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After reviewing feedback from over 120 professionals on LinkedIn on how they are using twitter we’ve distilled the strongest themes into 20 simple points on how companies are gaining an advantage to beat the economic downturn. It is true some companies are still getting familiar with this new tool and see it as a time consuming and there can be an overload of non-valuable information but over 80% of comments we received indicated the pro’s far outweighing the con’s

What we were delighted to see is that although twitter is strong in news and social interaction, it is playing a fundamental role in giving a number of companies a competitive edge during challenging economic times by:
- creating access to new customers
- receiving customer and public feedback that leads to more successful sales
- opening networking opportunities with contacts companies wouldn’t have had access to.

20 of LinkedIn’s Strongest Group Discussion Themes from over 120 Comments

Following are the strongest themes many companies said they’re enjoying as they’ve learned how to grasp the culture, grow their followers, and when needed apply external technology tools that simplifies the vast amounts of information.

Here’s how companies have benefited from twitter:

1. Build relationships with people they would have not met before
2. Exposure to lots of new business thoughts, technical ideas and leadership styles
3. Finding new clients by commenting back on others’ tweets
4. Access to thinkers and doer’s one wouldn’t normally interact with
5. Can follow businesses you want the latest updates from with less effort
6. Clients have asked for accounts to be opened so they can get regular updates
7. Can assist Google rankings, sometimes it gets first page results
8. Can assist in getting real questions answered real time during the day
9. Been a great way to gain interactive access with new clients by following their tweets
10. Received access to publicity: radio, TV, press, speaking engagements
11. Allows leaders to connect to followers on a personal level
12. Without being pushy, it can generate buzz/talk about your company
13. Great for bringing traffic to your site if you offer truly valuable information and links
14. Provides a premier marketing tool when used correctly
15. Can be a great resource for getting push information versus searching the web
16. Can act as a news wire for journalist who are looking for story content
17. Can save time by getting the latest news without having to go search for it
18. Enables expansion of your database by removing budget or geography barriers
19. It can increase your market reach if you actively promote your presence on twitter
20. A great way to showcase your expertise and differentiate from competition.

Social Media Marketing in the coming years will help drive website traffic at an incredible rate. The average person does not need to know how search engines work as much as to do the right things to get them to notice their blogs or websites. Using video, articles, blogging and a few other tools online the average small business has the opportunity to make as much of an impact on the world as all of the big name celebrity marketers. Search engines love blogs and articles.

They seem to drive traffic much faster and open up the average business to a particular method of branding that has never been able to spread virally at this rate before. You will know a company name because you have heard or seen it over the internet time and time again until it is seared in your mind. That is branding. What took people 5 or ten years before now is done in weeks or a few months with the right tools and methods. We see people, in our business all the time, getting noticed and achieving much greater business success than ever. The internet has come a long way and the tools are there at the average persons disposal.

Word of mouth takes on a whole new meaning with social media networking but it is time consuming and has to be done right. Once it is set up and in place it will beat ALL other forms of advertising that you could possibly do. You can literally have your idea or products selling online in a matter of weeks to consumers that are in your demographic and want your products. Why not Google Web 2.0, Viral Marketing and online marketing today and see what the world of the web has to offer you.

So unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few month you must have undoubtedly heard of Twitter. It really is something that is literally sweeping the Internet by storm. In this article I’m going to tell you what twitter is, why you should be using it and how you can profit from it.

Microblogging tool

So twitter is a microblogging tool. If you’ve heard of the term blog then you know that a blog is really just content published on a webpage. The content could be text , audio video. A microblogging tool is like a mini blog, where you’re content is usually limited to text and there’s a strict limit on the character length. Twitter has a character length of 140 characters.

Twitter allows you to create and publish your little mini posts. The nature of microblogs allow you to post text very quickly and easily almost like a stream of consciousness.

The interesting part is that you can search for and follow other people, and they can do the same for you. You can “direct message” to individuals meaning that you can send private posts. A twitter post by the way is also called a “tweet”.

Why You Should Be Using It Now

The reason you should be using Twitter now is simple. It’s a great social marketing tool. And it doesn’t hurt that it has mindshare and brandshare right now.

You can follow people you find interesting who discuss topics you’re interested in and engage them in conversation. I have an interest in Internet marketing for example. I can search for the topic Internet marketing on Twitter.com, find people discussing the term, and start following them. I can ask questions either posted on twitter for all to see or just to one particular person.

You Can Do Great Market Research

Twitter has reached a critical mass of people to the point where you can search on just about anything and find out how popular it is. This is great for market research. There are even tools (coming in another article) that allow you to track keywords in near real time.

