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Lets see what great marketer has to say about this.

1.  Startups: No, You Don’t Need To Hire A Social Media Expert by Dave Fleet

Let’s face it – the startup stage isn’t the time in a company lifecycle when resources are flush. You’re not likely to be walking around with a large marketing team; you don’t have big operating budget.

In that context, each dollar needs to deliver maximum return. Why hire someone at a premium when you can bring someone in-house with multiple skill sets – who can drive customer support and handle online support too? Who can handle your PR or marketing and integrate that strategy with your online activities? Hell, you might not even be at the point of investing in outside marketing help yet – why would you consider an even narrower function?

2. Do startups need to hire social media experts? by Francis Tan, TNW

First and foremost, let me tell you that the product is still the number one priority. If you’re going to market a bad product that hides behind a smokescreen of flowery words and flashy ads, it might sell for a while until people start to experience how crappy it is. One thing to keep in mind is that other startups are using social media as well so if you screw your shot, chances are people will just move on and talk about the next big thing.

3. Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A “Social Media Expert”

Being an expert in social media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.

Social media is just another facet of marketing and customer service. Say it with me. Repeat it until you know it by heart. Bind it as a sign upon your hands and upon thy gates. Social media, by itself, will not help you.

4. WHY Outsourcing Your Social Media is a Bad Idea by Rick Bakas

The rise of social media in business is approaching mass adoption. On a bell curve graph, we’ve progressed past “Early Adopters” and are now ascending up the graph to the top of the curve. How businesses are adopting social media is all over the board. Some businesses saw the writing on the wall, and began changing their internal culture to make new forms of communication part of their day-to-day. On the other hand, many businesses didn’t get social media but knew they had to have skin in the game so they found someone to “do” their social media for them. That strategy has all sorts of flaws associated with it and isn’t sustainable. Outsourcing your social media presence is like outsourcing your wedding vows. You don’t need someone else to tell the one you love that you care about them. It won’t come from the heart and won’t be as authentic as if you tell (or show) someone you care about them. No one can care about their own community better than the brand’s own employees.

5.  What Do Social Media Marketers Know About Tech? SURVEY RESULTS by Jolie O’Dell in ReadWriteWeb

Over the past couple days, we’ve been able to put together a decent picture and identify some knowledge gaps and points of confusion for many would-be social media experts. But first, let’s address why some of the RWW staff – and many of our readers, some of whom must hire social media experts – feel it’s important for even the most marketing-oriented of consultants to have a rudimentary understanding of the workings of the Web, including its ecosystem of companies and applications.

6. How to Choose the Right Social Media Consultant for Your Business 

With the strong emergence of social media in the internet marketing world, every Tom, Dick and Harry has come out saying they are social media experts. They are feeding on the desires of entrepreneurs who do not have time to dedicate to developing their social media presence effectively. If you do not ask the right questions you may wind up spending thousands of dollars and get no results. That’s why I created this guide to help you choose the best social media consultant for your company.

Also, 1 article that is worth checking

7. 10 Key Online Hires For Your Startup by Elance (Startup cloud)

Today, there is a new way to build a business. You can launch a startup without renting an office and without hiring employees. Instead you can build a virtual team. Whether it is IT, marketing or creative services you need, top talent is ready to work for you only when you need them.

The post Do social media experts can help new startups & businesses? appeared first on ENFEW.

• LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 90 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
• More than half of LinkedIn members are located outside of the United States.
• There were nearly two billion people searches on LinkedIn in 2010.
• Headquartered in Mountain View, California, LinkedIn also operates in Dublin, Ireland; London, England; Toronto, Canada; Mumbai, India; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Sydney, Australia.
• The company’s management team is comprised of seasoned executives from companies like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, TiVo, PayPal and Electronic Arts. The CEO of LinkedIn is Jeff Weiner.
• LinkedIn is currently available in six languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
• LinkedIn started off 2011 with about 1,000 full-time employees located all around the globe, up from around 500 at the beginning of 2010.

Tips For Using LinkedIn For Business

1. The ultimate guide to LinkedIn by Lauren Fisher at Simplyzesty

Many people set up a profile on LinkedIn but don’t use it regularly, only returning when prompted by an email telling you someone is looking to connect. There are many great features in LinkedIn that you should be using, whether you’re job-hunting, looking for business or simply want to network online. It’s worth investing your time in LinkedIn – as with any social network you need to build up a community and following in order to maximise the benefits to you. Having used LinkedIn regularly, it can seem particularly daunting and the features that make it such a great business tool can be hard to find. We’ve put together top tips for using LinkedIn that will help you get the most out of the site.

