Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media wrote a great guest blog post over there offering 80 ways for a Small Business Owner to use Twitter. Since most of my clients are only at the threshold of Twitter & Social Media, I thought I’d share this great post that gives you lots of proof that Twitter has great ROI potential.

Go read the post.

Enjoy!

By Mark Hayward – Follow him @mark_hayward.

Do you own a small business? Are you having a hard time understanding Twitter?

As a small business owner and social media user going on two years now, I can honestly say that initially I did not really see the point or power of Twitter at all.

However, after sticking it out passed the learning curve, picking up a couple of followers, and followingreally intelligent people, thanks to Twitter, I get to make connections and learn something new every day. In fact, at this point I feel like Twitter is a tool that all small business owners should use as part of their overall efforts to build a distributed social media footprint.

Nevertheless, if you are like many in the small business community who have tried Twitter without success, then you might be fond of saying, “I just don’t get it.”

For numerous small business owners (including myself at one point in time) who are new to Twitter, and social media in general, there appears to be a common misconception that as soon as you sign up customers are going to fall from the sky in droves and you will immediately be inundated with more business than you can handle.

Small Business Twitter Frustration
Amongst the business people that I discuss Twitter with there appear to be two types of discouraged small venture owners who give up on Twitter at rapid rate.

Frustrated business owner number one feels like Twitter is analogous to entering a large cocktail party or hotel lobby where she doesn’t know a single soul. Yet, conversations are happening all around her and rather than trying to ease into the discussion, she gives up without talking to anybody because the sheer numbers are overwhelming.

Disgruntled Twitter quitter number two is the complete opposite of number one. He will get on Twitter, see all of the conversations going on, and assume it is the customer “candy store.” This leads to the sending out of many spammy messages, which spew forth details about his great products and prices. He will typically stop using Twitter when to his surprise nobody follows him back and he doesn’t receive one @ reply.

Twitter Tips to Help Small Business Owners
Recently, a friend asked me to help him with that “Twitter thing” because he wants more customers for his niche jewelry business.

After our very long discussion and Twitter run through, I thought that perhaps there might be other business owners out there who are beginners on Twitter and could use some help. Here are the 20 tips that I passed on to my friend:

1. Twitter is first and foremost a place to connect, learn, and listen.
2. Define your goals if you have any (e.g. business promotion, socializing, etc).
3. If you’re confused about where to begin on Twitter, but are interested in learning, take a look at the previously done Twitip post that highlights key people for beginners to follow.
4. Twitter allows you to interact with individuals who you might not normally come into contact with. If you want to interact with a celebrity or a person with a huge following then send a simple @ message or comment on something they are doing. If you get a response you can then take it from there.
5. Don’t be offended if folks don’t follow you back. It’s not personal. (Even if it is, it doesn’t really matter.)
6. Use a photo of yourself or your business logo in you profile.
7. If you’re interested in connecting with someone you might want to try ReTweeting some of their messages before you introduce yourself.
8. It’s probably going to take a good 3 to 6 months to get a following.
9. Find out who the influencers are in your industry and see if they are on Twitter. If they are, follow them.
10. Always follow Jeff Pulver’s rule of giving 95% of the time and asking only 5% of the time.
11. Utilize a Twitter photo-sharing site like TwitPic or Yfrog to share cool photos from your typical business day, or while plying your craft, so that people get to know you. It helps to build social trust.
12. Use Twitter Search with keywords to find information and conversations that are relevant to your business. It’s also a good way to find out if anyone is talking about you or your company.
13. If you are not part of a particular conversation that concerns your area of business, but you would like to participate, approach with caution.
14. If you are sending DM’s to your followers with something related to your business, make sure to use your social capital wisely. Overwhelming folks with DM’s can result in a rapid loss of followers
15. Don’t Tweet anything that you would not want to see on the front page of a newspaper or wildly famous website.
16. Do interact and connect and don’t hesitate to @ message folks who have 10x or 100x the number of followers you have.
17. Employ sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit to find, and share amongst your followers, interesting stories from your particular area of business.
18. Create connections don’t spam. You most likely would not just walk into a crowded venue where you don’t know anyone and say, “Hi my name is Bob and I replace window screens and have great prices.” This method does not work very well on Twitter. (Should be a given but you still see it every day!)
19. Twitter is only one area online where you can begin to build a distributed social media footprint for your business. Do NOT rely solely on Twitter as your social media business promotion tool.
20. It takes a long time to build up a following and develop trust, but it only takes one Tweet to alienate every one of your followers.

