1. There are over 400 million active Facebook users and over 50% of the users login everyday. This means there is a huge, global audience to market your company to.

2. Facebook is a great place to distribute information about your company including events, photographs, videos, articles, blog posts as well as your business hours and contact information.

3. Social networking sites like Facebook allow you to connect with your customers on a personal level.

4. You can use the discussions feature to create surveys, ask questions and gather valuable information from your customers.

5. Having a Facebook page will give you a stronger presence with the search engines, especially with Google’s new social search function.

6. The Facebook Fan Box is a powerful tool that you can place on your blog, website, YouTube page or even your email newsletter that allows visitors to see your company’s Facebook page and even become a fan without ever leaving your site.

7. Facebook Connect allows users from a multitude of sites to access and post information to Facebook without leaving the site they are visiting, such as eBay, Etsy and all the major social bookmarking sites. If someone sees a product they like or reads an interesting article, they can easily post it to their Facebook profiles.

8. 20 million people become fans of Facebook Pages each day and more than 1.5 million local businesses have Facebook Pages. Your competition most likely has a Facebook page and you do not want to fall behind this important way to build your business.

9. As Facebook Mobile grows in popularity, more and more people are spending time on Facebook since they do not have to be at a computer and can access the site from anywhere in the world at anytime.

10. Facebook is growing internationally so you can easily target those in other countries and add international customers to your demographic.

Forrest Yingling is the Marketing Director for WebNet Hosting, Premier Partner Miva Host since 2004. WebNet Hosting provides fully PCI Compliant Miva Hosting with 100% up-time as well as e-commerce solutions and basic web hosting.

Think of regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts on the matter.

Social media, on the other hand, is a two-way street that gives you the ability to communicate too.

Getting started on social media can often be deceptively simple – What’s the big deal? You sign up. – or intimidating – Why am I being asked for my date of birth? – or overwhelming – How do I find people to friend or follow?

In actuality there are official and unofficial rules. It is easier if you start out knowing what’s what, and this is probably especially important if you’re more of an introvert.

Let’s imagine you already use email, search for information on Google, and read blog posts. But you’ve never joined any social media sites. How do you start?

1. Decide how comfortable you are sharing information about yourself. And the corollary to this – how wide a sharing of this information are you willing to do.

If you’re a book author and want people to buy your book, it’s a good idea to decide that you will share personal (although not private) information to as wide an audience as possible. If you only want to connect online with former high school friends, your target audience is much smaller.

If sharing information makes you somewhat nervous, think about what it means to be personal as opposed to private. Personal is a good marketing book you just read that you can recommend to help others; private is a fight you had with your business partner over implementing the marketing steps recommended in the book.

2. Ask online savvy friends that, based on your goal, which popular site they would recommend you first join. (And do start with just one while getting your feet wet in this brave new world.)

• If your goal, for example, is to have a wide audience, then Twitter may be the best choice because of its “open to everyone” format. – If you only want to search for high school friends, then Facebook may be the best choice as you can confine your information to a very small circle and can search by name for those long-lost friends.
• If you want to make connections to help with a future job search, then LinkedIn, whose format is set up for such a process, may be the best choice for you.

3. Once you have chosen the site you’ll start on, do a Google search for information on effectively using that site. That’s right, before you ever sign up, read some blog posts that provide guidance on effectively using the site.

Now this isn’t a research project that serves as an excuse for postponing actually joining the site. Just learn a few of the basic “rules.” And if you do this step, you’ll be way ahead of most other people who start on social media without first doing any research.

And why not learn this on the site itself? Because most of these sites have inadequate information for newcomers or an abundance of information that overwhelms newcomers.

Plus, to encourage you to sign up, the site’s home page says something like: To join now just do this. And it’s only after you’ve provided your name, email, password, etc. that you’re left wondering “What do I do next?”

4. If you’re starting on a site that doesn’t require your real name, choose a username carefully. You want to think about seeing this name used all across cyberspace as lots of social media sites pull information from other social media sites (with your permission, of course).

You may initially think, for example, of choosing the name of your first book. But what happens when you write a second book? Or perhaps using the name of the book won’t work well for a site that is focused on a non-book arena.

Keep in mind that whatever you do on the Internet can live forever. So this choice of a username should be considered carefully and for continued use in the long-run. (Once you’ve established a good online reputation with one username you don’t want to start at square one again with a new username.)

5. Immediately post a photo of yourself – a headshot in which sunglasses and a baseball cap are not blocking people from totally seeing your eyes. (This does not have to be professional-photographer quality but should not be blurry.)

This photo should be one that will also work on social media sites you will join in the future because you want consistency across these sites. You want consistency to help people recognize and connect with you on more than one site. (The same for your username).

Keep in mind that the photos for Twitter are quite small. And even if you’re starting on Facebook, only include a headshot of yourself. Do not include other people and preferably not animals and other props.

By posting a good headshot of yourself you’re signaling that you’re interested in connecting with people – real people such as yourself – and you’ll be off to a good start on your first social media site.

