By creating a company page you are allowing LinkedIn to promote the interests of your business. LinkedIn business profiles have the ability to appear in Google search results. You could view it as LinkedIn giving your company a recommendation.

The creation of a page helps build thought leadership and credibilty for your business. How? By valuable recommendations from followers that continually bring new opportunities to build your brand, secure new clients/referrals, and develop/improve your reputation.

Company pages from LinkedIn serve as a provision for business owners to promote their products or services, and the only cost is the time it takes to create the page, or what you pay your Virtual Assistant to create it for you. Shameless plug, or grab my new pdf guide, checklist and video “Discover How  and Why To Create LinkedIn Company Pages“.

With company pages you can enjoy increased traffic to your site when you link your site to your profile and company page.

Some of the basic info you’ll include on your Company Page:

• Company Name
• Logo – Visual Branding
• Business Description – Make it a keyword rich description
• Twitter Username – more link love as this will pull in your recent tweets
• Link to your website and your RSS Feed – increasing traffic to your site as stated above
• Specialties – more opportunities for keywords

In this quote from Jeff  Weiner of LinkedIn when he was interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2010 he sums up the power of being connected on LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn connects talent with opportunity at massive scale, scale that was never possible before because we did not have infrastructure that enabled us to connect 100s of millions of people world wide.”- Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn

Make sure to visit Your Virtual Girl Friday’s LinkedIn Company Page and click the follow button.

Podcasting is a highly portable and easy-to-implement communication tool for businesses to effectively build brand, connect with a target audience and increase their customer and client base.

Of course, business owners naturally lack the time and skills to effectively set up, produce and promote their podcasts. It is for this reason that VAClassroom has created this innovative and timely mini-course.

Registration is now officially open for the PODCAST MARKETING SUCCESS STRATEGIES Mini-Course.

The two-week mini-course officially gets underway on Monday, April 5, 2010, and is priced at a very reasonable rate ($147) for the first run of the program.

Learn more about the PODCAST MARKETING SUCCESS STRATEGIES Mini-Course.

For small business that are interested in the power of social media the following is accessable:  increasing referrals, develop trust, retain clients, be more available, and socialable

By participating in social media small businesses can build their online reputation no matter what type of business or professional service they are the above is an option for them.

Now that you know, social media is for your small business are you wondering where to start?

The first thing to do is define your social media  goals, have a strategy before you start.  How do you define goals or come up with a strategy when you don’t completely understand how social media marketing  works?  With an effective social media assessment you will be able to identify the appropriate starting point and direction for you and your business.  You will also be able to measure your ROI’s Return on Influence and Return on Investment.  This is where someone like myself comes into play, as a Social Media Marketing Virtual Assistant this is one of my favorite things to do.

Above all don’t let the fear of the unknown hold you back from participating in Social Media Marketing.  After all what is FEAR?  “False Evidence Appearing Real” – Ilene Meckely