing that happens in real life!

When Paul has accepted my connection request, he could then send a short message back. I like to take a look at my new connection’s profile if I’m not too familiar with him, and find something I can comment on. That may be something like he comes from my home town, or works for a company I know well or perhaps I can see from his interests that he’s a cyclist like me. Whatever it may be, try to find something to start a short conversation to build on your relationship. Make the effort to find out more.

So I’ve covered a couple of the initial steps we tend to forget about. Let’s look at composing a message to a group of connections.

#3: Composing a Group Mailing

First, you can only send a message to 50 people at any one time. This is a good thing; otherwise, I’m sure you would see a lot of spam. There are a couple of things to note here:

• Your Opening: If you’re sending an email to a group of connections, think about your greeting. How are you going to address them? I suggest you start with something like “Hi everyone” or “Greetings to you all” and then immediately say “Please excuse my lack of personalization in this email, as I am sending this out to a group of connections.” That way, you can be forgiven by any possible bad manners critics.
• Hide Others’ Email Addresses: Always uncheck the box that says, “Allow recipients to see each other’s email address.” This makes the email a BCC (blind carbon copy). Value other people’s privacy by not sharing their email addresses with everyone else.

When you receive a message yourself this way, respond where possible, depending on whether the content is relevant to you. If the sender has followed the rules below about message content and what to add, hopefully you found something of interest.

What about the message content?

If you want your connections to leave you in droves, feel free to write about all the good things you or your company can do or offer!

I’ve made this mistake in the past myself and then I came to my senses. I realized I needed to treat this form of communication just the same as my newsletters: add valuable resources.

People don’t want to hear about you all the time and what you can offer, but they do want to know about how you could possibly help fix one of their problems.

A recent example of an email to my connections looked like this.

Nowhere is there anything about my company; simply three bits of information I thought would be great to pass on. The message contained a great book that most businesses could probably utilize, a free event being put on by two great companies and a website that may save a business a bit of money.

By keeping in touch this way, my aim is to simply add value, but at the same time, put myself back on the radar of my connections.

#4: How to Ask for Recommendations

Recommendations are a valuable part of your LinkedIn profile and could be the one thing that gets you the deal when a possible client is comparing you to your competitor. Most people only have a couple of recommendations so you can stand out from the crowd with a good number of genuine and applicable recommendations. I suggest 10 as a minimum, but feel free to ask for more.

You’ll notice there’s another auto-generated template that needs personalizing, not only the body of the message but also the subject line. I like to change mine to read something like “Recommendation request” as the subject line and “Are you able to write a recommendation about the presentation I did for your company last week?” in the main body. Don’t make the request too long, but be clear on what you want a recommendation for.

If you’re asking Paul for a recommendation about a seminar he attended that featured you as a speaker, you could change the message to say, “I hope you enjoyed the seminar last week. If you feel that you’re able to write a brief recommendation about how you found my presentation and speaking skills, I would appreciate it. I totally understand if you would prefer not to. Kind regards…”

There’s no need to open your message with “Dear …” as LinkedIn will automatically add that for you.

One last tip I’d like to share with you is to install a spellcheck in your browser bar if you don’t already have one. Go to www.google.com/toolbar and download it free of charge. You just need to remember to click the little icon each time you’ve completed a space where you want to check your spelling.

You’ll be amazed at how many times you make a mistake and need to correct it. You can then use this on any form field you fill out online, not just for LinkedIn. Remember, first impressions count, so don’t let all of your hard work be undone with spelling mistakes.

In a nutshell, you should personalize every aspect of LinkedIn that you can, make each standard template your own. It may take you a little longer, but the value you’ll get from doing the job right will far outweigh the effort.

Ask yourself, if you were meeting face to face, what would you do differently?

People easily judge on first impressions, so make yours a great one, each and every time you connect.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you get your personality across when connecting online, so feel free to share your ideas or add comments in the box below.

Twitter interviews are the answer.   Twitter interviews are simply interviews where the conversation is carried out entirely in tweets. Here’s a few of the benefits of Twitter interviews:

• You learn more about the people you interview.
• You show your Twitter audience whom you are interested in connecting with.
• You give others the opportunity to share more about themselves.

Twitter interviews can be fun for everyone when you do them right.

Live Twitter Interviews

Jay Baer has been doing “live Twitter interviews (aka twitterviews), long before George Stephanopoulos popularized the concept by chatting with Senator John McCain in 140 character bursts.” Here is Jay Baer’s compilation of his Twitter interviews.