Now that you’ve read these five tips for starting on your first social media site, what are you waiting for? Join the cyberspace social media community today.

Just what we need, another social networking site.   Should I get involved in this one or will it end up being a waste of time?  I’ve signed up for quite a few and, honestly, it’s hard to keep up.  I either work one or two full force or not at all.  Maybe with Google running this and their capability to pull info from other social sites into one area this particular social network site will be the one and only site I’ll ever have to use again (yeah, right).  Maybe my reclusive tendencies at home are affecting my ability to branch out online.  I just don’t like going out there and meeting lots of people at a time – it takes me a while to warm up and consider someone a friend, even online.  Hopefully with the magic of google a whole pile of people who are just like me will end up in my social circle and I will live happily ever after.

Refusing to sit still long enough for anyone to catch up, Google has rolled out another Labs experiment to the public. Google Social Search Beta launched last October, hard on the heels of Personalized Search. But this week, Google graduated Social Search out of Labs and into the public sphere.

What Is Google Social Search?

As we become increasingly connected online, we start to build around ourselves a community of people that we have regular contact with and websites where we spend much of our time. This is called our social network. Now Google has worked out a way to measure and leverage these individual social networks so they influence the search results we see. Those results therefore become more relevant to us and more influential over time.

Google determines your social network based on the connections found in your public Google profile. Connections are classed as either direct connections or secondary connections. Your Gmail chat buddies and contacts are direct connections, as are connections from links listed in your Google profile (e.g. people you follow on Twitter, LinkedIn or FriendFeed). Secondary connections are those publicly associated with your direct connections (e.g. the people that your friends follow on Twitter).

To see your social profile on Google, login to your Google account and visit the social dashboard. The first time you do this, Google will collect all the social data it has stored about you, based on your Google Profile and public content, and build what they call your *social circle*.

After Google builds your social circle, whenever Google’s algorithm determines that your search experience will be improved, it annotates regular web index data with social data customized from your social circle and adds this information to the bottom of your search results.

You MUST be signed in to Google to see this. If you’re not happy with the results, say from Twitter, you can delete your Twitter account from your Google profile to prevent published info from your Twitter connections being added to your social circle.

You can also add or block Google contacts so you don’t see information from them in your social circle. In the reverse, you can choose what content you want to make public, based on your published Google profile.

How Does Social Search Work?

Google Social Search has been in experimental mode since October, but this week it’s been rolled out to full public Beta, meaning you should now see social content in your search results on Google.com. Google hasn’t rolled Social Search out to their regional sites at this stage, but this is expected soon.

To see social search results in action, login to your Google account, then run a search. You’ll see the heading *Results from people in your social circle* towards the bottom of the search results page. For example, if I run a search for *music blogs* on Google.com, I get the following social circle suggestions:

Because Matt Burgess and Tim Burrowes are in my social circle and have blogged about music, I see their content at the top of my social circle results.

If you want to see more social results, click on the *Show Options* link at the top left of the page and click on the *Social* link in the side menu under *All Results*. This will bring up search results sourced entirely from your social network. You’ll also see a list of your friends and connections under the menu heading *All People*. You can click on a particular name in the list to bring up more results from their public content.

Next to your social circle results are two links that are new additions to the service added to coincide with the public rollout: my social circle and my social content (pictured). These take you to your social circle dashboard that I linked to earlier.

The *my social circle* tab displays your extended network of online contacts, as well as the pathways that connect you. Clicking on the *my social content* tab brings up your public social media profiles, taken from your Google profile, that might appear in other people’s social results (pictured).

Apart from this social dashboard, the other major difference between the original Social Search experiment and the new public rollout is the addition of Google Images into the mix. If anyone in your social circle has shared images on Flickr or Picasa and Google determines they are relevant to your search query, you may see these in your search results as well.

Judging by my social search experiments to date, I believe Google has been collating social results for some time. A key observation is that relevance seems to win over freshness in the social influenced search results – some of the top results in my social circle were from 2008.

How Do You Take Advantage of Social Search?

1. If you haven’t already done so, create a Gmail account and create and flesh out your Google Profile immediately.
2. Join more social sites if you want your content to appear in the SERPs of your direct and secondary social circle networks, particularly the primary ones Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed.
3. Optimize your social media content (tweets, FB and LinkedIn status updates, blog feeds, etc) for target keywords to ensure your social content is shown in a wider number of social circle SERPs.
4. Gmail and Chat contacts get top billing in your social circle so choose your Gmail buddies wisely or remove them from your profile altogether.
5. Consider the type of social content that is popular and most often shared within your networks. Concentrate on building similar content in your public social media profiles to ensure it gets syndicated via your social circle.
6. If Universal Search wasn’t enough of a punch in the gut to convince you to optimize your multimedia content, consider Social Search to be that punch placed a little lower. Your shared photos just became another content channel.
7. Become more picky about who you follow and what social feeds you subscribe to. They have just become influencers in your every day search results.

What if I Don’t Like It?

