Using Twitter to grow awareness for your business may be the right approach, then again, it may not be to. Many small business owners think that just because Twitter is “Free” that they should and need to be there, but it simply isn’t so.

For sake of context here I am going to provide some definition around Twitter. Many think Twitter is a one-to-many chat session; it simply isn’t. Twitter is a life stream, a right-now stream of social consciousness. So what do you do with that? Consider this:

• A promotion that is time sensitive
• Reporting successes
• Addressing customer inquiries, complaints and accolades
• Encouraging brand engagement
• and many more I’ll leave off for brevity sake.

Using Twitter as the entry point for commerce will largely be a let down for small business. The SMB segment continually works to measure the “return on investment” in marketing as a line item in their budget. The reality is that most are not sophisticated enough in their business plan to determine and measure the value of the “return on engagement”.

I’m intentionally vague here, so bear with me:

A company recently felt accosted by a prolific Twitterer. The person stated her feeling about the product and service and the company swiftly and openly proclaimed that it was false. There was an exchange, hurt feelings, etc. and the company was placed at the mercy of the Twitterverse as the group retaliated. In short, the engagement was bad. You wouldn’t do this in your business, why would you do it in person?

We’ll play opposite world here:

The company is accused on Twitter and they immediately follow up with concern and caring. They seek the details, accept that there may be fault and arrange a meet offline. The Twitter feels heard and the situation is diffused. In short, the return on engagement is huge because the customer is heard and the business is validated as caring about it’s customers.

How do you use Twitter for success? Use it like you would any other communication tool, and remember that humans are on the other side of the screen and generally they are good people simply wanting to be heard.

Sure, the social web is important. Facebook in particular is the hub for many social interactions that take place online, and Microsoft’s latest Outlook integration recognizes that fact. Microsoft has released an Outlook feature that will sync your Facebook contacts to keep their relevant profile information up to date. There have been tools for similar features in the past, but the direct support from Microsoft shows the company’s acknowledgment of the permanence of Facebook’s social web influence.

The new feature integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Windows Live, looking to be a part of Microsoft’s Social Connector initiative, released with the latest Office 2010. Only those Facebook contacts with Outlook email addresses are synced, to avoid any privacy concerns such as those Google faced with its Buzz integration. Your Facebook contacts’ profile pictures are also synced. From Microsoft,

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“What Can Social Media do for Your Small Business?” focused on what social media could do for your small- or medium-sized business — the fact that it’s neither a broadcast medium nor a marketing tool. But now that we know about the what, how about the how?

Getting Started

First, work out which social media sites you want to engage with. There are a lot of them, even if you only count the bigger names, and you almost certainly don’t have the time or resources to be active on all of them. You need to cherry-pick a handful (or even just one), and really focus your energy on that select group.

The most important question to ask yourself is whether a given site already has an active community around your business area or product. It’s far easier to engage with an existing community than trying to start from scratch.

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Source: www.socialmediatoday.com

One of the most sought after answers in Social Media is whether or not engagement in social networks such as Twitter or Facebook directly correlates to customer acquisition, retention, and advocacy. Before we can earn customers however, we have to recognize that at any given time, they are also prospects. And, prospects require information and confidence in order to make decisions, in your favor of course. The answer to our question lies in social engagement.

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According to O’Reilly Media (2009), over half of all Facebook users are out of college, and their numbers are growing each year. Why are so many adults getting on board? Well, while younger people are using Facebook primarily for socializing, the older crowd is using Facebook to market their businesses.

Facebook offers several tools for business promotion, and there are also a number of apps available that give Facebook marketers even more options. Facebook can create buzz and help you stay in touch with customers. If you’re interested in getting started, here’s a basic tutorial:

Profile Page
This is where you create your business profile. Enter information that will help people find you, based on what you want to promote. This is a good place to tag your page so that both consumers and the search engines can find you, so make sure you choose the correct category. Profile pages can generate a lot of page views, so make yours interesting!

Facebook Pages
Your Facebook Page is where you’ll post everything you want people to see- photos, news, videos, messages and any other information. Establish your brand presence on your page, and customize it with Flash, apps and relevant content. Anything you do here is broadcast to your fans, so they can get updates in real time.

Facebook Groups
Once you create your profile, you can build groups centered around people who share your interests. This creates awareness of your business and brand through conversations and interactions. Users can’t become fans with this feature, but you can communicate in a more personal way with members by sending messages to their inboxes.

Facebook Events
Facebook Events is a free application that you can use to promote events, such as parties, contests, upcoming sales and product launches. Each event gets its own page where fans can request invitations and sign up for notifications. Facebook marketers use Events to build a community of interested people who want to become involved.

Notes and Photos
These are applications that allow you to share blog posts and pictures. They offer a way to create branded content that helps your Facebook pages rank. Just be sure to stay away from salesy verbiage, and don’t spam people with a lot of company information or logos. You’ll maintain your credibility if you just stick with text and photos that are more educational in nature.

