Let’s face it, LinkedIn is a very underutilized social media network. Most people believe that it’s too hard to make connections, and therefore use it more as a résumé site. There is so much more potential with this professional social media network.

How many of us have created a LinkedIn account and left it dormant for months?

It was my goal recently to attend more LinkedIn webinars and teleseminars to learn more about this mysterious network. I have often thought to myself, “I’m a professional. Why am I not utilizing this site?” I’ve even heard LinkedIn referred to as the “red-headed stepchild” of social media.

Here are some interesting facts that I learned about this often misunderstood network:

LinkedIn is a search engine and has a ton of authority on Google and other popular search engines.

Likely if you Google your name and you have a LinkedIn profile, it will show up on the first page of Google. This demonstrates the ranking authority of LinkedIn on Google.

Here are the top 6 things that I learned about this powerful network:

#1: Boosting Your Search Engine Optimization

There are three areas to add website links to your LinkedIn profile. Instead of displaying “My Blog” & “My Website,” click on Edit and then click on Other.  Type in a keyword phrase that describes how people can search to find your business.

For example, I changed my main mortgage website to say Foreclosure Options

I changed “My Blog” to say Social Media Marketing

I changed my Facebook fan page to say Facebook Marketing

What an incredibly easy way to boost your rankings in the search engines! Be sure to optimize your LinkedIn profile as soon as possible before your next client enters your main keyword(s) and finds your competition.

#2: Promoting Your Blog Feed

It is also possible to import your Wordpress blog feed to your profile by searching for the Wordpress application. This is a quick way for others to scan your blog content at a glance.

There is also another blog application on LinkedIn—Blog Link—which supports TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more.

Promote your blog and develop your personal brand. Everyone knows blogs are the best way to cultivate your personal brand. Now you can share your thoughts and insights on your blog on your professional home, LinkedIn.

#3: Creating LinkedIn Ad Campaigns

I had no clue that LinkedIn has its own Direct Ads Campaign targeted to professionals. I felt like I found a hidden treasure at the bottom of a huge sea! Because LinkedIn is a professional site, there is less likelihood of views from random people; rather, more from people interested in business-related information. I will definitely be utilizing this advertising feature this year.

Reach a rapidly growing community of over 57 million professionals (average household income: US $108,000), and select your ad’s audience by seniority, industry, job function, company size, and more.

It is possible to write, target, and start your ad in minutes, pay by clicks or impressions and get started with as little as US $50. Be sure to leverage the power of LinkedIn by using your professional brand to put a face to your business.

#4: Utilizing Events to Engage Clients

I really love LinkedIn’s event features because I “plan” to be an event planner in my next life. It’s not required to be the event coordinator to create an event. An event can be created if you have an interest in going to an event or will be an attendee.

Invitations can also be sent to your LinkedIn network, which will give you an opportunity to meet face to face if they decide to attend. The best feature is the ability to view at a glance all of your network’s upcoming events. As an event planner geek, it rocks my world to promote business events online just like I do in my personal hemisphere.

#5: Using Groups to Connect With People

Most people join groups and never come back to participate in them. I can raise my hand and say that I’m guilty of this bad practice too. I’ve started changing and participating in a lot more groups lately. However, STARTING a group is a great way to have access to email and stay in touch with your group as it grows. It does take some focused effort to grow your group but a great place to start is to invite your current network. As the people from your network join your group, this is visible to their networks’ news feeds which can potentially pique new interest.

I’m really amazed at the size of various groups on LinkedIn. Then I remember that professionals really enjoy networking, so I really shouldn’t be so surprised. Let’s take a look at a few groups on LinkedIn:

Social Media Today—18,078 members at the time of this writing

On Startups—Community of Entrepreneurs—123,680 members at the time of this writing

Real Estate Open Networkers—17,795 members at the time of this writing

Can you imagine having access to this many people at your fingertips?

#6: Getting Recommendations to Attract More Clients

Recommendations are one of the unique features of LinkedIn that sets it apart from other social media networks. What better way to really market your business than by having your colleagues and clients share your expertise?

I’m sure your next question is, “How can I obtain recommendations?” The best way is to live by the old adage:

“Give and you shall receive.”

