Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is free to use and is available to everyone. But there is a certain degree of etiquette involved in any type of social networking, so here are a few suggestions about how to promote your business by using Twitter.

Set up an Account with Twitter

The first thing to do is create your twitter account and then populate it with interesting tweets, which is Twitters way of describing a micro-blogging post containing no more than 140 characters.

Before you get to involved with this new account and all the tweets you intend to do, take some time to choose or design a customised Twitter background for your business page. Far too often individuals and even businesses go for the common default ones provided by Twitter. Here’s a really good blog post that’s all about twitter backgrounds and why you should keep away from the default ones – mashable.com/2009/05/23/twitter-backgrounds

Once you start to deal with your tweets, retweets and a growing list of followers, its best to use a free tool like Tweetdeck to help you with your Twitter marketing campaign. Tweetdeck is a desktop application that allows you to review and post updates to your Twitter Account. You can even use this tool to update your Twitter and Facebook pages at the same time!

Tweetdeck lets you sort the people and businesses you follow into groups and allows you to limit the number of tweets you view at any one time. It also lets you remove all the tweets you have seen with just one click.

Adding Interesting and Informative Tweets

By adding tweets that are interesting and relevant about your products and services, you can keep your tweets current and therefore popular with Twitter users. You should also add relevant news about your ‘industry’ to keep your Tweets interesting and varied.

To build up a following you should begin following people and businesses who are also using Twitter. As you follow others, most of them will follow you back. This is an important step as a blank Twitter account will not attract anyone.

You can use Twitter to point people to content on your website perhaps to articles you have written or the products or services you want to sell.

Bear in mind that Google indexes Twitter so your Twitter business page can appear in the organic search results.

So how can you follow others?

The best way to follow others is to do some research.

Go to Twitter.com and run a search by using keywords that are related to the industry you are targeting. For example if you are trying to sell an application for Apples IPhone you would search using the keywords such as Iphone, Iphone App and Iphone Apps and anything else that might find people who use Twitter and own an IPhone.

If your tweets are interesting to your readers you will find that other people will begin to follow you as they stumble across your Twitter business page.

Another way to pick up followers after you have logged-in is to click the Find People option at the top of the page and then enter keywords, related industry’s, locations or other details to locate potential followers and begin following them.

Always respond when your followers tweet you. If you do not keep up with you hard earned following it may begin to crumble. If you have a large following to maintain outsource you retweets or assign the task to one of your employees. Also make use of twitter tools like Tweetdeck to help with your twitter marketing campaign.

As you develop your Twitter marketing campaign you need to keep your followers engaged so you will have to tweet often, preferably daily or weekly.

Ensure that you retweet relevant tweets from other Twitter followers. If they then start to follow you will begin to benefit from all their followers. Retweeting is certainly one of the fastest ways to build your own Twitter followers.

By checking search.twitter.com frequently you can look for your brand name to see what customers are saying about your company. You can follow these tweets whether they are good or bad and get involved in the conversations. Your customers will be thrilled when you thank them for their kind words or even rectify a problem for them.

The ability of your customers who use Twitter to contact your management team is an invaluable resource. This one to one exchange permits you to keep close tabs on customer viewpoints, concerns and interests and is a great way to tap into social networking to test new ideas and to ask for customer feedback.

Avoid Spamming your followers

Beware – if you start to spam your followers they will quickly un-follow you. Spam activity includes things like only tweeting about your own products or services or retweeting the same URL time and time again. To many frivolous tweets can also be classed as spam.

It’s best to avoid these sort of tweets if you want to continue to build up and retain your Twitter followers.

Microsoft said it plans to end support for more than 4,000 old-style newsgroups starting next month, pushing users instead to discussion forums such as those found on the Microsoft Answers, TechNet, and MSDN sites.

Although venerable, Microsoft said that so-called NNTP newsgroups are past their time in terms of being usable and secure.

“Newsgroups run on an outdated and discontinued platform that is no longer supported, making them vulnerable to spam and other usability issues,” Microsoft said in a statement. The company said that its forums get 15 million visits a month and have been growing, on average, 12 percent each month. By contrast, it said that participation in newsgroups has dropped nearly in half over the past year.

Still, at last count the company had 2,000 public newsgroups and another 2,200 private groups focused on specific communities such as partners or its MVP (Most Valued Professional) program.

Source: ZDNet

Facebook has undergone a few changes of late and is now a much more viral experience for you and your potential or existing customers (collectively called Fans in Facebook).

The new Facebook Business Page layout is divided into two distinct areas.

The left-most column is where your brand logo, business information summary, fans, links and admin links can be located. Make sure you write something interesting about your company in this left column. Be sure to include a link to your website here. Your description can be changed at any time, so this is also a great place to highlight a promotion or some other news about your company.

The right hand column is the certainly the largest and is divided into a series of tabs, with the Wall tab generally being the default view.

The Wall acts as a Twitter-style update feed that puts your business news directly on your Facebook Business Page.

When you are logged into Facebook and click Edit Page a third column appears containing blocks of advertising.