Self Branding

You can actually virally brand yourself to a large audience and both directly and indirectly market products and services.

Do you want to learn how to use twitter and other social media to generate more traffic and more money for your own business or cause? Get my free social media marketing ebook right here.

Twitter is the most widely used microblogging tool on the Internet today. Its use has skyrocketed in a relatively short time and a ton of twitter tools have been created to extend its functionality. Its important to know how to really use some of these tools and see whether they’re worth your time.

This article assumes you’re already familiar with Twitter. If you’re not check out my newbie article on Twitter. Here are two very useful and popular twitter tools that will increase your productivity while using twitter:

Tweetdeck

This is one of the most widely used twitter tools around today. Its based on Adobe technologies AIR platform. It takes over where Twitter.com left off in terms of additional features. Its a desktop based application number one, which means you’re not constrained to refreshing a browser to get your updates from Twitter in your browser.

Here are the cool things about it: So you get all the power of twitter but all your posts, replies, direct messages are place into their own group which makes things easier to manage. You can add people into new groups. You can create your own search groups.

For example, you can search for the term “Internet marketing” for all twitter posts and the results are put into their own group and continuously updated. Finally, you can chose to shorten any of your long Urls with any number of Url shortener services like Tinyurl.

Twellow.com

Twellow is a great online Twitter search directory - a kind of yellow pages for Twitterers. It allows you to proactively find people by searching for by categories and subcategories already created for you. These categories and sub can help you drill down into the industries or interests of the Twitter community.

You can create a profile in Twellow. You’ll want to maximize that profile by entering in as much interesting on-topic information about yourself as possible. By the way you may already find yourself in the directory because Twellow automatically seeks and gathers public Twitter information about you.

By clicking around the categories,you can quickly find and add several top tier twitterers based on your area of interest. Then you can begin to follow them watch their updates and engage them in social conversation, expanding your own network.

These twitter tools are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how to leverage Twitter as a social media tool. There are literally hundreds of Twitter applications now on the Internet You should definitely be aware of them and understand how to best leverage them in your business.

Do you want to learn how to use twitter and other social media to generate more traffic and more money for your own business or cause? Get my free social media marketing ebook right here.

Twitter is the most popular microblogging social networking tool on the Internet today. Think of it as a “mini” blog where your posts or “tweets” as they’re called can only be 140 characters in length. That means you really have to use “economy of expression” and keep your tweets short and to the point.

As popular as twitter is, the fact that its browser based makes it a bit cumbersome to use. Tweetdeck has changed all that.

So What Is Tweetdeck Anyway?

Tweetdeck is a desktop application based on AIR technology from Adobe, the folks who brought us the ubiquitous Flash player. It runs on Windows as well as the MAC. It does everything Twitter site does and much much more.

Standard Twitter functionality on the desktop

Right off the bat you get all the tweeting, retweeting, following and direct reply functionality that Twitter provides you, but in a slick intuitive and more responsive user interface on the desktop.

Tweet Notifications

One of the first and best things Tweetdeck allows you to do is to get notifications when a new tweet arrives. You’ll get a nice small window that appears unobtrusively. You don’t get that on the Twitter.com website. In fact you have to refresh your browser to see the new tweets and who wants to continuously do that?

See Multiple Groups At A Time

Tweetdeck allows you to group the types of tweets that you get. You get the standard groups like the catch all group ALL FRIENDS that shows you the tweets of all of your followers and a “direct replies” group that shows you the posts of folks that have replied directly to you only. But the coolest thing is you can perform a search and take the results of that search and create your own group! And this group will be constantly updated with tweets that have the search keyword you selected. This is GREAT for doing any kind of marketing research.

Url Shortening

Url shorteners are services that take really long names and shorten them for you. Tinyurl.com will take something like myreallyincrediblysoverylongurl.com and give you back tinyurl.com/ur489lup

Since you only get 140 characters to a post or tweet using Twitter you really have to choose your words wisely. TwitterDeck comes with an awesome built-in tool that allows you to choose from a variety of Url shorteners when creating your tweet.

We’ve just scratched the surface here of what Tweetdeck can do. Its one of the most powerful twitter tools on the Internet today and you should check it out and see how it will drastically improve your Twitter experience.

Twellow.com is in the business of organizing and categorizing Twitter’s rapidly expanding social network. If you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time you know it can be difficult to locate people who may be worth following. And as social networks grow exponentially on the Internet, it’s become quite challenging to locate quality information.

