Archive for the ‘social networking’ Category

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Twitter! Twitter! What is Twitter?

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

by Dianne Ronnow

Everyone online seems to be talking about Twitter these days! But what exactly is Twitter?

This is Twitter.com’s official definition:

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called “tweets” of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.”

It’s pretty simple really. Twitter is a site where you toss out short notes on the web that tell people what you are doing, feeling, thinking right now. It’s a great way for busy people to keep in touch with friends and quickly broadcast information about where you are and what you’re up to. Twitter is like an instant messaging blog that posts your conversations to the world (although you can also have private conversations.) You only have 140 spaces to write something– so you have to keep it short.

With Twitter you have the option to link it to your mobile phone or to your instant messenger. This turns Twitter into a powerful mobile communication tool, since you can both send and receive updates on your phone, and stay in touch wherever you are.

What is the point? Well, if you’ve ever been hooked on Facebook, MySpace, email, blogging, one of the instant messaging clients, or even just spent a lot of time texting on your cell phone, you probably get the idea. It is a quick way to stay in touch, meet new people, and have some fun. It is like a mini blog.

Twitter isn’t just for personal use, it also has many applications for business use. It can be used to broadcast your company’s latest news and blog posts. Twitter is good for interacting with your customers and employees. It can also enable easy internal group communication, feedback and collaboration.

For the entrepreneur and home worker, Twitter is becoming an important part of business promotion, web marketing, personal branding, and the social networking scene. It can be a great tool to get your messages out to a targeted audience and find new business leads.

There are some great twitter resources and tool out there on the web. One of my favorites is Tweetdeck.com. It organizes your Twitter information and gives your Twitter account an instant messenger style format. Firefox has some great Twitter add-ons. Another good Twitter tool is Tweetlater.com. You can send postdated tweets and auto reply tweets with this. There is also a Twitter download that you can add to your Apple/Mac Dashboard. You can also add twitter feed and wigets to your Facebook, WordPress and Blogger blogs.

If you are going to be using Twitter to promote your business, here are a few important Twitter Business Tips:

1. Don’t blatantly promote. This is more of a passive promotion media. Blatant promotions turn your audience off.

2. Don’t let it take over and distract you from other important tasks. It’s easy to get too caught up in Twittering and lose track of time.

3. Don’t let it take the place of real communication in your life. Twitter is a communication tool not a communication replacement.

4. Do have fun! Share interesting non-business as well as business related tidbits of information that others might enjoy learning.

So, are you ready? Let’s Twitter!

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Blogging for a Small Business

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Blogs are easy way to communicate with the customers, and employees. From past few years, blogs are continuing as one of the effective channels of communication when compared to other advertising channels. Blogs for business can help to strengthen relationships with targeted audiences. A blog can help in as many ways, from a business perceptive.

Reasons why a small business needs blogging
Small businesses need to be more effective in building a potential and loyal customer base when compared to large businesses. Blogs helps in increasing the consumer base.
• Building customer relationships: Blogs are very helpful to increase the brand loyalty in customers by engaging with them through blogging on their favorite topics. Regularly updated blogs can help businesses in making readers to visit the website on regular basis. This may steadily enhance the business opportunities of the organization. Blogs became easy and effective medium to make the customers to join in discussions, providing tips, insights, etc., about the products and services of many businesses.
• Blogs at workplace: Employees can write their opinions, views, and recommendations for any developments in the business. Blogs helps small businesses for effective cross-functional communication with employees. Companies can create internal blogs within organizations where project members and employees update project information along with reports without having to waste time for interaction and responses for minor updates.
• For brand awareness: Small businesses can easily update their recent achievements in products and services in blogs and can create awareness to the customers about them. With regular reading of blogs, customers can know the latest developments in the business. Blogs help small businesses to create brand awareness for the products or services they offer.
• Better communication: Blogging for small businesses facilitate to increase the integrity in the organization with the easy communication process between the employees and the management. Blogs are also created to attract the readers of targeted markets. Companies update their respective blogs frequently with opinions and reviews of customers along with their new achievements in their products and services, and make them visible to almost everyone online.

