How To Use Twitter For Business

Social Networking: Quality Vs. Quantity

By: Joel Postman | 19/09/2008 | Social Marketing
The value of your social networks is largely based on the quality, and to some extent quantity, of people in them. While nearly all social networks have a “Terms of Service” (TOS), the rules for participation (don’t post obscenities or copyrighted material, for example), the etiquette for adding people to each network is defined by the mores of those on the network. It’s also highly subject to change when early adopters (who tend to be purists) become outnumbered by “newcomers.”

Social Media Marketing Success - Three Steps on How to Maximize Your Efforts

By: Doug Firebaugh | 29/10/2008 | Marketing
Social Media. Social Media Marketing. THOSE 2 things has been written and talked about the last 2 years a LOT. But believe it or not, not a lot of small businesses or home businesses are using this powerful business and marketing "Zone" yet. Many people, because it is on the internet, shy...

How to Make Social Media Work for You

By: David Ogden | 25/08/2008 | Home Business
Today one of the most effective ways to build your Internet business is to use social media. Social media is where you use the Internet tools available to you to electronically to share information with people. Let's take a little closer look at exactly what social media is and how you can benefit from it.

Social Media Optimization- Primary Strategy for Online Marketing

By: Christina George | 03/10/2008 | SMO
Optimization of a site through social networking is called as Social Media Optimization. SMO is one of the easiest and the promising method of ranking high and expanding your business. Once a network starts it keep on increasing.

What People Aren't Saying About Social Media

By: Jennifer Horowitz | 18/06/2008 | Internet
Let me start by saying I am a fan of social media, I personally choose to participate in social media. However when you read about social media, you often only hear one side of things - the message is clear - Participate or miss out! And while I do believe that is true, I think it's not always that simple.

Social Networking Media – What Will You Do, be Connected or be a Voyeur?

By: Nancy McCord | 24/04/2008 | Networking
Will you connect or will you simply become a voyeur? Social networking media is all about sharing yourself with others. Find out why you should be involved with this exciting new medium.

Everyone is All A-twitter About Twitter

By: Jennifer Horowitz | 22/04/2008 | Internet
According to the Twitter FAQ, "Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you're doing." But it's not only for social purposes ' there can be many benefits to your business as well. Follow a few simple rules and you can stay "top of mind" with your customers and potential customers.

Maximizing Your 140 Characters on Twitter

By: Matthew Bredel | 01/11/2008 | Internet
Are you Twittering yet? Those new to Twitter might not really 'get' what it this social marketing tool is at first but as soon as you find some people to follow and get people following you, you're going to see the potential. Micro blogging is mini blogging and it can...

Basically, Twitter is, it's called a Micro-Blogging Platform and it has a real instant message into it, okay, because it's very much real time. Some of my favorite things, actually before it broke, Twitter Tracking was really a very cool feature for business usage. And I say that because there are other tools that I am going to suggest that you can use in its place.

It basically, here is the premise of Twitter Tracking. You have a topic that you want to track or you want to get notification on even if it's somebody that you are not following ,okay. You have the ability to like for instance, if I wanted to see who is writing stuff about SharePoint training? I would have typed in the Twitter Tracking feature which is, was just on IM and your mobile phone. You couldn't actually do it through the web like here. I would type-in Track SharePoint Training. And with all, the rest of my Twitter post that I see coming through to me, I would see any other post that people have SharePoint training in it.

So I thought that's a really great way to find out who is talking about stuff related to your business, and you could chime-in to that conversation. And that becoming part of the conversation and you could help out where you could and make suggestions and kind of become an expert in that area. People will end up looking to you for questions, answers to their questions and that's a great way to drive traffic to your business.

Now, if that feature doesn't seem to be working right now in Twitter. But I have found some other services like one that I really like that I use is Tweet Beep, and that allows me to get stuff in my Inbox, kind of like Google Alerts. You just sign up, it's very, very simple. Not a whole lot to it, you sign up, you get your Twitter name and you give them an email address if you want these Alerts to be sent to, and you get them sent into your email.