Want to learn how to do great live Twitter interviews?  Here’s a 7-point checklist.

#1: Determine Reasons for the Twitter Interview

First, you need to have a clear understanding of why you are conducting your live Twitter interviews.  This will help you choose the best people to interview and the right questions to ask to get the most out of your interviews. Here are some possible reasons:

• To provide valuable or unique insights to your Twitter audience
• To have a bit of fun and share it with others
• To network with others and get to know them more
• To help someone promote his or her latest book or services

#2: Make Pre-Interview Contact

You need to make sure the person you interview understands the reasons why you are conducting the live Twitter interview and agrees with this.  If you want to provide valuable insights to your Twitter audience and your Twitter interviewee only promotes his or her services, the experience will not be a good one for anyone.

Send a pre-interview email outlining what to expect and how it will take place.  Don’t assume everyone is as Twitter- or web-savvy as you are; they may appreciate the extra information you can give them.

#3: Decide on a Hashtag

Hashtags make it possible for everyone to follow the Twitter interview.  So you’ll need to come up with an easy hashtag to use.

Jay Baer uses #twt20 for his Twitter 20 interview series and I use #ckinterview for my cross-cultural Twitter interview series.

You’ll want to let people know what your Twitter interview hashtag is so they can follow along or search for it after the event.

#4: TweetChat

Of course, you can simply post your tweets as you usually do, but this only gives you a limited view of the conversation.  The Twitter monitoring tools you use to follow hashtags can also help you follow the Twitter interview.

I like using TweetChat to follow and tweet live Twitter interviews for a variety of reasons:

• It’s web-based, which means everyone can access it easily.
• It’s easy to sign in with your Twitter account.
• All you need to do is enter the hashtag you are using—without the “#.”
• With TweetChat you don’t need to add your hashtag each time you tweet. TweetChat does this automatically for you.
• You can use the reply button in TweetChat so others can see the question.
• You have a live stream of everyone using this hashtag.
• You see all of the live conversations, including any comments from your audience.

Simply “sign in with Twitter” and “enter hashtag to follow” in the top box.

#5: Decide Direction of the Interview

You’ll want to think about the number of questions you want to ask and the ideal average length of time for your Twitter interview.

As you can see, Jay sticks to 20 questions in his live Twitter 20 interviews and this takes about 90 minutes.

After trial and error I found my audience and interviewees enjoyed 30- to 45-minute interviews most with about 10 questions.

You’ll need to find the right fit for your audience.

You can also split your interview into two parts: a written interview in a blog post published before your live Twitter interview and an updated blog post with the transcription of the live interview.

#6: Come Up With Interview Questions

Do you want to adapt your questions to each interview? Or do you want a set of questions for all of the people you interview?

When you prepare your interview questions, try to make them suitable for your Twitter audience.  There’s only so much you can do in 140 characters.

When your Twitter audience finds your questions fun or intriguing they will want to jump in and enter the discussion too.

#7: Advertise Your Twitter Interview

Let people know about your upcoming Twitter interview through your usual communication channels: your blog, newsletter, Facebook and LinkedIn updates and whatever relevant methods of communication you use offline.

Tweet about it prior to the live Twitter interview:

• The day before
• A couple of hours before
• Half an hour before
• A few minutes before

Find what works best for your audience.

Remember to let your Twitter followers know what you are doing during the live interview.

Keep the Conversation Going

Once your live Twitter interview is finished be sure to put up the transcript on your blog and share it on your social media platforms.

When you do a series of live Twitter interviews it’s easy to collate the different interviews and rebroadcast the information in different formats.  As you can see at the beginning of this post, Jay made a presentation of his Twitter 20 interviews.  I created separate blog posts for each of the 10 questions in my cross-cultural Twitter interviews.

If you think about how you’d like to continue the conversation before your live interview, you might find questions to ask to make it easy to do this.

Ask how you can help them connect with others and continue networking after the Twitter interview.

Above all, remember this is a networking exercise.  Have fun and try to make it easy for everyone to jump in and follow the Twitter interview.

Are you ready to use Twitter interviews to develop your network on Twitter? Please share your comments below.

Social media goes beyond Facebook or Twitter.  It’s about connecting with people and developing relationships.  And sometimes those connections can be literally face-to-face!

Social media allows us to make connections faster and over greater distances, but there is power in social media to bring us closer to our neighbors, too.  One of the ways to do that is with a Tweetup.