Recommend your peers and they will return the favor. This is one area that I need to work on this year. It doesn’t take that much time, but if we don’t make it a focus, it won’t happen.

So what about you? Do you feel that LinkedIn is the red-headed stepchild of social media? Do you have any plans for this network in 2010? Let us know in the comments.

A lot is happening in the world of social media. Here’s a quick summary of recent major research findings:

#1: By 2010, 26 Million (1 in 7) U.S. Adults Will Use Twitter Monthly

A new study by eMarketer surpasses their previous estimates of Twitter usage. The study, conducted just last month, found the following: “In 2009, there will be 18 million U.S. adults who access Twitter on any platform at least monthly. That represents a 200% increase over 2008 levels. Usage will reach 26 million U.S. adults in 2010, a further 44.4% climb.”

Earlier this year, eMarketer reported more conservative usage numbers, stating that there were indications of large numbers of users abandoning the site shortly after signing up and many others only using it sporadically. However, they recently revised their estimates because “recent data shows healthy—and growing—percentages of U.S. Internet users adopting the popular microblogging platform,” according to eMarketer senior analyst, Paul Verna.

Twitter is not the only social networking site to report record usage numbers. In September, Facebook officially hit the 300 million-user mark, making the social networking site nearly as large as the U.S. population.

#2: Americans Spend 17% of Online Time on Social Media Sites

As popular social media platforms continue to grow their numbers of users, it is logical to conclude that Americans are spending more time on social networking sites. According to a recent study by The Nielsen Company, 17% of the time spent online was at social networking sites (an increase from 6% in August 2008).

Among those paying the most attention to this recent trend are advertisers. Online ad spending increased by 119% to $108 million in August 2009.

#3: In 2010, Over 50% of Marketers Will Be Using Social Media

Marketers are becoming even more aware that social media marketing must be a key component of their media buy strategy. This was recently affirmed in the findings of the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” by the Center for Media Research, which examined the likelihood of marketers including social media in their 2010 marketing plan. Over half (56.3%) of marketers stated that social media would “realistically” be part of that mix.

The top 5 most popular media for the 2010 marketing spend were as follows:

• Email (56.8%)
• Social networks (56.3%)
• Keyword search (49.7%)
• Radio (42.2%)
• Magazines (42.1%)

In addition, 57% of media buyers reported they will buy non-traditional media, including online, display video, search, mobile and event sponsorships, while 43% reported they will buy the more traditional media, including TV, print and radio.

#4: Blogs Most Useful Social Media Tool, Say 51% of Businesses

McKinsey Quarterly’s “Global Survey” examined companies’ overall assessment of the value of different social media technologies. As reviewed by eMarketer, “When it came to customer-related benefits, blogs were the most useful tool, bringing measurable benefits to 51% of responding companies worldwide. That was followed by video-sharing and social networking at 48% each, and RSS feeds at 45%.”

In addition to these findings, the top three reported benefits of Web 2.0 marketing included:

• Increased marketing effectiveness (52%)
• Higher customer satisfaction (43%)
• Reduced marketing costs (38%)

#5: 75% of Marketers Plan to Increase Social Media Use in 2010

According to a recent survey by virtual events provider Unisfair, marketers are most focused on attracting and keeping customers in 2010 and they plan to use social media to make this happen. A few interesting factoids from the Unisfair findings:

The 3 leading marketing priorities in 2010 according to U.S. marketers:

• New customer acquisition (60%)
• Customer retention and engagement (48%)
• Thought leadership (45%)

The top 5 marketing tactics U.S. marketers planned to increase in their 2010 marketing mix:

• Social media (75%)
• Web search/SEO (51%)
• Email campaigns (49%)
• Virtual events (48%)
• Online advertising (28%)

The study also asked marketers to rank the value of social media platforms. LinkedIn came in on top at 26%, Facebook at 23% and Twitter at 17%.

What are your thoughts? How might these study findings impact your future social media activities? I’d love to hear from you.

I recently sat down with Dan Zarrella. Dan is a social media and viral marketing scientist. He’s also the author of the brand-new book coming out called The Social Media Marketing Book by O’Reilly.