As you make changes, add links and share other information on your Facebook Business Page, it automatically appears in the new Wall feed.

Updates and Wall posts made by your fans are also shown in this Wall feed.

And any updates that you add also appear on all your Fans Walls, so this can be a truly viral experience.

Sign up for a Facebook Business Account

Go to the Facebook sign up page and create your Business Account – www.facebook.com. Once you are logged into Facebook, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Advertising,” and then click “Pages.” at the top of the page. There is some great information here, so take a moment to read through the information and when you are ready click “Create Page.”

As you go through the set-up process, remember that you must categorise your company in the right area to help people find you business.

Setting Up a Business Page

One of the first things you need to do when you set up a new Facebook Page is to give it a title. A tip with this is to think about using rich keywords related to your business that you would like to be found for. Use your own collection of keywords and choose the main one that currently attracts people to your website or blog. (If you need to produce keywords for your advertising campaigns try this free tool.)

You also want to choose a good, clear photo for your Facebook Page. This can be a personal picture or your company’s logo.

When setting up your page you will have to decide if you want visitors to be able to post messages for everybody to see or if you only want your own messages shown. It may be best to allow everything, as this will help to build your Wall content faster because people love to post messages.

When you are logged in and at the Wall, click Edit Page (under your Logo or picture) and edit the Wall settings. Select the options you require for your business.

If the posts become out of control or unflattering, you can always delete individual posts or change the settings later.

One of the great things about Facebook is the ease of set up.

Setting up a business page is really just about carefully finding your way around and following the various prompts.

Other Tabs

At the top of your new Facebook Wall you will see an Info Tab where you can create a full-length version of your company information.

There are also Tabs for Custom Facebook Applications that you choose to add to your Business Page, like RSS feeds Pictures and other applications.

Once you fill in all of the basic information, save everything. You have now successfully created your Facebook Business Page.

Provide Interesting and Useful Comments

It is important for you to let people know about your Business Page. This is where having an already active Business Page comes in handy because if you already have a lot of people who are interested in your Company, you can suggest your new Facebook Business Page to them.

Just like in other areas of social media (blog’s, linkden, twitter, etc), it’s extremely important to provide interesting content to your readers.

You should add fresh content and updates to your Facebook Business Page on a regular basis (daily or weekly). This will keep your fans returning to your page. And Fans that do return, are far more likely to become paying customers at some point.

When you update your Facebook Business Page you’ll need to find a good balance between getting your business message across to your Facebook Fans without commercially spamming them. Keep the updates light and useful rather than advertising-heavy.

Offering regular and useful content will naturally encourage interaction because you are giving people something to respond to. You don’t need to come up with all the content yourself, either. You might just link to an interesting article or blog post you have found on the web that’s related to your business or industry.

To help with this content creation you can also use an application like Notes to enter your blog’s RSS details so that it pulls your blog posts straight into your Wall. The Notes application can be found in the Application settings section of your facebook account (Edit Page/Applications/Notes).

Keep in mind that a user can simply click a little X beside your update in their news feed to hide all future news updates about you. So make your updates newsworthy and interesting but do not aggressively promote your business as other Facebook users will probably frown on this.

Ultimately, the more time you invest in your Business Facebook page, the better response you will get from it.

Google has taken the wraps off its latest social network known as Buzz.

The service – integrated directly with its e-mail service Gmail – allows users to post status updates, share content and read and comment on friends’ posts.

The site pitches Google directly against rival networks such as Facebook, which has amassed nearly 400 million users since its launch in 2004.

Buzz will try to capitalise on the number of regular Gmail users, which is currently around 170 million people.

BBC News technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said that the launch appeared to be a “major land grab by Google for the social networking space”.

“They’ve launched Buzz with plenty of interesting new features, particularly for mobile users, but the real question is whether there’s enough to entice social networkers away from sites like Facebook and Twitter,” he said.

Rival Yahoo already offers a service that allows people to see updates from sites such as Twitter and Flickr from inside their Yahoo Mail page.

The messages – highlighted with a Buzz symbol – are incorporated directly into a person’s Gmail inbox. Private updates are automatically added to a user’s profile page, whilst public updates will also be available to search engines.

The site also incorporates elements of Twitter, such as the ability to “follow” people that share updates, and features that appear in Facebook such as the ability to “like” content.

Source: BBC Tech News

Microsoft and Facebook have revised their search pact into a global deal where the social-networking giant will sell its own ads and get more of Bing’s features on its web results.

Microsoft outlined the changes in a blog post.

• Facebook users will get the full-featured version of Bing beyond links for the site’s Web search.
• The deal becomes a global pact that will bring Bing to Facebook users abroad.
• And Facebook will sell its own display ads.

The revised deal makes a lot of sense on many fronts. First, Facebook should be selling its own display ads so it can work on better targeting and control its revenue stream.

Jon Tinter, general manager of Bing, said: “Given the kinds of advertisements that make sense within a product as unique as Facebook, it just made more sense for them to take the lead on this part of their advertising strategy”.

This international partnership could be a big win for Microsoft as it seeks greater market share for Bing.

Source: ZDNet