Twellow allows you quite simply to promote yourself, your business via a profile and improve access to other creditable folks or businesses via those profiles.

Twellow.com profiles are divided into keyword categories raised from thousands of member listings.

Twellow.com’s free services include profile updating and management and a new linking feature, which enables subscribers to build connections to their other web presences. These links can be edited by the subscriber.

Once the Twellow.com member has verified their account, they can edit their name, biography, categories, location and URL information. All Twellow.com subscribers update these fields. In the category field, members can add up to ten items designating their interests or talents. Most Twitter members will already find they have a Twellow.com listing. Twellow.com listings from non-registered members are compiled based on public data records posted on the Internet.

Once Twellow.com memberships are established, members may access and update their profile.

Once profile information is entered, Twellow.com lists subscribers in the applicable categories according to their biographical input and their categorical preferences. Upon viewing the listings, members can change their classifications. Twellow.com links may be placed on the member Urls.

This is another great Twitter tool to check out for your social media marketing strategy!

Do you want to learn how to use twitter and other social media to generate more traffic and more money for your own business or cause? Get my free social media marketing ebook right here.

Twitter is one of the most popular social networking applications in the Internet space right now. Its a microblogging tool, like a mini blog, where you’re content is usually limited to text and there’s a strict limit on the character length 140 characters. Here is a list of great 5 “must have” twitter tools that can to use with Twitter to push your social media marketing efforts into overdrive:

TweetCube

Simply put, TweetCube is a filesharing service for Twitter. You can store your videos, images, music and more with just a few clicks and your files are automatically posted on Twitter to share with others.

TwitterSnooze

If you follow someone that is annoying you with a flood of tweets, you can “snooze” them or unfollow them “temporarily”and their tweets. Some caveats: When you “unsnooze” them they get sent an “unfollow” email. Also your password is temporarily stored so if you’re squeamish about that don’t use it. But it could be useful to limit a “talker”.

Tweet2Tweet

Wanna know the conversation between two peoples? Tweet2Tweet lets you see the replies, “@replies” between any two twitterers. You can track any conversation instantly. You simply type in both screen names on the page to see the results.

HootSuite

This is one cool Twitter tool! It allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts and profiles from one web-based application. You can also send one tweet to multiple accounts, schedule your tweets, and track clicks to your shortened url links (using HootSuite’s ow.ly URL shortening service).

TweetChannel

Use Tweet Channel to send tweets to a specific groups. This web-based tool sports an easy to use interface to that allows you to work with hashtags. You can see the most popular as well as the newest created channels directly from the website. Make sure you put these twitter tools in your social media toolbox.

If you don’t know about Twitter by now you definitely should. Its one of the most popular services out there on the Internet. Twitter is microblogging service that lets you post or “tweet” short messages of 140 characters or less. You can search for other people who tweet and follow them and they can follow you. Its so popular there are now hundreds of applications to help extend its basic functionality. That being said, if you’re a blogger there are numerous ways that you can take advantage of twitter to help leverage your own blog. Here are a few listed below:

Research
If your stuck for ideas researching a new post tweet your idea into the “twittersphere” and see what responses you get. Better yet, ask a question around your idea and see what responses you get. You can search using twitter (or better yet use Tweetdeck) for topics of interest and jump start your post based on what others are talking about around that topic.

Build Your Brand
Whether you’re blogging, interacting on social networks, making videos, etc, all these activities in multiple mediums help to get your name “out there” in the Internet. Twitter is yet another powerful and sometimes real time tool to help you market yourself. When people “resend” or retweet a helpful tweet of yours for example that means they are promoting your content and your brand into “their” network and your brand has just gone viral! You’ll find as people get to know you and you offer valuable content your brand awareness will naturally increase, which means their awareness of your blog can increase as well.

Promote Your Content
You’re not on the Internet to hear yourself right? You want your ideas your content to be heard and/or seen. Well you can refer to your blog posts via Twitter. In fact there’s a cool tool called Twitterfeed that’ll let you feed your rss blog to Twitter. Also there are Wordpress plug-ins that will individually post to Twitter each time you publish a blog post.

Extend your audience
Some bloggers find they reach a certain saturation point with their readers. Twitter can help you grow and audience by searching for new folks in the Twittersphere based on your blog topics. You can then follow them and communicate with them too referring them back to your blog.

Story Gathering
Twitter is GREAT for hearing about breaking news and other news sometimes before the large media outlets get wind of it.

Networking
Networking really combines all the aspects of social interaction, engaging communicating, etc. Twitter allows you find, follow and communicate with others building up relationships over time.