What’s really unique about Dan is that he makes science practical for the social media world. He takes a deep look at what’s going on with social media activity and he extracts knowledge or nuggets that are really amazing and very helpful for marketers.

Dan has contributed to major websites like Mashable, Copyblogger and ProBlogger. He has also developed a number of tools for Twitter, including TweetBacks, which is a great tool that actually helps bloggers display tweets related to a blog post on their website. He also works at HubSpot as an inbound marketing manager.

Mike: Dan, tell us a little bit about your background. How did you become so interested in things like Twitter?

Dan: By trade, I’m a programmer. My first real job was as a webmaster and I built a bunch of tools for the company I was working for at the time.

Then I moved into search engine optimization (SEO). My interest in social media in general started as an offshoot of SEO, generating content. Writing content with the keywords in it is pretty easy. Anybody can do that.

The hard part of SEO, of course, is getting links to your stuff. You can buy links, you can exchange links and you can do shady things like that, but eventually Google is going to catch you. It takes a lot of time and a lot of investment and it’s not really worth it anyway.

The only acceptable way to get links is by writing link-worthy content and using social media to promote it and getting other people to link to you. So I started playing with Digg and working on getting things on the front page of Digg because you can get a lot of links that way.

Then Twitter kind of blew up and I started getting into that initially, to be completely honest, just as a way to help my stories do better on Digg. But then once I got into it and realized the power behind it, especially with retweeting, which is one of my absolute favorite phenomena ever, I started focusing on Twitter.

What I think is so unique about Twitter, again, specifically retweets, is that people have been sharing content or sharing ideas for thousands of years. In fact, most of our culture is based on that concept. The chair you’re probably sitting in right now wouldn’t exist if somebody didn’t have the idea to build a chair and then tell somebody else about it, and then the idea caught on.

So retweeting specifically, I think, is a godsend if you’re interested in figuring out what types of content are contagious.

Mike: I want to get into retweets a lot, actually. But first of all, tell me what a social and viral marketing scientist is. What does that mean?

Dan: The best way for me to explain is if you think about the people who give a lot of social media advice or many of the gurus ‘in the space,’ a lot of them are doing what comedian Stephen Colbert refers to as “truthiness.” It’s advice that sounds good or sounds warming inside. I call it soft-focus sort of rainbows and unicorns stuff. It’s stuff that sounds right and it makes you feel good inside, like, “Be transparent and be honest and be nice and be helpful.” Those are good ideas. There’s nothing wrong with those.

But what I’m interested in, and being a programmer at heart, is learning more about what actually causes things to go viral or what actually causes people to take certain actions. Rather than just, “This sounds right,” I want to know what’s actually correct and what’s actually true.

Mike: You just want the data to prove that these things are accurate.

Dan: Yes, the hard data just to prove or disprove in some cases what actually happens and what’s actually good advice and what are really good best practices.

Mike: Where do you get your data as a scientist?

Dan: A lot of different places. The Twitter API is amazing. I have several systems built that capture every retweet that happens. Or I can write scripts very quickly that will draw whatever type of data I’m looking for from Twitter.

Then, of course, there are all the other APIs of the social web applications. Digg has an API that’s wonderful to use. Also, at HubSpot we have developed a number of grader tools. Twitter Grader is the one that’s probably the most well-known. Now that I work here, that allows me to dig into a database of over 5 million accounts and analyze all sorts of fun data there too.

Mike: For folks who don’t know what Twitter Grader is, it’s a great little tool. You can put in your Twitter ID and it will rank you up against other people in the Twitter universe by giving you a score from 0 to 100. I think it’s really very cool. It also helps set you apart by physical location.

How do people find Twitter Grader, Dan?

Dan: The main URL is www.TwitterGrader.com. From there, we also have www.WebsiteGrader.com, which gives you tips on how to optimize your website for SEO.

I actually didn’t build the tool. It was built before I got here.

I think one of the  useful things about any kind of measuring or grading tool is that people love to compare themselves to other people. There’s a Twitter Grader badge and you can tweet about it. Of course, when you get a grade and it’s good or bad, you want to tell people about it. You want to say, “Look, this is what I am.” It definitely spreads word of mouth. There has been a bunch of blogger coverage [of Twitter Grader], and it definitely spread because people wanted other people to know how they stacked up.