2. Guide to Using LinkedIn to Sell More, Faster by  Scott Allen

One of the most common questions I get asked is, “How can LinkedIn help me sell more?” LinkedIn isn’t just for job seekers and recruiters. And while trying to use LinkedIn as a cold-calling tool may not be very effective, there are several ways that you can use LinkedIn to support the entire sales lifecycle: lead generation, sales acceleration, solution delivery and customer relationship.

3. Amateur’s Guide to Using LinkedIn.com by Pamela DeLoatch

The phrase “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is clearly the premise of Linkedin.com. Take friends, family and associates, and expand it to the people they know, and so on, to eventually form a huge group of contacts.

4. Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn by Guy Kawasaki

Most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to make a sale, form a partnership, or get a job. It works well for this because it is an online network of more than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 130 industries. However, it is a tool that is under-utilized, so I’ve compiled a top-ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn.

5. The “Don’t Do It” Guide To Using LinkedIn at Applicant

The other day we got an email asking – “I update my linkedin status regularly and add many people each day. This approach works wonders for me on Facebook and Twitter but it’s not working on LinkedIn. What am I doing wrong?” Although the question might surprise some of us, we need to realize there are many people who still use LinkedIn the way they use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other social networking tools. LinkedIn is a networking tool for professionals and for anyone who wants to showcase their skills and find opportunities via this wonderful platform.

—  If you know any tips that can help others or if you have any guides, feel free to post with comments.

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There are many snippets on the Internet that show you how to get total Twitter followers of an user, most of them are written in PHP or other server-side script languages. But do you know that we can do that with only pure Javascript by using ajax in jQuery?

2. Twitter Followers Count Snippet for WordPress

Here’s a short snippet to grab and display your twitter followers count in WordPress. You can use this anywhere, sidebar, posts, header, footer. We’ll be firing an anonymous call to the Twitter API for a user profile. This method does not require authentication, unless you’re trying to view a protected profile. To make this slightly easier I’ve used the JSON functions which are available in PHP 5, but you can easily get them to work in PHP 4 (and as Alex mentioned in the comments below, WordPress comes with it’s own JSON functions for PHP 4 users, which is awesome).

3.  Twitter API and jQuery Showcase: Display your Followers or Friends

Today I was playing around with the Twitter API and created this little “widget” using jQuery and PHP. I know, there are already plenty of them, but I wanted to improve some details.

Some of the features are:

• You can get your most recent 100 followers or friends
• Followers or friends are shown in sets of 25 per widget page
• The images of the users are preloaded (unlike in Twitter)
• You can navigate through the set
• You can refresh the entire set
• More information on the user can be seen using a tooltip when hovering over his picture

4. Combined Facebook, Twitter & RSS Social Stats with jQuery, PHP & YQL

As we increasingly depend on more and more social services, there rises the need to provide a simple way to let our website visitors take part of our diverse social presence.

In this tutorial we are going to create a simple widget, which combines the number of your RSS readers, twitter followers, and fans of your facebook fan page, to give a rough estimate of your social popularity.

We are using jQuery and the tipTip plugin, object-oriented PHP, and Yahoo’s YQL, while demonstrating a number of interesting web development techniques.

5. Cool Tweet/Twitter Follower Counter Using jQuery

In the current time of social networking social bookmarks have become lifeline of any website that needs to attract traffic ( including webspeaks.in :P). Everyone wants to show the number of subscribers/follwers of  is/her site. This task has been oversimplified by jQuery, where a single line of code can ease your life a lot. In this post I am showing how to display ‘Number of tweets’ and ‘Number of Twitter followers of your
website’.

6. Tricks: Display Total Twitter Followers as Text on WordPress

Everybody blogging everybody using Twitter for Microbloging tools. On this tips, I will show you how to display your total twitter followers on your sidebar or whatever and displaying as text. All need to do is add little bit code on your header.php or footer.php or sidebar.php files. and done.

7.  Twitter Friends & Followers Widget – A jQuery Plugin!

There is a Facebook fans widget, Google friends widget, what about a Twitter friends widget?!
Here is a jQuery plugin that you can embed anywhere to display pictures of your Twitter followers or friends (whom you follow) and their latest tweets if you like.

By featuring your Twitter friends or followers on your blog, you will encourage others to become friends too..

8. jTwitter, jQuery and getting the number of followers

It just is a very small wrapper around the Twitter API and it returns the json document that the api uses. It is very easy to use, once you know how ;-).
i’m really excited to see how you use in your projects and stuff, Don’t forget to subscribe. :0

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