If you’re like me, you’re working out and eating healthy this week in preparation for Thanksgiving Day.  It’s a day to enjoy with family and friends where the full focus of the day is the turkey dinner…and a little football.  If you ask people what they really look forward to about the dinner, there are normally two camps; the turkey, or the side dishes.  Some people really look forward to the turkey; white meat, dark meat, fried turkey, turkey legs, etc. Others can’t wait for the mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, grandma’s special gravy and more.  While the focus is the turkey, the side dishes really make a difference in how fast they run to the table.

Taking a step back, the same can be said for your business social media strategy.  How so?  Think of the turkey as your product or service.  When it’s all said and done, that’s the focus of your business and why you’re there.  Where social media really helps is when you’ve got a product or service with many competitors and that prospects view as somewhat commoditized. To a lot of people, the turkey is pretty much the same.  Whether you have it at one person’s place or another, it’s basically still turkey.  There are some slight nuances and different sizes but nothing crazy.

That’s where social media (aka side dishes) comes into play.  Using social media to educate prospects and build your reputation as a thought leader really makes the difference.  What can help you get people running to the table?  Here are some great side dishes that can get people running to your table over the holidays and long thereafter.

Blogs

A great blog with helpful content makes a big difference.  Shift Communications helps themselves standout from the thousands of other PR firms out there with their PR Squared blog.

Videos

Fun and educational videos attract attention.  Check out Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” videos. Their iPhone video alone has almost 7.5 million views.  They’ve done a great job of making their blenders stand out.

Free Educational Content

Making your presentations, case studies, ebooks and other helpful content free and available for others to download and share online also brings in prospects.  The key thing here is not to hide them behind a registration.

Free Services

Free services can help attract people to your site and service as well as provide you with additional information in your area of expertise.  HubSpot does a great job offering free services such as Twitter grader and Website grader to help others out.  It also provides them with a ton of aggregate data that they can use to continue to improve their products.

There are many more but you can only digest so much at once.  Have a great Thanksgiving!

Here are this week’s top five SM4B posts.  Enjoy!

Making Social Media a Tool, Not a Distraction by @benparr on the American Express OPEN Forum

Ben Parr provides tips that will help to make sure your company gets the most out of social media and prevents it from being a distraction.

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Get Higher ROI from a B2B Email Marketing Campaign by @b2bcommunicate on Red On Marketing

Rebekah Donaldson provides tips on creating a great newsletter that will capture you customers’ interest and provides examples of topics to cover.

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Blogging for Position – How to Set Up and Run a Keyword Blog by @kateheaden on Savvy B2B Marketing

Knowing that search engines love blogs, Kate Headen shares advice on how to set up a blog, create a schedule, and select topics that will help attract the people your company is looking for.

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The Four Spheres Of Social Media Strategy by @jasonfalls on Social Media Explorer

Jason Falls shares his Four Spheres of Social Media Strategy, where they overlap, and the impact of each and solicits feedback on what he’s shared.

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5 Ways to Use Social Media Activity Offline by @ducttape on the American Express OPEN Forum

John Jantsch believes that small businesses will get the greatest bang for their social media buck when they think in terms of merging their online and offline networking and marketing and provides five ways to help make it happen.

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As many know, LinkedIn and Twitter recently announced that you can now update your Twitter status updates through LinkedIn and your Twitter status from your LinkedIn.  This is definitely a good thing for all involved.  It give Twitter more legitimacy in the business world.  It gives LinkedIn much more activity then it currently has.  And most importantly, it gives us, those that use the two platforms for business more efficiency in sharing information in our networks.

For those that tend to use Twitter more then LinkedIn, it’s easy to set your profile to automatically post your tweets.  Here’s how you do it.

On your profile page, you’ll see the new “Twitter” section (It’s right under “Websites”.)  Go ahead and click the “Edit” link.

In this example, I’ve already added my @scottjmanley Twitter account to my profile and now I want to add my company’s tweets (@FYIndOut) as well. To do so, I’ll click the “Add another Twitter account” link.

You’ll receive a popup asking if you want to allow LinkedIn to connect to your Twitter account.  Because I’m already logged into Twitter as @FYIndOut on my pc, it asks me to confirm the account or tells me to log out of Twitter and log back in as the account I wish to add to my LinkedIn profile.

Once you add the profile, you’ll see that you have the ability to share tweets from that Twitter account on your profile with either “everyone” or “no one”.

 You also have the ability to set your profile to share all of your tweets or just ones with the hashtag “#in” in them.  For those that tend to use Twitter for personal use as well, this is a great way to make sure only your professional tweets end up on your LinkedIn profile.  However, if you’re like me and you only use Twitter for your work life, you’ll want to set it to display all tweets.

All you need to do from there is click the “Save” button and you’re good to go.

Using this new feature makes it much easier to share your information with both networks in one action.  It’s worth the 2 minutes to set it up.  Good luck!

Millions of people are using social media today.  So when a study of social media users says that they feel more positive about brands that interact online, it’s worth noting.

It’s especially interesting to see that 68% of the respondents feel better served by a company when they can have a conversation via social media.  One of the major benefits of social media is that when you’re helping one person out, millions get to see and/or hear about it.  You’re not only helping out one customer, but attracting 100’s more.

Not only does it build goodwill with the majority of users but interacting with people via social media also makes them more likely to engage with your company and your brand.

My time with FYIndOut is coming to a close today, and I wanted to reach out and say goodbye. To all our readers – I appreciate every second of time you spend on our blog. I hope you enjoyed everything I’ve produced for you as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Although I will no longer be a weekly contributor to this blog, I will still be making my presence known. Look for my input in occasional guest posts and among the comment section. The FYIndOut team is incredible, and I will miss my place in the company very much.

As a final installment of what I hope you considered good rules to work by, I’m offering my top 6 takeaways from my time at FYIndOut:

1. It’s never about selling your company. It’s about building your relationships.
2. Everyone needs information, and giving means getting. Share any nugget of knowledge you can for the benefit of the masses.
3. Nothing beats great content with an automatic takeaway.
4. Be as viral as possible. Marketing doesn’t require deep pockets. Be creative, be innovative, and be web 2.0 savvy.
5. Connect with the people your audience already trusts. They are the ones who will offer dynamite input for your company that will be listened to and shared.
6. Social media is the bomb diggity.

In case we haven’t already connected on Twitter, lets do it now. Follow me @CAGarland.

Thanks for everything FYIndOut!

Keep reading everyone. I know I will.

(Roscoe with Dead End Sign by Zoomar)