We also have www.FacebookGrader.com and www.PressReleaseGrader.com and things like that.

Mike: Let’s talk a little bit about retweeting because I know this is something you’re very passionate about.

I know you’ve done a lot of research. First of all, talk to us about the findings. What makes folks retweet? What are the main characteristics of messages that tend to go viral?

Dan: One of the first things is that a lot of tweets—I think it’s something like 20%; I have the exact numbers on my site—have links in them. That’s just random all tweets, not just retweets. Retweets have more of a tendency to have links in them. So, clearly, if a tweet has a link in it, it’s much more likely to get retweeted.

Another one that is kind of a no-brainer, but is really, really powerful is if you ask people to retweet a tweet for you. If you say, “Yada, yada, yada,” with a link and then you say, “Please retweet,” you’ll get a lot more tweets than if you didn’t.

Mike: What’s the psychology behind that?

Dan: I think there are two things. There’s a call to action there. With any sort of marketing, you always want to tell people exactly what to do and what action you want them to take. I think that’s probably the thing that’s most powerful.

The other thing is that people who are going to see something that says, “Please retweet,” are following you, which means they like you for whatever reason. So if you’re asking for a favor, it’s not really a big deal. Most Twitter clients have a one-click kind of retweet thing and so they’ll do that for you.

Mike: So far, we’ve talked about how retweets often have links and often have a request to retweet it. What are some of the other characteristics?

Dan: More recently, I’ve done research into the linguistics of retweets. Actually, some of my findings here were sort of surprising.

I assumed that with most kinds of viral content outside of Twitter, the message had to be simple and people had to get it in order to retweet it. So I ran the Flesch-Kincaid, which is a standard test of readability, against random tweets and retweets, and I found that retweets, surprisingly, have a slightly higher grade level required to read them, which means they’re more intelligent or they’re more complex.

Mike: What does that mean for a marketer, just out of curiosity? How does that translate?

Dan: It means you shouldn’t be afraid to not dumb down your content.

Another thing I found, and I think this might have to do with that readability, is I looked at word uniqueness. I took every word in my database of millions of tweets and millions of retweets and I looked at how many other times those words occurred in that data set.

It turns out that retweets, the words used in them, tend to be a lot more unique and novel.

Mike: Do you have any examples off the top of your head?

Dan: Novelty is huge in all type of viral marketing. That’s one thing that’s pretty important.

Another thing I looked at is the actual breakdown of parts of speech in tweets versus retweets. Retweets tend to be very noun-heavy and speak in the third person.

What I think that has to do with is one of the most retweetable phrases is actually “new blog post.” What that comes from is in WordPress and a bunch of other publishing platforms, there are features where you can automatically publish or automatically tweet the newest content. So if you’re doing a WordPress blog and you write the blog about whatever and then the system automatically tweets it for you, typically it will start the tweet with the prefix “new blog post.” Then that gets retweeted a ton.

What that means is that a lot of retweets are actually headlines. Headlines, if you think of some newspaper headlines, tend to be very noun-heavy.

Mike: So “new” is obviously one of those keywords there. “Blog post” implies some valuable content that they’re going to be clicking on. And the link, of course, is going to be present because that’s going to be pointed to the blog post and then maybe asking for the retweet.

Do you also think some of the tools that are now on blogs like TweetMeme are going to help increase the retweets?

Dan: Absolutely. To compare this to some other data that I’ve looked at, when a tweet gets tweeted, the more it’s retweeted, the more likely it is to be retweeted, which means that even if you’re not asking for a retweet by saying, “Please retweet,” merely having “RT” or “retweet” in something is sort of an implicit call to action. Just bringing up the idea of retweets and reminding people that that’s something they can do will lead to more retweets.

TweetMeme has a little button where you can see the number of times it has been tweeted. Then it says ‘Retweet.’ So just reminding people, even if it’s subtly or implicitly, that retweeting is something they can do is a great way to get them to do that.