Do you want to learn how to use twitter and other social media to generate more traffic and more money for your own business or cause?

It seems that today there is no limit to how we are able to connect with people via the internet. Most of the people Facebooking and Tweeting on a daily (or hourly) basis have a vested interest in connecting. I am speaking about those of us that make our living selling online. If you run an online business, you know about social media.

Some have embraced this marketing trend to the fullest, while others have shunned it. Think you don’t want to reconnect with schoolmates you haven’t seen in decades? Think again. These people knew you before you were a wife, a husband, a mom, a dad… a business owner. Unlike the dreadful small talk we are forced to endure at awkward business networking functions, ‘catch-up’ conversation with old friends comes naturally. Sharing a common point of reference from your past, you are able to reach out and share ‘good old days’ stories. This is not only refreshing personally, it can be the start of a casual, yet profitable business networking relationship.

You have a greater chance at developing strong networking connections with old classmates, be they former BFFs or just mere acquaintances, than a stranger at a business mixer. To ignore a networking tool like Facebook is to turn your back on a free, easy and fun connection to hundreds of potential customers, investors, partners and consultants. It is worth the time and effort setting not only yourself, but also your business up with accounts on these social media/social networking websites.

It is important, if not urgent, to note that there is an unspoken code of ethics when it comes to marketing your company via social media. You should be ‘you’ and not a weird, unfamiliar salesman version of yourself. When alerting your list of friends or followers to the fact that you even own an online business, you should do it in the same manner in which you might recommend a great restaurant. In other words, take care not to seem pushy or greedy. Mention that you have set your business’s page up on Facebook and you’d love it if everyone ‘became a fan’ (which is the terminology used on Facebook for business pages.) On Twitter, include a link to your site (preferably by first visiting a site like tinyurl.com to condense the URL) and let everyone know that you would love for them to check it out.

If you get lousy results (no one ‘fans’ your page on Facebook and you can see from your Google Analytics that no one came over to your website via the link you ‘tweeted’ on Twitter) be patient. Bulk up the content on your company’s Facebook page. A couple of times a month (between casual personal FB communications) update your status with something relevant to your business. The same thing goes for Twitter - tweet to your followers that you have added new products, services or content to your website. These things are all acceptable, but in moderation. Do NOT tweet each time you get mentioned in the press. Do NOT update your status on Facebook letting everyone know each time a ‘great new product was just added to your website.’ If all of your communications to the FB or Twitter community are business related, be prepared to see nothing but lousy results.

I have followed these ‘rules’ and had a nice amount of success on Facebook. I now have repeat customers that were once fellow Girl Scouts. I have also secured some great exposure for my site on prominent product review blogs through Twitter.

Since I found that social media sites work well for my business, I have since connected my Wordpress blog to Facebook. This way, each time I add a post to my blog, a new note pops up on my business FB page. This casually shows up in a box on my personal FB page - not as a headline/status update - but literally as a side note. It is prominent, but not in their face. So, relax, have fun with social media and you can’t lose, as long as you remember to be ‘you’.

Just when you thought there couldn’t or maybe “shouldn’t” be any more Twitter tools, yet another Twitter Application comes along. The three tools below allow you to track the most popular talked about topics that are going on in the “Twittersphere” at a moments notice.

Twit scoop

Twit scoop, uses an automated algorithm to scan tons of tweets every minute, and uses a tag cloud,to show you the most recently used words. Top words are displayed in bold and the most popular words are shown even bigger. You can hover over the word to see the most recent tweets with that word.

You can enter a search on the right side to see the most tweeted conversations that match your search term. You can also see a graph of your search results.

Tweetscan

Tweetscan is a similar search tool minus the graphical features. The Tweetscan home page displays the most popular tweeted words in a tag cloud with the more popular words displayed in larger font sizes. Click on a word and get the search results of all tweets with that word. You can search by keyword and twitter use. You can setup a search of up to 5 phrases and Get updates via email, rss

Summize

Summize is more of a bare bones twitter search tool. You don’t get any tag clouds here dude.

What you do get is a simple search page (think Google search). Type in your search term and get back the resulting tweets with the search term which basically looks like the search results you’d get if you searched on your own Twitter.com homepage. On the right hand side you’ll see sections for trending “twitted” topics and so-called “nifty” queries. Clicking on the advanced tab link will allow you to search by people, places, dates and attitudes.

The list of Twitter tools grows nearly every day. Check out the search and tracking tools above and see how they can be useful in your social media marketing efforts or just to keep up on your areas of interest!