If your particular social circle seems a little lightweight or top heavy, you can control what results you do and don’t see under your social search results. You can choose to either remove a social network from your Google profile (such as Twitter or Facebook), or remove a specific contact from your network.

You can ignore the social results at the bottom of the page when signed in, or if you don’t wish to see any social search results at all, simply conduct your searches while signed out of your Google account.

It’s important to note that Google doesn’t make your social circle public e.g. publish your list of chat buddies. It simply adds your buddies’ public information to YOUR social circle.

What Does it All Mean?

What this really means is that standard SERPs are a thing of the past. Over the last couple of years, we’ve come to expect that a search for *blue widgets* will pull up completely different results for someone in London and someone in New York. But with Google having rolled out personalized search, real time search and now social search, you and your flatmate could be sharing an Internet connection in the same room and be served very different SERPs for identical search queries.

As for how this impacts online marketing? For starters, if you’ve been hoping social media will just go away, it’s time to wake up and smell the pancakes. Not only is online social networking not going anywhere, it is thriving and changing how we search. It is now in your interest to expand your social network and create a presence on as many social sites as you can.

More importantly, your clients will be looking to you to help them understand how to use social search to their advantage. Embrace the opportunity and get socializing.

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This fantastic Article is by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Found this great list at Sitepro!

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy for people to come together and share opinions, experiences and thoughts on a number of topics. Smart companies understand this and are using the power of social media to connect and inform their customers, and potential customers. Referred to as “Social Media Marketing”, it’s a smart way to open the lines of communication between you and your prospects.

Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with social media.

There are many different forms of social media, so it’s impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working them all, at the very least you should claim your name or company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t want to find out later that someone has the user name that you want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available try Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry later.

So how do you monitor all the buzz? How do you monitor your brand and protect your hard earned reputation? There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you pull out your wallet.

These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often referred to, will help you to define keywords or phrases you wish to track and then watch for any mention of your company name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor your online reputation. Similar to High School reputations, protecting your image online is the name of the game, and just as in real life, everybody has one to maintain.

Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at your disposal:

1) http://BackTweets.com : A search engine for Twitter. See who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email alerts of new findings.

2) http://Addictomatic.com : A little different than the others, you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to your topic.

3) http://Buzzoo.net : All about Internet buzz, it tracks several different websites to bring you what’s “hot” right now.

4) http://Surchur.com : Search for the latest and greatest on topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for your chosen topic.

5) http://Commentful.Blogflux.com : This service watches for comments on blog posts, Digg, Flickr, and others and notifies you of any findings.

6) http://AlertRank.com : A better way to organize and sort Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a spreadsheet format of what it finds.

7) http://BoardTracker.com : A search engine for forums only. Monitor discussion boards and be notified by email when a thread matching your search terms is discovered. Free to use.

http://www.google.com/alerts : I’ve been using this “secret weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you receive the links. Free and nice.

9) http://BrandsEye.com : An online reputation management tool with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation. Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at $1.00.

10) http://Twazzup.com : Another Twitter only search engine.

11) http://SiteMention.com : Type in your url and find out what’s being said about you. The results returned are gathered from Google Blog Search, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and many more.

12) http://Brandwatch.net: This service tracks your brands, companies, even the competition. Sign up for free weekly updates on any brand. Their detailed reports break down what sites like you, your most talked about features, weekly summary of all blogs and forum activity. Very similar to the old “press clipping” service.

13) http://Trackur.com : A tool that scans many websites, including blogs, news, image and video sites, forums and notifies you of any mention of your brand, products/services. Easy to use and affordable. Prices vary depending on need, a personal account is only $18.00 a month, corporate account $88.00 a month with other options also available. Try a “personal” account free for 14 days.

14) http://FiltrBox.com : This one searches online news sources, Twitter and others to find out what’s being said about you or your company. Pricing is based on the number of users, but there is a free version that provides “5 filters” and 15 days of what they call “article history”.

15) http://SocialMention.com/alerts : Just like Google Alerts but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos and more.

16) http://BlogPulse.com : A search engine that searches only for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and off it goes to gather results.

17) http://BackType.com : Billing itself as a “conversational search engine” they index millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media.

18) http://sm2.techrigy.com : Industry insiders claim this to be the leading social media monitoring solution online. Choice of free or paid version. Free is limited to five searches and 1,000 results. There are three paid professional levels: Gold, Diamond, or Platinum.

19) http://ReputationDefender.com : This paid service finds out everything there is to know about you online, and if negative information is found they try to have it removed. Different types of plans are available such as “My Reputation”, “My Privacy”, starting at only $14.95 a month.

20) http://Topsy.com : Topsy will track your tweets that have been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be amazed at what you find.

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL

Just as there are many ways to market your company using social media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some level. How smart are you?

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL

As budgets are drying up entrepreneurs are turning, yet again, to technology, social media comes to the rescue. Words such as YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn would have been considered typos not too recently have become part of our corporate success dictionary. Social media offers companies inexpensive ways to improve their customer service, ramp up their customer service, learn more about their market, reduce their expenses, and more.