Blogging enables the small businesses to stay in business, to connect with its customers, clients. This can indirectly help to increase their sales. Blogging can make your customers relate better to company on a personal level. Blogging is a great way to set your company apart from the group of small, and home based businesses through Internet.

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How to Succeed in blogging?

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Blogging is a technology where bloggers unite and succeed. Thats what I think, I might be wrong but bloggers need to know one thing clear regarding blogs, that blogs are not only content sites they are also a good communication channels. This channel must be displayed in front of readers in order to get those readers. So the main activity for a blogger should be that he starts communicating with his fellow bloggers. If he didn’t start to communicate, this will lead him to no reader for his blog. Once a blogger starts having some readers for his blog, they will inturn generate more readers. Its completely a viral effect.

One activity that bloggers are mostly engaged in, is writing content. The content must be good. Otherwise no where the blog will be seen, if the blogger wants to get noticed. he should write quality content. Content is the essence of a blog, This thing must be remembered. If you don’t write a content that appeals to your readers, you would not be able to sustain those readers.In order to attract a lot of readers a bloggers must focus on writing some excellent content. This content can be of any type like an how to article, desciption or a list of Links , but it must appeal to the public.

Bloggers do forget about their niche. This must be remembered that in order to succeed you must first focus what’s your niche. The niche can be anything from Technology to lifestyle. But focusing the niche is really important because unless you focus on your niche, how could you label your blog. Bloggers mostly fail because they don’t focus on their niche, they write content about each and everything found on earth, thinking that it will bring more readers, but actually readers go for those blogs which contains a lot of content for a particular niche.

A blogger must also regularly Bookmark his articles on various bookmarking sites. This brings him in attention of a lot of readers which again bookmark the blog, thus having a viral effect. Please don’t Spam the bookmarking sites, otherwise your domain could be banned.

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New Twitter Users Biggest Mistakes: How to Avoid Them

Friday, April 17th, 2009

I am not usually a big fan of rules when it comes to social media, but I do think there are ways to make your experience using tools such as Twitter more beneficial to yourself and others. There are some common mistakes I see new users make that I want to share with you. The good news is, once you are aware of them they are really easy to avoid!

Mistake: Not using a real picture of yourself for your avatar.

When I first joined Twitter over a year ago I was guilty of using a cartoon-type picture of me for mine. I thought it was cute and it happened to be part of the design I had on my previous blog. However, I switched to an actual photo of myself a few months later, and more than a few people commented that they were glad to see the real me.

I feel the same about others now. A picture of you is a lot more personable than a picture of your dog or a company logo. People like to see your smile!

Mistake: Automating pushy direct messages for new followers.

Many Twitter users use a service such as TweetLater to set up automatic messages to go to anyone who begins following them. This is a bit controversial among people on Twitter. If you are automating a friendly message to just say thanks for following me, that’s one thing, but a message with a link to one of your products when we haven’t even connected yet is generally frowned upon.

Mistake: Starting to follow people without posting a couple of your updates.

It may feel like you are talking to yourself to do this, especially if you don’t have any followers yourself. But when someone comes upon your page and is deciding whether or not to follow you, they need something to go on. People are looking for some sign of life or personality.

Mistake: Not spending a good amount of time interacting.

There is nothing wrong with letting others know what you did last night or what your plans are for the day. Just be sure to intersperse your tweets with some two-way conversation. Ask questions, re-tweet others, reply to questions, comment on others tweets, etc. This builds community and keeps things balanced and interesting.

Mistake: Mass following right out of the gate.

My ratio of followers to those I am following is pretty even, mainly because I like to follow back most of the people who follow me as long as they don’t look like spammers.

However, I find it hard to follow others who, in addition to having only a couple of updates, are following thousands of people and have only a few people following them. It feels spammy, like they don’t have much interest in having a relationship or conversation with anyone.

Mistake: Doing everything from the web instead of using a Twitter client.

Installing a client such as Tweetdeck gives you more functionality than what you can do from the Twitter website alone. For example, Tweetdeck allows you to place people in groups which make it easier to keep track of them, especially once you are following lots of people. Plus, you don’t have to be connected to the web to use these types of clients. I find they make tweeting a lot easier and more convenient for keeping track of your replies, direct messages and followers.