To be sure, on a daily basis we are all trying to figure how best to utilize Twitter effectively as a small business tool. Certainly, this is not a be all end all list, so your thoughts and input on how small business can better tap into Twitter are appreciated.

Some quick and easy tips that were tweeted to me about using twitter to promote your blog. Cross posted for your enjoyment:

5 Ways To Use Twitter To Promote Your Blog

by Zahid Lilani on November 12, 2009

Twitter is now more popular than ever. Anita Hamilton at TIME magazine said “While some people call it microblogging or moblogging, I like to think of Twitter simply as blogging for regular people.” She said that in 2007 when Twitter was a baby… it is now microblogging powerhouse.

Bloggers shouldn’t be disappointed because even though you might like to write more detailed posts and not be limited to 140 characters, you can still use Twitter to promote your blogs and keep in touch with your readers.

Here are 5 Ways To Use Twitter To Promote Your Personal Blog

1) Choose a reasonable twitter username that reflects your personality or your blog. If your blog doesn’t have a set topic, which is the case with most personal blogs, go with any name of your liking. It is recommended you use your real name if you are comfortable or a nickname. Avoid numbers, make it simple and easy to remember.

2) Create a background image for your twitter profile page and have the name of your blog in a prominent place or tiled through out the page. Make sure you have a nice left column that has your picture and a small introduction about you or your blog.

3) Every time you publish a post on your blog, send a tweet to all your followers. Use a URL shortner to make long ugly links smaller and less scary to click.

4) Use Twitter search function to find other bloggers and tweeters who have similar interests as you and start following them. This is also useful if you want to generate topic for your next blog post.

5) Instead of just talking about yourself and your blog, try to make conversation with other people. It is as easy as replying to a Tweet that you consider useful or have something to say about. That’s how you will make friends and get more followers.

When one of my client’s asked for a few tips, I thought I’d also put them up here. There’s tons of posts about how to properly use twitter, so I’m really just reiterating the basic stuff and adding to the cloud.

1. Be sure to tweet 90/10 ratio.. that’s for every tweet you make about your business, you should be tweeting 9 tweets about other things like interests, passions, news, companies, other people etc that fall in line with your core values and brand messaging but don’t promote your brand explicitely.

2. www.socialoomph.com allows you to set up an autofollow system that is handy because you can vet your new followers if you so choose. I have this set up for clients so that when someone follows them, they are placed in a queue for me to vet, if they aren’t spammers but are genuine fans of the company, I approve them. If not, they simply don’t get followed.

3. Google people who return follow (auto follow) and add some who’s values are in line with yours, that’s Guy Kawasaki’s suggestion: that innovators have tons of followers but it’s the masses that promote your business, so for every large following you accumulate you’re helping move your business into the conversation. So add as many people who autofollow as you can, and you’ll end up with a higher number of followers by default. Just try and keep the amount of people you follow BELOW the amount of people who follow you -Twitiquette (twitter etiquette) dictates you look like a spammer if you follow a significantly higher amount of people than the number that follow you.

4. If you google “journalists on twitter” you’ll get many databases of journalists who tweet – then it’s all about finding the ones that would be appropriate to your business and following them. If you see them tweet something relevant to you, respond, and build up a relationship, so you can eventually pitch them an idea. I also do this with bloggers and have successfully gotten blog coverage over twitter

5. www.friendorfollow.com is a great little site that lets you see who’s following you that you aren’t following back, and vice versa. I use it to cull the list of followers if I’m ever approaching the point of following more people than are following me back.

Twitter has become the ‘to-do’ for businesses, and I can see why. People go where word-of-mouth takes them, and Twitter is the giant megaphone for giving your recommendation to an infinite number of people. As long as you’re adding value, you’re helping Twitter be useful.