Improve your customer service

Having a conversation with your customers through social media is a new business skill. In an effort to improve its public image, Dell has made a conscious effort to connect with its customers through various social media channels such as blogs, forums, and various third-party websites. Dell had to appreciate that customers talked about their products online, and the company was forced to become part of the conversation. With a little help from their social media friend Dell managed to make improvements to its Latitude laptop. Note: It was a Dell laptop that exploded into flames at a conference in Japan.

Social media is the great equalizer as the story of Jeff Jarvis, an unhappy Dell customer, shows. Jarvis took on this giant of a company using his own blog. He managed to create awareness about customer concerns that had reached an international audience. Initially, Dell had ignored the blog voicing Jarvis’ concerns until his blog became the outlet for public conversation of customer issues. His blog, the BuzzMachine, has become the focus of Dell’s mistakes, poor customer service and flawed products.

The blogosphere doesn’t create the problems it simply brings them to light, and it makes it possible for business to address the issues at hand. Now, the CEOs of companies don’t have to take customer service managers word for it, they can learn about customer issues directly from the source. Some might argue that somehow this is a bad thing. On the contrary, with social media, companies and consumers can realize problems that need to be addressed. Customer engagement through social media could only hurt a company in the long run that is not interested in positive change. Instead of creating a problem social media brings a new level of efficiency to the corporate world.

Do more research

Market research is no longer a luxury only large companies can afford. Social media is the market research alternative for small and mid-size businesses that don’t have money to burn. Especially in a recession, market research is an essential part of a winning corporate strategy. Using social media, companies can carry out their own market research, and the best part is that it’s free.

Search for the topic of your choice on StumbleUpon and learn what people say. One of the greatest aspects of StumbleUpon is that marketers can easily find websites related to their market that they would never find on their own. Businesses can use this website to get instant feedback. The community is continually engaged providing constant opinion that result in a better product. A company might be developing new packaging for a product and get instant criticism from the online community. Something that might have taken weeks and months using traditional methods can be done in a matter of days or even hours. This method is not only fast, but it is also free.

LinkedIn, the social media outlet

for grownups, is a rich and dynamic database, which can be searched, mined, and yield insightful and useful information to you and your business. Through its “Answers” feature LinkedIn serves as a valuable market research tool because it enables users to ask questions on virtually any topic, and expect to get answers quickly from the community. Executives can ask questions about products, services, trends, or any topic that might be useful to gain a better insight into their market. You can use the search feature to find people by industry, job title, company, or geographical location. The search results include vital corporate information.

Twitter, a micro blogging service, with its millions of users, offers a world of market intelligence for your business. Twitter is the killer app for marketers that are dying to become the fly on the wall as they are given the opportunity to listen in on public conversations about their market, social issues, products, services, or industry trends. Twitter provides near-real time intelligence on virtually any market.

Should StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social media applications going to be your only source of market research? Of course not, but social media offers an abundance of honest conversation from which business can gather a wide range of vital information.

Companies ranging small and large are increasingly turning to outside blogs, viral videos and websites such as Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Digg — and their tens of millions of users — to reach consumers. Instead of cringing at the idea of relinquishing control to social media outlets, smart executives realize that there is more benefit in joining the conversation than fighting it. Instead of controlling information about your brand, your social media strategy should be about engagement.

Advertising as we know it is expensive; social media is cheap. For this reason, the recession is bad news for traditional marketers, while the same environment is full of opportunities for social media marketers. Setting up a company blog or a Facebook page is significantly less expensive than traditional marketing. Even creating your own community web site can be significantly cheaper than traditional advertising campaigns.

Social media marketing is not without risk. While every company wants to generate buzz, online backlash can be vicious. Recently a Motrin commercial aimed at moms created quite a stir. You can view the ad on YouTube

as did another 210,000 people. The ad makes the apparently condescending claim that carrying babies in a sling is a painful experience for moms. According to moms, the ad was wrong and they made it loud and clear through social media applications such as Twitter. Some moms found the Motrin ad outright offensive, and they were quite vocal about it. You can catch them on YouTube. Of course, the disaster doesn’t end there. It continues on a myriad of blogs, and carries on in a Facebook page dedicated to boycotting Motrin. The backlash ad on YouTube can be viewed.

What to do when your target rejects your ad? Turn to social media. Instead of rejecting the market reaction Johnson & Johnson could have used social media applications to learn about their market prior to creating and publishing the controversial ad. There could have been a Facebook page created to learn about young moms and pain. There could have been a blog inviting moms to provide video testimonials on YouTube. The lesson learned in this case is to use social media to learn about your market, or be prepared to be taught very quickly and painfully.

Reduce your expenses

Save time and money on travel and use LinkedIn to network. Instead of driving to the other end of town fighting your way through traffic use the largest business social network to build new connections and to nurture existing ones. Only attend your most valuable networking events, and transfer as much of your networking as you can to the web. LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Facebook are some of the best social networking applications.