So for example, I am going to show you, like here is a Tweet Beep Alert for SharePoint. And I can see all the things that people are talking about SharePoint, and it comes to me, like every half hour it seems to come to me. So I get my have a Tweet Beep for SharePoint and I have got one for my name, and I've got one for Outlook, and things like that. And the way you can use it in the business sense of the work is that you can actually reply, you can actually reply or send a Tweet reply to these people to say like this person, I still hate SharePoint blah, blah, blah. I know that, lot of people hate SharePoint. But, somebody asked about a SharePoint training earlier today, and I saw one in here about who knows a good SharePoint training for end-users? So and it was to this person right here.

So what I did was, and I'll show you how I do this, this little tool that I use. You can actually go to Twitter, and I would say, @LLIU, and I want to do this right here, because you want to know what the heck I am talking about . And then I type, I would type in, I typed-in well, I think my training is pretty good and here is a link to my information in the site about my training. So I mean that's just a way for you to interject yourself, and you don't want to be too salzy (ph) because all of this is all about building relationships, and it's soft relationships. You don't go in hardcore marketing.

it's very much like we have all heard, you go on to Facebook, and everybody has to be really nice and very friendly and no hardcore selling and we all understand that Twitter is no different than that really. But, this is a way for you to keep an eye on the topic and keywords that are related to your business. And Denise is asking, if you tweet at someone whatever -- if you tweet at somebody's name who isn't subscribed to you, will they receive it? And yes, they will, absolutely because that's what I did with this person LLIU. I didn't know him, he didn't know me, we are not, we are not following each other. But, I was able to use Twitter to connect with him that way, and if he decide, it's great. He wants to follow me, he'll follow me and if I want to follow him, I'll follow him. But, you don't have to.

So I think that's really the beauty of using this Tweet Scan is that, you can still keep your finger on the post without having to become somebody's follower or having them follow you. So all very good points. Okay, so getting back to using Twitter for business.

One thing that you can do is, that I see a lot of, and if you have been involved in Twitter at all, you can always see that people are, they are asking questions. I am having a trouble with this product, can anybody help, or do you know anything about this particular new service? I am thinking of using this. Is there anybody had any problems? If you start asking questions using Twitter, things that are related to your business, again it's a way for you to control the conversation around a topic surrounding your business. That's another great way to use Twitter to do that.

So like for me, for example, I could say, I am creating SharePoint training. Whatever you think is the best method of delivery, if you like workshops, videos or both? And it basically starts up a conversation, and people who are doing a search, okay, tracking the words SharePoint or SharePoint training, they are going to see that. They are going to see your post. So again, it makes you get to be part of the bigger Twitter universe as far as people finding you and finding out about you, that you do stuff with SharePoint or whatever your business is, but that's a great way to use Twitter for business is to ask questions about things related to your business. So that's very good to do.

Now, another thing that you can do is, and I don't know about you but sometimes I hold workshops, I hold web meetings, and seminars. I see this happening a lot like Sherman Hu is one of my favorite. Sherman Hu is one of my favorite people. He is a great podcaster, a social marketer or whatever. But he uses YouStream a lot every Monday about 12 o'clock Colorado time. He uses YouStream to say hey, I am starting a YouStream open session. You come, see me. And that's a video type of thing where he answers, people use the chat feature in YouStream and they say, they ask him questions about podcasting or blogging and he answers, and he records that. And he announces that in Twitter. And actually, YouStream has a setup to where whenever you do a -- whenever you get ready to start a show, there's a little button that says Announce Twitter.

So it will push out an announcement to Twitter and say, this show is starting right now about this, here is a link. So you can use this type of technology to let people know that you've got something going on right away. Terry was saying that she attended a seminar from Twitter just this week. Yes, absolutely, I mean you see it all the time and the more you become involved in Twitter, I just think these things that people are doing are great business strategies as far as marketing, because it increases your exposer to people you know if that are interested in what you have to say or what you have to offer. And that's really what marketing is all about.