Another nice feature for marketers is the ability to tag photos and notes. If you want to bring them to the attention of certain people, you can tag them to be sent to those people.

Messages
Facebook Messages help you target your marketing efforts. You can look at it as an alternative to email. While it doesn’t have all of the functions and features of email, it does prevent spam by monitoring the volume of message sent to users.

Marketplace
The Facebook Marketplace is like a classified, or ad section. If you’re looking for goods or services or want to offer yours to fans and members, you can post your ads here. This has the potential to generate leads and sales by targeting people who are likely to be interested. All Marketplaces are tied to actual Facebook accounts, so you can see the profiles of all respondents.

News Feed
The Facebook News Feed gives your posts wide exposure by syndicating it, like an RSS feed. When a user joins your group, responds to an invitation, or engages you in any way, Facebook automatically adds that transaction to each user’s “mini feed” in the form of a “recent news” stream. This stream unifies all actions so that everyone can see what’s been going on with your business.

As you can see, there are many ways to market your business using Facebook. There are also a lot of useful apps available to anyone who wants to take advantage of Facebook to promote a product or service.

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Seybold Scientific provides managed social media marketing and consulting services. To learn more contact us at (208) 639-0781.

Many folks ask how to go about creating social media for their company. As a service to the industry, find here an open source version of a draft social media content development process.

This process is general enough to guide development of specific initiatives. It does not recommend blogging or video, per say. Rather the process allows content creation to move towards the market’s needs, and within the company’s resources. There are 14 steps in all: Read the rest of this entry »

Like it or not, the Internet is changing, and it is changing fast. This change, however, is in our favor. In favor, that is, of individuals, small businesses, authors, and small presses. Web 2.0 and Social Media are here to stay, and are likely the beginning infrastructure of a fresh, new Internet. So, if you are not using these tools and technologies yet, you may want to ask yourself why. More >

Facebook Pages are a powerful way to reach a mass audience and their friends. Sometimes, however, you’ll want to limit who sees what. Here are three tools to help:

(1) Age Restrictions for Pages: You can restrict your Page to users over age 13, 17, 18, 19, or 21, or the legal drinking age where they live. On your Page’s edit page, scroll down to “Settings” at the bottom.

(2) Targeted Messaging: When you send a message to fans, you can target it by geography, gender, and age. For example, a musician can promote a concert to fans in the area. When sending an update, check the “Target this update” box.

(3) New FBML Tags: If you use FBML (http://new.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4949752878), you can restrict content by country and age. For example, if you have licensed content for U.S. and Canada users only, you can to restrict it to those countries, and show alternative content to other users. More details are on the Facebook Developers Blog: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=150.

I seem to have created a little controversy, in Twitter, to some of the comments of the above post.  I wanted to take the time to make it clear that I do not mean to say that Twitter has no SEO value.

Indeed, syndicated links can provide some ‘link juice’ which can be seen as a potential SEO advantage.  For those of you unaware with this concept, the idea of syndication is that RSS feeds (which do not have the ‘nofollow’ tag) can in fact be used to provide some RSS value to the links you post in Twitter.

I have made an effort over the past couple days to find a single URL that has been indexed as a result of a single syndicated RSS feed.  So while some people, as I have said before have had some varying amount of results providing direct SEO value from Twitter, it proves to be an inefficient venue.

This means that syndication of Twitter is not a widely developed idea.  It might be a great idea for someone to develop a chatter application, but even then we are limited to the potential hope that this will be picked up by the search engines.  In short, it seems like a lot of effort to propagate a link, and resources are probably better utilized if your goal is SEO.

Hope for the future?  Absolutely.  One potential, most likely move, is Twitter will begin to use bit.ly exclusively for their URL shortening services.  For those who are not aware of this relationship, bit.ly is a product of Summize, which has been purchased by Twitter.

This as I understand will have some serious SEO chops. Bit.ly analyzes all shortened URLs through Open Calais (developed by some friends of mine at a company I used to work for), and making this data available in public RSS feeds.  As Thomson Reuters, and Bit.ly, look to find other ways of presenting this content and creating toolkits for development teams through Open Calais, the possibilities could be mind-boggling.

There is a serious future for it.

That said, Twitter remains primarily a way of building your relationships online.  As an SEO tool it remains pretty inefficient.  Would I say not to use it?  Never.  Twitter is a valuable marketing tool, and its influences will grow over time.  There is no doubt about that fact in my mind.

However, I would, as a seasoned Product Manager, suggest tempering value vs. effort when pitching it as an SEO application in your organization or to a potential client.  I believe that you risk creating expectations, or potentially creating a project where effort exceeds the return.

An overwhelming majority (93%) of online Americans say companies should have a social-media presence, and 85% believe these companies also should be interacting with consumers through social media, according to research from Cone.

See the full article here.