Reduce your legal fees through a fairly new social media site called Docstoc. It is a place to find and share professional documents such as contracts, confidentiality agreements, intellectual property documents and more. Docstoc is a social community resource that enables anyone to find and share professional documents. The site provides an opportunity for individuals and organizations to share their professional documents. Documents available on Docstoc can be easily searched, previewed and downloaded for free.

Decrease your recruiting costs as you hire your employees though Craigslist, which has quietly become one of the most visited websites in cyberspace. It offers a much cheaper way to recruit online, and your company can expect excellent response rates for your job posts.

Putting it all together

Are more companies turning to social media in this economy? They should if they want to improve their marketing efficiencies, enhance their customer service experience, or develop their research techniques. Social media allows companies to engage with the customers instead of shouting about their own wonderfulness. It offers ways to business to partner with the community in an effort to develop a better product. In the end everybody wins because both the company and the consumer end up with a better product.

Virtually all companies can benefit from using social media not just to create awareness, but also to become part of the conversation. Managing your corporate reputation is impossible without social media, and ignoring it can be outright devastating. Instead if fighting against it, embrace it as it rockets your business forward as it deepens your relationship with the only reason you are in business for, your customer.
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Let’s face it, Twitter is a lot of fun! And it has spawned an entire industry of amazing Twitter tools that are not only fun – but can also help you maximize the power of Twitter, as well as enhance your business interests. Following are 32 Fun and Useful Twitter Tools. Enjoy!
1. BackType Plugins backtype.com/plugins Backtype.com is a real-time conversational search engine that helps users find, follow and share comments from blogs, social networks and other social media. Very, very cool.

2. CureCRM curecrm.com/net CureCRM is a Twitter CRM (Customer Realationship Management) tool. It works on your desktop and gives you the ability to automatically record email conversations into salesforce cases, contacts, opportunities, and leads entries. It also schedules meetings, manages your calendar, and reminds colleagues to attend meetings.

3. Friend or Follow friendorfollow.com This is my favorite Twitter tool. It tells you who you’re following who’s not following you back. This tool allows you to stay on top of your unfollows, as well as “trim your Twitter fat”, so to speak.

4. Featured Users featuredUsers.com Featured Users is a Twitter application ad network. It appears to be affiliated with the aforementioned Friend or Follow. Here’s how it works: When you purchase impressions, your Twitter profile is displayed on the Twitter applications in the Featured Users network. The more impressions you purchase, the more often your profile is displayed. It actually looks pretty cool. I haven’t tried this one yet, but I’m seriously thinking about it. They also have a user referral program that will allow you to make money when you refer customers to their program.

6. GoTwitr gotwitr.com GoTwitr is a Twitter referral service. However, what makes GoTwitr different from other Twitter referal services is the fact GoTwitr gives you the ability to preview in detail everyone you follow or unfollow. That way, your community will be made up of people who actually share your interests.

7. HootSuite hootsuite.com HootSuite is yet another free professional Twitter client. Here are some of the functions that HootSuite performs: Manages multiple Twtitter accounts, tracks how many people click the links you tweet out, pre-schedules your messages, submits your blog feed to Twitter and more.

8. OpenBreak (Formerly TwitterBerry) orangatame.com/products/openbeak Billed as “The evolution of TwitterBerry,” OpenBeak is mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don’t need to use SMS. OpenBeak is the evolution of TwitterBerry, and the new name allows the app to grow beyond both the Twitter platform and BlackBerry smartphones.

9. PeopleBrowsr peoplebrowsr.com PeopleBrowsr is a real time data mine and social search engine. It allows you to monitor your brand, manage feedback, share accounts, run campaigns, track keywords, build widgets and engage across multiple social networks simultaneously.

10.Ping.fm ping.fm Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. This is a really great tool!

11. Qwitter useqwitter.com Qwitter is a Twitter tool that notifies you when you get un-followed. Qwitter checks your followers and notifies you as often as it can, depending on how many people are using it and how many followers they have. Now here’s what’s really cool about Qwitter. Not only will it alert you as to who is no longer following you, but it will also show you the tweet you posted that (may or may not) have caused the person to unsubscribe. Very useful.

12. Seesmic Desktop seesmic.com Seesmic Desktop is a Twitter client and desktop app which allows you to view multiple accounts in one window. Not only will you be able to view multiple accounts, you will be able to view the window in columns (similar to Tweetdeck).

13. SocialOomph (Formally known as TweetLater) socialoomph.com SocialOomph is a free Twitter tool that lets you set your tweets to be sent at specific time intervals, track keywords, automatically send welcome direct messages (DM’s)to new followers, purge your direct messages and more.

14. Trendistic trendistic.com/_help Ever heard of Google Trends? Well, Trendistic is similar to that. Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals.

15. TwitterMail twittermail.com TwitterMail is a service for users of Twitter that allows them to redirect email to their twitter account. Here’s how it works: When you give TwitterMail your Twitter credentials they supply you with a unique TwitterMail email address. For instance, abc123example@twittermail.com. If you send an email to that address it will be posted to Twitter.com (By the way, that’s a fake Twittermail address, so don’t use it).

