AN INTERVIEW WITH SOCIAL MEDIA ENTREPRENEUR
LINDSEY C. HOLMES
Lindsey Holmes is Founder of LCH Business, a social media marketing company specializing in social media campaigns and management, and mobile application development. Lindsey is a claimed voice in social media and has created a business model that engages on over 60 social media/ bookmarking channels where she proudly leverages her channels with a personal following of over 50,000. I had the opportunity to sit down with Lindsey and learn more about her entrepreneurial experience and some tips and wisdom on her speedy road to success in this phenomenal industry. Read on!
Arvin: Lindsey, what things can you attribute to your success in social media marketing?
Lindsey: A real understanding of its power/ necessity to the small business. I discovered social media as a young real estate broker in NYC. The competition was extreme and my budget was very limited. One day, utilizing a tool that I once used in college to tell my friends that I’d be in the ‘caf’ or after college simply to stay in touch, something amazing happened. I made a comment about how I had just closed my first deal and that I’d be taking the next month off. From that post I subsequently sold 3 homes and recruited 4 agents for my firm. Two things happened here. My friends’ parents were excited to see that I was an entrepreneur and wanted to support me, and my friends who were bored at work or still seeking work, became excited about making enough money at something to take a whole month off. All through a Facebook post, a career was jump started and I integrated social media marketing, even before it was considered an industry, into my business. I also try to be as ‘social’ as possible, including quotes/ sentiments that reflect me as a CEO, and not just a salesperson. I think it is very important to keep the ‘social’ in social media.
Arvin: What is one of the first things you notice when you meet another business professional?
Lindsey: Their pitch/networking skills. Are they overly direct, or do they understand and embrace the need for social interaction even in business?
Arvin: What’s the next big social media platform that you see people using besides beyond Twitter and Facebook?
Lindsey: Business-based social media platforms such as LinkedIn and others with usability features/ metrics steered mainly at business. I don’t think a new platform is necessary however, I believe that Facebook and Twitter are already evolving into the social media marketing/ business side of things, with Facebook Pages, Twitter’s solid brand usage models and Ad integrations. I believe that people will utilize Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with more of a business premise.
Arvin: You have well over 24K Twitter followers. Why follow so many people or why shouldn’t you follow so many people?
Lindsey: I am a social media marketer who has resigned myself to utilizing the tool that I sell and believe in to its height. That means I believe if used correctly, you won’t have to pay for any other means of marketing to start/ grow a business. That also means that you have to be active and willing to source opportunities and not just wait for them to find you. Through Twitter, there are many ways to search for target markets, interests and respond to potential clients. You must follow first sometimes. I follow colleagues, people interested in learning how to use social media to market, or people that relate to the other aspects of my Twitter bio, like being a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated, loving dogs (I have a 3 year old Shih Tzu, Banks, who is the light of my life), or being a female tech. Through following/ following back, engaging with, and retweets, I have gained a following of 24,000 + people that I may not speak with daily, but that have like interests, and can be a viable source of business or friendship. More technically, when following back, I read bios, at least the last 25 tweets and if they look super interesting, I add them to a private list to see if they should be ‘current’ in my twitter stream. I do think it’s important for brands to follow back. You, as my client, should be able to tell me when I need improvement, and I would rather you do this through a DM. 
Arvin: Do you have plans to share specific practices of maintaining a quality Twitter follower list? What advice can you provide to ensure a clean list of followers?
Lindsey: If people are using the tool by ‘correct standards,’ then you will find your followers only being people with the exact interests you’ve specified in your bio/ through your tweets. Most don’t go by these standards and thank God or we would be bored to death! Most of my new followers last week were from my Tuesday night Glee rant. I love Glee! When Wednesday rolled around and I was sharing articles on GTD tools or Mobile Apps, they stayed, they retweeted and found interest in what I was tweeting there too. Your tweets should be reflective of you, and unless you are boring, will unveil a range of interests over time. To ensure a ‘clean’ list of followers, use a good management tool. You can follow based on searches, cross-follow accounts will similar interests/ followers, unfollow, and more. Buzzom.com is the best management tool, Social Oomph is also good. There are also a ton of other applications for specific needs such as unfollowing, JustUnfollow.com or Untweeps.com that lets you unfollow dormant accounts, or based on the last time a person tweeted from days to months. I am partner in a Social Media Application Development company, Pandi, which created its first tool Rters. Rters lets you track who is retweeting you. This is another very solid way of cleaning list or at least establishing who your Twitter allies are. It literally speaks to who feels that what you say is important enough to share.
Arvin: Who has inspired you in the business that you are in and the markets that you serve? If possible, can you share any personal testimonies from your inspirations?
Lindsey: I am personally inspired by my clients of the past few years. As a new industry, Social Media Marketing has such a high learning curve. For brands, both large and small to take a chance on this new, often controversial form of marketing, even as the solid business/ ROI metrics were being rolled out as we went along, to me speaks highly of my clients and makes them innovators right along with this industry. FEMWORKS, LLC subcontracted my firm to create a full scale social media campaign for an HIV/ AIDS Awareness Campaign based in Newark, NJ. Working for a health department leaves no room for speculative results. They want numbers! Through Twitter, Facebook, Causecast, and an LCH marketing strategy, we created a standard in social media health campaigns, with solid metrics and increased testing significantly in this community. I am most proud of this campaign for its impact on my community and the demonstration that out-of-the-box thinking is what is necessary to be progressive.
Arvin: Finally, what do you see in store with your recent partnership with SHAARP Management?
Lindsey: I see the creation of life-altering applications, tools, and methodologies to make productivity attainable and to empower people. I think we both understand the need for technology in our communities and are creative and dedicated enough to build these solutions, teach these solutions and maintain a level of commitment that many other young leaders don’t to our communities.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM LINDSEY
1. Socializing is at the heart of all business. Social networking should be at the core of your business interactions.
2. People want to learn about you – the person that could relate to them outside of their quite possibly mundane daily business tasks. They will most likely feel more comfortable/ be more apt to do business with you if there is a social relation, not just a business one, which is why social networking online is so important.
3. Find balance in your social media. There have been times when I have forgotten the social intent and spammed my friends/ followers or forgotten my marketing premise and wasted time. I think it’s important to carve out your social media objectives, find tools such as aggregators and other management tools to help you effectively manage your social media, and follow them to a “T”.
4. Stop being a Twitter snob or you will lose out on some potentially valuable clients/ contacts. If you are not following back based solely on a bio that seems unrelated to yours, you are highly mistaken. You only get 140 characters. Add these people to a private list. If they aren’t spam bots or they say good, albeit random (a la the premise of Twitter) things, give them a shot.