Creating Your Social Media Plan by Lisa Barone

If you enter into social media without a plan, you will fail. Period.

All the hours you spent will be wasted, you will receive no traffic bump, there will be no engagement, no one will care and you will learn nothing. Except maybe that you’re an idiot and that you should have listened to me when I told you to create a social media plan. You wouldn’t jump into a raging river without knowing how to swim, don’t create a Twitter account without knowing how to use it.

Grab a pen, I’m about to save your life.

Just because the tools of social media are free doesn’t mean they come without their own barrier to entry. The barrier is the knowledge of how to use them. Before you get started with using social media, you need to understand the tools you’ll be using. When we work with clients on their social media strategy for their business, here’s a bit of what we’re always sure to discuss with them.

Secure Your Brand

The first step of a successful (and long term) social media plan is to grab your brand everywhere you can, regardless of whether or not you plan to use it. It’s important that you have control of your identity all over the Web. It’s always better to have the username and not use it, then need to wait and kick yourself later when someone else grabs it. Having a unified social media username is very important in establishing trust with other members (and potential press contacts) who may belong to multiple communities with you. You want them to know that you’re the same person. Appearing as [cameraexpert] on one network and [cameras343] on another may confuse them.

To help ease the mind numbing task of username registration, we suggest using Knowem to search a large listing of social media sites. One search will tell you where your brand is still available on 120 different social media sites. (We also use their premium service to register the profiles for us since we’re too lazy busy to register all those profiles ourselves).

Set Your Metrics

Listen to me. Do NOT enter social media until you know what you want to get out of it. Period. If you don’t know what “success” is for you, then you’re not ready to start yet. It also means you should cut back on your blog reading.

Before you jump in, define success. Is it:

• Building buzz and conversation around a particular product?
• Better overall brand awareness?
• More traffic?
• Blog subscribers? Increased leads?
• New knowledge about your customers and how they view your brand?

Once you know that, the next step in your social media planning is to figure out how you’re going to measure success.. You want to identify your challenges, goals and concepts to determine how “buzz” will be quantified. Is it blog comments, conversions, links, Twitter talk, better brand recognition? If you can’t measure whether or not you’re meeting your goals, then you’re going to fail before you even start. It will limit your ability to bench mark results and render you unable to implement changes.

If you don’t take the time to figure out (a) what you want and (b) how you’re going to get it, you will fail in social media. In fact, you’ll fail in life.

Know Who You Are

I tend to believe that for most businesses, marketing is storytelling. It’s about using the tools available to you through social media to pique your customer’s interest and make them invested in who you are. The most successful companies are the ones that have gotten us interested in their story to the point where we want to share it with other people. We want to be associated with them.

Figure out your story in the market. Don’t construct a mythical tale about yourself, but do take the time to become aware of your identity. What does your company believe in? What are you known for and what do you want to be known for? If you’re “the corporate white hat SEO company” or “the blogger with an axe to grind”, you’re going to need to embrace that and bleed it. That knowledge will also be crucial in determining how you’ll talk to people, what your tone will be, how far you’ll go, and what you are (or are not) comfortable doing and sharing.

Determine Where to Build Satellite Communities

You want to plan your social media attack so that it’s as concentrated and as powerful as it can be. You don’t want to waste your time in communities where either no one is talking or they’re simply not interested in your kind. That means understanding two things:

1. Your customers
2. The communities you’re walking into

Your Customers: Put a face on them. Who are they and what are they interested in? Are they comfortable enough online to be hanging out in these communities? If so, where are they in the social media landscape? Are they on Twitter? Creating Facebook Fan pages? Answering questions on LinkedIn or Yahoo Answers? Or, God forbid, on MySpace? Wherever they are, find them.

If the bulk of your customers aren’t online, is there an opportunity to capture a secondary audience through social media – folks who may not make up a large percentage of your customer base but sit in parallel industries and could become more important?