16. Twitbin twitbin.com If you’re a Firefox user, this one’s for you. Twitbin is a Firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar. Twitbin allows you to send messages, receive messages, share links, and more. Great Firefox extension!

17. Twibbon twibbon.com Supporting a cause? Twibbon allows you to promote your cause through Twitter. Twibbon overlays a small icon onto supporters’ profile images to create a ‘Twibbon’, making an impactful online statement. The user’s Twitter account automatically tweets to let everyone know about their affiliation.

18. TweetMeMe tweetmeme.com If you’re an article marketer like I am, you’re going to love this tool. TweetMeMe is a retweet button for website and blog publishers who want to encourage viral activity of their content on Twitter. The button shows a live count of the number of times your content has been tweeted. I love this tool!

19. TweetDeck tweetdeck.com/beta TweetDeck is your personal social networking dashboard for staying in touch with what’s happening now on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. In fact, you can do so many things with TweetDeck, you are limited only by your imagination.

20. Twitterfeed twitterfeed.com Twitterfeed allows you to publish updates from any RSS feed to your Twitter account. You then have the ability to decide how frequently you want Twitterfeed to check your feed updates and how many updated articles to post to Twitter.

21. Twitpic twitpic.com As its name suggests, Twitpic allows you to share photos on Twitter. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, their API, or through the Twitpic site itself.

22. TwitterCounter twittercounter.com If you have a lot of Twitter followers and want to show them off, you’ll find this is an interesting tool. TwitterCounter is a statistics tool which allows you to display the number of Twitter followers you have on your blog. It will also display whether your followers are increasing or decreasing. The service also has a Twitter Remote widget that you can add to your blog sidebar for more interaction with your followers.

23. Twitterholic twitterholic.com Want to know who has the most followers on Twitter? Then Twitterholic is the tool for you. But Twitterholic goes one step further, not only does it allow you to see who has the most followers, it also allows you to check your own ranking in the Twitter universe. Great tool!

24. Twellow twellow.com Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts. It features hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people in specific niches. Here’s how it works: Twellow grabs publicly available messages from Twitter. Twellow then analyzes and categorizes each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found on its website.

25. Twaitter twaitter.com Twaitter is a tool that allows team accounts, scheduled tweets, RSS integration, tweet calendar and more.

26. Twibes twibes.com Twibes is an interesting Twitter tool that allows you to find groups of people who share your common interests.

27. TwitterLocal twitterlocal.net TwitterLocal is an Adobe AIR based application that allows you to filter Tweets by location. You can generate an RSS or XML feed, which allows you to receive Tweets from a specified area, including city, state, postal code and mile radius.

28. TweetBrain tweetbrain.com TweetBrain is a crowdsourcing service powered by the Twitter community. It enables you to get quality answers to your Twitter questions quickly – sort of like Yahoo Answers for Twitter users. Very cool.

29. Tweetvisor tweetvisor.com Tweetvisor is a web-based, multi-column Twitter interface that enables users to better manage multiple Twitter accounts. Tweetvisor returns real-time updates about favorite topics, news and tweets – plus, much, much more. Nice!

30. TwitterFox twitterfox.net TwitterFox is Firefox web browser plugin that TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets on Twitter. This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets. It also has a small text input field to update your tweets. In addition, TwitterFox allows you to view Tweets within your own web browser, in a popup menu. This is extremely convenient and eliminates the need to constantly go to the Twitter website.

31. Wickett Twitter Widget wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wickett-twitter-widget This is a popular WordPress plugin that display tweets from a Twitter account in the sidebar of your blog. It is without question the easiest way to add Tweets to WordPress.

32. Yahoo Sideline yahoo.sideline.com Sideline is an Adobe AIR desktop application that allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

Recently, all the major news websites announced that Facebook has passed Fox, Ebay and Amazon on its way to the respectable fifth place in the Top 50  U.S. web properties list. More and more small business owners and advertisers seem to understand the power of social media marketing and divert some of their attention and budgets towards this relatively new medium. However, many of us just don’t know how to approach these tools and how to utilize them best for our business. As an early adapter, I have joined Facebook almost immediately after it allowed general public access, but it was only around 18 months ago that I began to understand its power and to study its business capabilities.

Here are some initial tips to get you started:

1. Always Use a Real Profile Photo – The whole idea of social media is the building of relationship and “friendships” over the web. Your users and future customers want to see the person behind the username/brand. Your profile photo is the first contact point with your potential audience, and as such should be both representative and personal at the same time.
2. Always Be Interesting – people use Facebook on a daily (and even hourly) basis.  If you want to be always on your potential customers’ mind, make sure that you  update your status at least once a day (this is the  ’What’s on your mind?’ sentence in the top of the page). Make sure that you link to interesting content, provide important insights, connect to other similar friends etc. The more you appear on their wall the more they will remember you as an authority and a person to trust for interesting information. Of course, the rule of thumb here is to do everything in the right proportion in order not to be considered a spammer or a Persona non grata.
3. Use Facebook Groups – Facebook provides two main platforms to gather “fans” or “followers” (people who likes your product or your brand and want to be updated about it). I will talk about the Facebook Pages in the next point. Facebook Groups is a powerful tool to create a (guess what…) group of people, all interested in one cause/product/brand/issue. While your first instinct would be to go and establish a group for your brand, STOP! Do not forget that people nowadays are very much aware of any direct marketing attempt and usually will not cooperate. So, the right way to use groups, in my opinion, would be to organize a group around a non-commercial cause (such as “Job Search Tips”). This will increase your attractiveness towards users who may have never heard of your brand but still would like to get job search tips. to know more about groups I suggest the following post from Read Write Web.
4. Use Facebook Pages - Facebook Pages are what Facebook uses for business. This is where I recommend to introduce your brand. Here you can put your logo, your brand description and related commercial information. You can add “Fans” to your page and communicate with them through “Updates”. The secret here is to create discussions and conversations around your product/brand. The goal is to reach a situation where this page is running by itself – conversations and discussions are initiated by the users between themselves. This is a great tool to investigate what people have to say about your brand and to get first hand feedback without the need to conduct expensive focus group researches. Of course, it takes time to build such traction, but for this you have to be patient and follow the steps suggested on a daily basis to eventually succeed in reaching this goal.
5. The Three C’s: Content-Communicate-Community –  This is the modern replacement for the traditional marketing four P’s formula. Nowadays, if you don’t produce constant CONTENT, if you don’t COMMUNICATE it with right tools, and if you don’t create a COMMUNITY around your brand, reaching your target audience and selling them your product or services will become almost impossible.  So remember, create quality content, send it along the social media river and dont forget to gather around you community of fans or followers that will wait for your next content and more importantly – will be an avid advocate of your brand.
6. Cross-Collaboration – Once we thought that all the social media tools are competing with each other. We now see the next step of social media – a trend of cooperation and collaboration between almost all the social media websites. The most recent step in this direction is the release of Facebook’s Twitter App. What it actually means is that the social media tools allows you to post your content simultaneously in front of hundreds of millions of people with one click! So, make sure you have an account on Twitter (and don’t forget to follow me…), Linkedin, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, etc. It’s FREE and you won’t regret it.

Social networking is not just a way to connect with friends and meet new people; it can also be a lucrative business tool. Social networking allows you to advertise, network with others in your field as well as potential customers, and make valuable business contacts, all for free.

Utilizing social network websites for these purposes is a little different than just using them for fun and entertainment, however, and there are a few things you should know if you want to be successful at social networking for business purposes.

One of the simplest ways to draw attention to your social network profile is to choose a relevant username. When you are setting up your networking profile select a username that will create interest and will tell potential clients, business partners, and anyone else what your business is all about.

Using a nickname, some variation of your real mane, or something cutesy like lovesbunnies5 is ok if you are only there for entertainment, but if you want to use social networks to succeed in the business world you should pick a name that reflects your business interests.

There are many different social networking sites that you can join, and the most popular ones that are inhabited with adolescents and 20 something’s are not always the best places to go for business purposes. Sure if your product or company’s target audience is this age group then by all means create an interesting profile for advertising purposes on Myspace or Facebook, but if your target demographic is older or a niche audience then you need to go to where they hang out. Find social networks populated by people who fit your demographic or niche audience for the best results.

You have to be interesting if you want to attract people to your profile and you need the right balance of business promotion and fun. Make your business known, your goods or services may be needed by others in your social circle which is where you can benefit form free advertising. But at the same time, you have to participate in the community and stay interesting for people to remain interested in your profile and to continue expanding your network of friends and potential customers.

If you approach social networking the right way you can use it as a business tool. Just remember to stay active in the community and add value so that people remain interested in your profile which will also expose them to your business bringing you the potential of many new customers.

About the Author

Ron Subs works with Mega Star Media as a public relations consultant, more information about Ron Subs can be found at http://www.megastarmedia.com/http://www.megastarmedia.com/

Social networking sites have increased in popularity over the past few years. More people than ever before now use sites such as “MySpace” and “YouTube” to get their message across to the rest of the world. While sites like these are mainly used for meeting new people, they can also help you to sell your product/service if you advertise yourself properly.

What to Remember With Social Networking and Advertising

The main thing to keep in mind if you are looking to advertise on social networking sites, is that you should not make your message too pushy. People do not want things sold to them online, especially not on social networking sites. It is fine to mention what you do and what you sell but do it in a way that does not make your product too desperate. For example, you could say something like:

“Hi my name’s John and I own a company known as ‘John’s Fitness Equipment’. It’s taken me a few years to build up my business but I love providing a service that people need. My hobbies are…”

You should not say something like:

“Hi my name’s John and I run a fantastic company known as ‘John’s Fitness Equipment’. My products can really help you to get harder, firmer bodies whilst helping you to have fun at the same time. No other products act quite like these ones, so check them out now if you haven’t already!”

You can really tell the difference between the two descriptions. People want to know more about you. What is your passion other than your products? If you have a sincere reason for selling your products then you can mention that in a blog on the site, but other than that just mention things about you. If you drop your product/business into conversation then people will be more interested in what you do than if you went on and on about it constantly.