What Is a Tweetup?

There are some things that just can’t be done with a 140-character limit.

A Tweetup is an in-person meeting of Twitter users. It has also become a colloquialism for any in-person networking event organized using social media.

For example, there are lots of events on Facebook that result in large parties. One I was recently involved with is Bring Gary Vaynerchuk to Chicago. The whole thing was organized through Facebook. The end result was to meet Gary in Chicago, along with a lot of other entrepreneurs, networkers and wine lovers.

How Tweetups Benefit Your Business

Obviously Gary benefited from the Facebook event by having a lot of attention drawn to his book. Did anyone else benefit?

On a personal level, Nancy S. (a friend, entrepreneur and wine connoisseur) was inspired by meeting Gary. Nancy has been hesitating about starting a new venture, and gained new confidence from the event.

Kelly Olexa, the event organizer, also benefited by hosting this event. She is now recognized as the person who brought Gary Vaynerchuk to Chicago, and she was able to network with a targeted audience during the event.

The nice thing about a Tweetup is that it doesn’t have to involve a celebrity. The key element to a successful Tweetup is having something people are interested in. Just think of parties you’ve had before and what made them successful. You’ll generally get more people to come when you give them a reason to be there.

We’ll cover how to organize a Tweetup in a second. For now, let’s take a look at three major benefits you get from a Tweetup:

Thought Leadership

This is when people recognize you as a leader and influencer of opinion. Kelly gained credibility as a thought leader by reaching out to Gary and getting him to come to Chicago.

Community-Building

By bringing people together around a common interest, you help them to get to know each other better. Whether it’s a backyard barbecue or a national convention, the most important aspect of any networking event is the conversations and relationships that develop.

Credibility-Building

The person who organizes a Tweetup is recognized as a leader and an expert. In Kelly’s case, her expertise is in media, getting the word out, and organizing events. She was able to capitalize on her complementary interest in wine to develop a major event with Gary.

Other benefits of hosting a Tweetup include:

• Deeper relationships
• New testimonials
• Media exposure
• Lead generation
• Increased sales

Organizing a Tweetup

The first thing to understand about organizing a Tweetup is that it has already been done. There are lots of resources out there for you to use and make it easier for yourself.

Three of those resources are Meetup.com, Eventbrite and Amiando. They all have free elements to their service, and paid components as well.

Meetup allows you to join and participate for free. When you decide to become an organizer for events, there is a subscription fee for accessing those tools. You can subscribe for up to 6 months at a time for $12/month. You can charge for events through Meetup if you want to. They allow you to connect to Amazon Payments and PayPal to collect fees.

The great thing about Meetup is that it announces your new Meetup Group to the community. You just pick a topic, describe your Meetup, and you’re ready to go.

Eventbrite and Amiando are more like Ticketmaster. You can use them to organize events, and when you charge a ticket price they take a percentage of the sales.

Aside from using a service such as Meetup, Eventbrite or even Facebook to organize your event, there are three important organizing elements I want to draw attention to.

#1: Visit the Venue

Especially when you’re hosting the Tweetup at your business location, take time to look at the location from the perspective of guests. You might even ask a couple of friends to give you their opinions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Will guests be able to have conversations without shouting at each other?
• Is there enough light to read business cards?
• Where will refreshments be?

#2: Use Name Tags

Everyone has an online handle, and it’s often different from their real name. Plan to have name tags that show both.

#3: Be Active During the Tweetup

To get the benefits of hosting a Tweetup, guests need to see you and meet you. Make a point of speaking to everyone and introducing yourself.

Stuart Foster wrote an excellent article for Mashable entitled Organize a Successful Tweetup. He outlines 17 things both to do and to avoid when planning and hosting a Tweetup. I suggest you print the article and keep it as a resource, but there’s something else you need to do first.

Networking Before a Tweetup

You’re going to have the most success by making sure you have lots of people to invite. To get a good crowd, you need two things:

1. A local network (not huge – millions or even thousands – a couple of hundred people is plenty)
2. A common interest

The common interest part is fairly easy, and it doesn’t have to be directly related to your business.

When the earthquake struck Haiti, you know a lot of business owners organized fundraising activities. You could easily use status updates, tweets, and email – even the telephone – to reach your network and tell them about an event like that.

The great thing about it is that everyone you tell is definitely going to tell a friend or two. Being able to help others gives everyone a good feeling.