Mistake: All promotion, all the time.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, no one likes to follow someone who is constantly selling and promoting without giving anything back. Keep things balanced and respect that others do not want to be pitched all of the time. That being said…

Mistake: Not leveraging Twitter as part of your business marketing strategy.

If you are in business and using social media, you are looking at Twitter as a tool to get results in that business, not to just socialize all day. Remember that it is a great way to reinforce your brand, form strategic alliances and build credibility and trust.

by Christine Gallagher

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Making an income from Twitter

Friday, April 17th, 2009

There is hardly a day that goes by without the mention of Twitter.
Twitter has seemingly sprung up overnight and is taking the web world by storm. Everyone is ‘Twittering’ each other, sharing short tales of what they are up to with friends and the world, creating an online social networking phenomenon unlike anything ever seen before.

Why is Twitter so popular?

The answer is simple. Very ‘simple’. Twitter is so simple to use and readily accessible. You can Twitter from your computer, Twitter on the bus with your iPhone using one of the many Twitter Apps now readily available.

So what is Twittering?

“Twittering’ is the terminology used by members of the Twitter social network when they communicate. To Twitter you simply log in to your free Twitter account and type a few short lines of what you are up to, and share it with your Twitter buddies. You can become online friends with other Twitter members, read their updates, send them messages and even share photos using TwitPic. If your posts are interesting enough people will want to become your Twitter friend as well and request to be added to your network. Simple!

Making an income from Twitter

So here is the part that you’re interested in! Making money from Twitter!
You can use Twitter as a money-making business networking and advertising tool as well.
MAny of the largest companies such as Virgin, Billabong, Flight Centre regularly post their latest specials, with a link back to that promotion page of their website for readers to follow. By offering ‘Twitter Only’ promotions, they can track the readers that take up the offer. Very simple, effective and free form of online marketing, and the best thing about it is that you are targeting people who are already in your own social network so you know they are already interested in your products or services.
Now, when you post your twitter message to your friends it will show up on their message board, and if their friends are interested in your messages they will also want to become your friend, and your online marketing network snowballs rapidly. It really is free marketing in the simplest form!

But what if you don’t yet have a product or service to sell?

If I told you that you can earn an income from selling a product you don’t even have, would you believe me?
I will tell you how. This is not a con and it’s no big secret. It is very simple!
I will use a case study for an online lingerie store called Dream Lingerie in Australia.
The entire Dream Lingerie online store is a templated site provided freely by Fantasy Lingerie and you simply sign up with them as an affiliate. To do this search the site and find the ‘Affiliate’ link. It costs nothing to sign up and all you need is a domain name and they will set you up your own online store. The current commission for selling their products through your online store in 20%, so a tidy profit if you make a sale. You don’t need to purchase any products or hard sell. You simply have to drive visitors to your website and when they make an online purchase, Fantasy Lingerie ship the products to the customer and you earn your commission, which is paid monthly. Very simple concept and many companies including Flight Centre, British Airways & HotelClub have similar revenue-earning affiliate programs.

Now, you set up your Twitter account to work it’s magic!….

Firstly, customize your Twitter settings to promote your website. You can change the background image, colours etc very easily in Twitter. Make sure your background image has your web address, product images or specials in the design for instant attraction. Professional looking branding is critical.

Once you have done this, start sending Twitter messages to your network promoting the products.
As Lingerie is a product that needs to be visualized, and Twitter can’t directly upload images, use TwitPic and log in using your same Twitter account details and you can upload products and add a product description, which is automatically sent to your Twitter page. Make sure with every product description you mention your web address so people will know where they can view and purchase that product.
Like any marketing, you must do this regularly, so set yourself a goal. Post 4 new products every day, and find 20 new Twitter friends each day to follow you. For people that request to join your network, make sure you send them back a response thanking them, including your website address in that response encouraging them to visit your website.
You will quickly find the number of visitors to your site will triple and sales will soar!
This principle also works with other social networks such as Myspace and Facebook.

Article by Chris Bourke of Devision.com.au

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