The main way in which you can get yourself noticed on social networking sites, is if you actively take part. By making new friends and posting comments on their profiles, you can get noticed as other people will see the comments and visit your profile, too. Joining groups is another good idea, especially on MySpace. There are all kinds of different groups to suit all of your needs. Whether you want to join a group about religion, food, pets or hobbies, there are thousands of groups to choose from. Just remember that whatever groups you do choose to join, will show potential clients what your tastes are. You do not want to come across badly and so you really need to think about what you say and what groups you join.

Social networking sites can be a fantastic way to bring new business to your company. However, it needs to be done properly and you need to spend the time and effort making new friends and posting new comments and blogs wherever possible.

Learn more about Social Networking visit: FriendsWin Randal Williams aka 500KMentor is a Expert Internet Marketer, MLM and Direct Sales industry leader who’s business spans 10+ countries. Randal specializes in Lead Generation, Advanced Internet Marketing, No Cost Prospecting and SEO. To learn more about Social Networking and MLM visit FriendsWin

I’ve made posts about social bookmarking sites in the past and provided links to many of these, but I never trtuly understood the power of these sites until I started using Blog Catalog and Entrecard in the past couple weeks.  Now I’ve become addicted.  These sites are so viral – once you get beyond just signing up and actually start using the sites as they were meant to be used, the hits come rolling in – it’s really exciting.  I’m not going to give you any lists in this post, just some advice, choose a couple of the more popular social networking sites and work them until the visitors start to pour in.  Try to stick to just a couple to begin, it is really easy to keep signing up for lots of different social bookmarking sites, then you never really use one to it’s full advantage.  If you are having a hard time grasping the concept of social bookmarking, here is an awesome video to help you understand. 

If you would like to submit your articles to lots of different social networking sites, check out Social Marker

 If you need a social bookmarking sharing button go to, addthis.com

The popularity of social networking websites is fast spreading like wildfire across the Internet. These websites allow their members to live in a carefree virtual world where they can interact with other members without any obligations. Apart from finding friends, these sites are now used as Internet marketing tools – yes, social networking websites can help increase website traffic by sending a massive amount of traffic to a website thereby improving its search engine rankings.

These websites are powered by the latest sophisticated technologies like AJAX, that allow members – apart from interacting with other members – to customize page backgrounds, work with unique templates, post music/videos, share pictures, store documents and generally have a ball of a virtual time.

There are two kinds of social networking websites – social networking sites and social bookmarking sites. Social networking websites allow you to network with and make friends with their members – most of the most famous social sites that feature a tremendous database of users are MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Facebook, Hi5 and Friendster. Serious Internet marketers become members of these websites and then spread their links around, thereby generating volume traffic on their own website.

On the other hand, social bookmarking websites allow their members to save their favorite links on their pages, which, of course, are shared with other members. Famous social bookmarking sites include delicious, Mixx and Digg.

There are some social networking sites that bring together common interest groups, but even their focus is on making new friends. These “friendship” sites feature a tremendous number of members and are always busy, with members hanging all the time. Some social sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow their users to even hoist advertisements and market their products, so long they don’t spam. So, if you have a good enough website, and you want to generate solid traffic on it, then you can always sign up with a social site and say nice things about your website there to divert the traffic.

Let’s now talk about social bookmarking sites – these allow you to easily save, organize and maintain your favorite bookmarks along with sharing them with your friends and other members of the site. On these sites, you can save and store any URL or webpage that you find interesting and mark it for public viewing. You can even tag your bookmarks if you like. Some of these social bookmarking sites link to your URL and this increases the backlinks to your websites, thereby increasing its search engine results ranking. It is well known that websites such as Stumbleupon, Digg and Delicious are famous for directing massive traffic to websites. If your website ever gets on the front page of these social bookmarking websites, then you must be ready to handle a mindboggling inflow of traffic.

Search engine algorithms simply love social sites because they get clued on to links that feature rich content. So, if you have your website’s link on these social sites, it will be picked up and indexed by the search engines pretty quickly.

If you use WordPress as a content management system, then remember to incorporate plugins like Socialmarker, Socializer and Addthis. These plugins enable your site’s visitors to bookmark your website with just one click, and as we have discussed, getting bookmarked by many users goes on to improve the search engine rankings. There are other plugins such as Onlywire that can automatically spread your post to about 20 different bookmarking sites as soon as it is published!

Sites like Youtube and Flickr allow their members to post videos and pictures, and they are frequented by millions of users daily. These websites too can be used effectively for Internet marketing. It’s simple – just think creatively and make a video using a hand-held cam or shoot some pictures with your digital cam, and you’re rolling! Metacafe, a video-sharing site, even shares their revenue with their members!

Well, social networking sites are here to stay for a long time. Might as well use them to increase traffic before they begin losing out to another Internet innovation.

About the Author

Discover Kevin Sinclair’s system for making profits regardless of whether anyone joins your network marketing business.