Mike: Talk to me a little bit about the usage patterns of people on Twitter. I know you’ve done a little work on this. From a marketer’s perspective, what time of the day should we be tweeting our best content? When are people most likely to be viewing tweets? What other kind of time or usage patterns can you share with us?

Dan: I’ve graphed both the volume of tweeting and the velocity of tweets overall and then the volume of retweets. They both fall into very similar patterns.

Twitter is a worldwide tool, but it’s very, very prevalent in English-speaking countries, so clearly the U.S. leads in Twitter usage right now. Specifically, the coasts lead it.

East Coast time starting from say 11 am until 5 or 6 pm are the peak hours on the East Coast for tweeting and retweeting. It varies up and down in between that. At 11:00 am, I think people on the West Coast are starting to get into work or waking up.

My best tweets are the things that I want to get retweeted. I’ll do, later on in the day, maybe one or two because the West Coast is up at the same time and the East Coast hasn’t really gotten into being ready to go home or anything.

Remember that people use Twitter differently. I’m on Twitter 24 hours a day, but I’m a huge geek. Other people use Twitter when they get home or before they go to bed, or they’ll use it early in the morning or they’ll use it at work all day. If you have a bunch of followers, they may be using Twitter at completely different times. There’s the morning crew or the afternoon crew or the night crew.

So if I have some piece of content that I think is really, really good and I really want everybody to see it, I’ll retweet it a couple of times at different times because people’s tweet streams move so fast that it’s easy to miss things.

If you do it a few times, don’t go crazy with that because you will annoy people if you’re tweeting the same thing over and over again. But if you throw a few different things in between, I think that’s perfectly okay.

Mike: Talk to me about days of the week. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dan: Yes, I think, like everything else on the web as far as business kinds of things go, Monday through Thursday are probably the best, with Tuesday and Wednesday being THE best.

Especially the stuff I’m tweeting about. I’m a marketer, but I also publish marketing content, so I’m marketing to marketers. Clearly, they’re all during business hours during the week.

It’s the same thing with email open rates and things. Monday, people have a lot of stuff because they’re catching up from the weekend. They’re at work, but that might not be the best time to catch them. And then on Friday, they’re thinking about the weekend and they’re just ready to go home. A lot of people even leave early on Fridays. So Tuesday and Wednesday and sometimes early in the day on Thursday are the best times.

Mike: What are some of the new projects that you’re working on that you can tell us about?

Dan: The book is the one that’s holding my life right now. I’m writing a very introductory sort of PowerPoint as a book for O’Reilly publishers called The Social Media Marketing Book.

The idea with that is if you’re new to the web but you’re an old-school marketer or if you’re new to marketing but you’ve been on the web for a little while, like on Facebook or whatever, this book will introduce you to the concepts of social media marketing.

It’s not really meant for the super-advanced users. It’s meant for people who want to know, “What can I do on Facebook for marketing?” or “What can I do on Twitter or on forums?” and that kind of stuff.

That should be out at the end of the year, hopefully before Thanksgiving. I think it will be really good.

Mike: Where can folks go if they want to learn some more about you, Dan?

Dan: You mentioned my website, www.DanZarrella.com. I also blog for HubSpot which is http://blog.hubspot.com/

The thing that I probably update most often is my Twitter account, so @DanZarrella is where people can get a hold of me and talk with me.

Mike: Excellent. Do you have any closing words of wisdom or any last thoughts on social media marketing or anything in general that you would want to share with marketers?

Dan: Yes, I think that with the web in general and with social media marketing in particular, we don’t have to just rely on what sounds right anymore.

If you are making a decision and it’s important to you, you should actually be looking at data. If somebody is giving you advice and it sounds right but you’re thinking, “I don’t know if I believe that,” ask them where the data is coming from. If they don’t have an answer, try to figure it out and get your own answers through the data. It’s easy to do now and everybody should be doing it.

Mike: Excellent advice. Dan, thank you very much for taking some time out of your day to talk to us.

Dan: Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Listen to the rest of this interview (below) and learn how to set up Twitter account descriptions, whether your personal name or business name is better, how to create automated direct messages, how to use social media analytics and more.