You could be a hardware store owner and still find plenty of common interests for a Tweetup. In spring, organize an event around garden planting. For the do-it-yourself crowd, organize summertime events around barbecuing, deck installations, and landscaping.

Any time you’re stuck for an idea, just pick up the phone and call your best clients. Ask them what they’re interested in and would like to know more about. Finding a common interest is easy. Building a local network is a tiny bit more challenging. And I mean just a tiny bit because there are lots of tools to help you do it.

Naturally you’re going to start with the social media sites you already belong to. Twitter is an excellent one to use, and not just because Twitter developed Tweetups. It’s also because there are several applications and two features in Twitter designed to help. (If you don’t have a Twitter account, here’s an instruction booklet to get you started.)

One feature in Twitter is geotagging. Just login to your Twitter account and go to Settings. Check the box for Geotagging under Locations. Here’s a screenshot to show you what it looks like:

For your own profile, turn geotagging on so other people can find you. For your network, spread the word about geotagging so it becomes easier for you to find other people.

The other feature in Twitter is its Search function. You can type a city and radius into the search field to find local Twitter users. For example, someone in Toronto could type:

Near:Toronto within:50mi

This is going to show you Twitter users living within 50 miles of Toronto.

You can see from the image above that a Twitter search gives you tweets along with who made them. That can be a lot of extra information to sort through. Fortunately, there are some great services out there that help you do the work. Two I particularly enjoy are Twellow and TwitterLocal.

Twellow is yellow pages for Twitter users. You can register for a free account, but you don’t have to be registered to use the service. Twellow is cool because it lets you search Twitter users in several ways. You can search by location, interest, name, and subject, to name a few.

It also has a neat feature called Twellowhood. It lets you zero in on any geographic location in the world. (Remember what I mentioned about geotagging?) You start by picking a continent, then a state or province. When you get to an area that’s small enough – say, Ontario, Canada – Twellowhood gives you a list of cities in that province.

The number beside each city is how many Twitter users are located there. Just click on a city and you’ll get a listing of every local Twitter user.

TwitterLocal is a little different. It’s an Adobe AIR application that you download to your computer.

Once installed, TwitterLocal allows you to filter tweets by location – similar to the Twitter search function I showed you. Obviously this is handy for watching the conversations happening in your area. It can be a great way to get ideas for which common interest to tap into for your next event.

In every case, your goal is to develop new relationships with people in your locale so they can attend your Tweetups.

Keep in mind that your own existing network can help you meet local people, too. Tell them what you are doing and ask your connections to help by introducing you to local people. I was surprised at the people I was introduced to through my own network.

Cooperating With Customers

Social media has become part of our cultural and marketing landscape. We’re also generally social creatures who enjoy meeting new people and making friends.

Hosting a Tweetup allows you to cooperate with your customers to give them three important benefits:

1. They’re learning more about the common interest.
2. Everyone gets to meet new people and be social.
3. Guests develop a deeper relationship with you and your business.

Take your first step today. Pick a common interest and use Twitter to organize a Tweetup with 10 friends. That gives you a doable project with a safe audience. You can build from there.

Have you participated in tweetups? Post your experiences and questions below. And, even more importantly, come back to write about the experiences you have. Let’s make a conversation here that helps everyone build success with social media.

As Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motor Company, says, “U.S. brands looking to leverage social networks internationally know that while their messages need to stay consistent regardless of the region, the language, cultural reference points, platform and tactics, all need to be tailored for each market.”

He continues, “Whether it is customer service, IT, HR or product development, there are a number of uses for social media. And when you add to that all of our constituents—customers, employees, shareholders, dealers, retirees—it becomes a very complex assignment.”

Here’s a look at a few of the difficulties and how you can overcome them…

The Information Available

In the past, statistics on social media were difficult to come by and they were not always relevant.  But there are more Internet statistics available today even for social media.  McCann’s Wave 4 Power to the People report  is one resource available to gain insights into how to use social media internationally.

The trouble  with an international social media strategy, as Erik Qualman of Search Engine Watch points out, one size does not fit all. Having more relevant statistics does not get you very far.  You still need to learn how to adapt what you do on social media to effectively connect with people in other countries. And before you can do this, you need to know a bit more about what social media is like over there.

Social Media in Different Regions of the World

A good place to start is to look for general insights into the social media environment in the places you would like to reach.

The Nielsen report Global Faces and Networked Places clearly explains why localization has won the day in many countries and says, “Succeeding in China takes more than producing a translated version; it requires investment in a local infrastructure and a mentality of running a Chinese social network that understands the domestic nuances of social network behaviour rather than simply rolling out a generic social network in Chinese.”

Here are more insights from two social media players well-known in their own countries:

Have a look at this interview of Laurel Papworth in which she gives an analysis on what’s happening in social media in Australia and Southeast Asia.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlhEzAdyCIs

Fred Cavazza says, “The main differences in France‘s social media are based on the local offering and local players: Dailymotion, Skyblog, Viadeo, Dofus, BlogSpirit, CanalBlog, OverBlog… and there are 3 distinct groups in France around culinary, political and IT gadget blogs.”

Fred Cavazza raises a good point. Let’s have a look at the main challenges presented by local offerings and local players.  These are areas where you will need to adapt to fit in with what works in the local social media environment.

Cultural Differences in How People Respond to Social Media

Cultural differences always impact how people use social media. Here are some insights from a few culturally minded social media players.

Engagement—Jack Yan says, “There seems to be a gap between Americans and New Zealanders on Twitter usage, for instance. Kiwis, for the most part, seem to engage a bit more and there are relatively fewer accounts, proportionally, made up of automated tweets. There seems to be more of a demand on American tweeters, for instance, to provide a lot of content, and I suspect that this drives the automation. This arguably comes back to the different cultures: one historically more collaborative, the other historically more individualistic.”

Hesitation—France shares a trait with many countries: hesitation and observation before engaging in new social media. Thierry de Baillon says, “Where Anglo Saxons are prone to quickly dive into new platforms and get new habits, Frenchies stick with old ones, watching others acting while taking their time.”

Networking—Lucy Chatburn sees more networking activity on both LinkedIn and Facebook in Turkey than in the UK. “This could be because networking doesn’t come naturally to many British people. And a LinkedIn profile is definitely not seen as an essential career tool in the UK.”

Shyness—Mixi, a leading social network in Japan, added a special feature to make it easier for people to make friends.

Of course, there are many more ways cultural differences impact social media. Before you can find the right way for your business to connect with people on social media platforms in different countries, you do need to:

• Develop cultural awareness
• Do your research
• Adapt your communication and social approach

Evolution in Local Players

Other challenges in international social media are related to changes in popularity of social media platforms.  A snapshot of the social media environment in any country may not remain current for long.  Social media environments change.

Facebook’s growth has had an impact on many countries outside of North America. Orkut’s popularity in Brazil and India is changing.

This is why it is difficult for businesses to know how to:

• Anticipate where to spend time
• Identify the most relevant social media platforms for their business

Good monitoring practices and a local presence are keys to success.

Can Social Media Help Your International Business?

There are many reasons why this is a tough question to answer.  As we have seen above, statistics do not always reflect how people use social media. There are also:

• Different speeds of adopting social media
• Differences in how locals use social media
• Differences in how businesses can use social media in different countries

On the one hand, local statistics can be misleading.  Another culturally minded social media player, Martin Lindeskog points out that “The broadband/high-speed Internet connection is very common here in Sweden.” However, he also notes that “you can’t find many examples of companies that have embraced a new type of media strategy in full scale yet. There is a lot of talk about Twitter, but you don’t see many companies microblogging.”

On the other hand, although statistics only tell part of the story, a detailed view of the local social media environment can give you valuable insights.  According to Fred Cavazza, the social media market in France was evangelized long ago by local players, and this made the road to success easy to maneuver for Facebook in France.

A Source of Inspiration

In addition to connecting with business networking partners abroad, there is another good reason to keep an ear open for what is happening in international social media: there is richness in diversity.  And this can help you stay in tune with social media as it evolves for everyone.

Monitoring how businesses in other countries use social media helps you to:

• Get ideas for new things to try in your own country
• Spot new trends in other areas of the world which might, in time, affect your own industry

As different people around the world adapt social media to their own cultural tastes and the driving forces in their local markets, we are sure to see:

• More innovation
• Different uses for social media in business
• Opportunities to adapt the strategies and tools we are familiar with to new international markets

Observing these changes and understanding why they fail or succeed increase our understanding of what social media is all about.  Although North American businesses are using social media more than businesses elsewhere, there are many examples of innovation and inspiration to be found outside of North America.  This alone is why following international social media is useful to many businesses.

Now, over to you…

• What have you learned by observing social media in other countries?
• What is the most interesting difference in international social media to you?
• What anecdotes can you share about social media in different countries?

Please share your comments with us below.