If you don’t naturally know where people are hanging out, don’t panic. It just means you’ll need to do some research to start. Head to Twitter and search for your brand name, your competitors’ names, your keywords, industry, etc. Decide if there’s enough conversation to warrant engagement. Head to Facebook and see if there are any Fan pages dedicated to your company or industry. If there aren’t, are there a lot of people who list it as an interest and who may be interested in joining a community on that topic? Go to Yahoo Answers and see if people are asking or answering questions.

If your community is Internet-literate, they’re talking somewhere. You don’t have to invent the neighborhood, you just have to track it down and move in.

The Communities: Once you find the communities, study them. Scope them out and identify the elders, the specific caste system, their openness to newbies, how folks communicate, the type of content that is passed around, the rules for engagement, etc. You need to become an expert so that you know how to interact and don’t end up stepping on people’s toes or burning your bridges before you even start. Every community operates differently so you want to know the proper rules for each.

Create Rules for Engagement

What are you going to do when someone calls you a moron? How will you react when they tell the world that your company is deceitful and made of nothing but liars? Will you find a way to use the negative press or spaz out Christian Bale-style?

You won’t be able to create an exit strategy for every possible situation, but do get some ground rules down. Last week we all got a peek at the Wall Street Journal’s official conduct rules for employees engaging in social media. The document mentions basic social media tenants like disclosing the company you work for, not discussing confidential information, refraining from disparaging the company, and not “engaging in impolite dialogue” with the wonderful folks of the Internet who will spend 20 minutes telling you you’re ugly. And so is your mother. It’s a lot easier to respond to the crazy when you have a system already documented on paper.

You also need rules for not just what you’ll say but who will be in charge of saying it and what their role is. Create these rules before you start, not after the break up.

Some things you’ll want to address are:

• How will social media be integrated into the company’s core strategy?
• Who from the company will engage? Will there be one voice? A team using one branded account? Personal accounts?
• How much time will be spent on social media?
• How long will the company “test” the different sites before evaluating their success?
• If a serious fire breaks out, what is the proper protocol and who needs to become involved?

Engage. Genuinely.

Did you notice that “engaging in social media” is Step 6 and not Step 1? Just wanted to point that out. Carry on.

When you finally enter the social space, your job is to listen and begin forming a platform for people to openly talk and engage with you.

• Listen to what they’re saying.
• Listen to what they mean.
• Listen to what’s bothering them.
• Listen to what makes them happy.

And when you have something to help lighten their load, to be helpful or to make them smile, respond. Respond with links to your resources, to other people’s resources, to your competitors’ resources. Your job in social media is to listen, to help and to get your message out only when appropriate. For every 10-15 messages where you help someone else, you get to include one that promotes yourself. That’s it. Social media isn’t about you. It’s about your customers and connecting with them so that when they have a need for X, they remember they have a friend on Twitter/Facebook/the Web who specializes in that.

If you chose to enter Twitter, use tools like the Advanced Search, Twitter Grader and Twellow to find people you should be following. If you’re on Facebook, join the groups that are relevant to you and become part of the conversation. If you’re answering questions on Flickr or LinkedIn, again, find the groups that are relevant to you and jump in finding ways to be useful and a good community member.

And then get in there. Leave comments on blogs, tweet people, leave Wall comments, etc. Engage new visitors. Go out there and talk to your community and at least pretend to have fun doing it. Be social and friendly and everything you wish you were in real life. The more excited you are about your community, the more excited they’ll be about you.

Also look for ways to take it offline and in the flesh. Organize meetups and tweetups so that people can be passionately vocal about your company together. No one wants to be in love alone. Give your community a way to find one another and to band together. You’ll empower them and empower yourself.

Assess Your Success.

The same way you can’t “set and forget” an SEO campaign, you can’t dive into social media and then never look back either. You’re going to have to take a look at your on-site and off-site metrics to determine whether or not your social media efforts have been successful, and if not, what you can do to fix them. Lucky for you (!), you set your metrics early on and determined what you were looking for and how you were going to quantify it. You know how to measure social media success.

I’d give your social media efforts about 2-3 months to stabilize before you really start trying to decide if things are working for you. If you start evaluating any earlier than that all you’ll have to go on is your number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans. Those aren’t really the metrics you want to be looking at. They’re useful to bench mark, but you should really be looking to see if:

• Rankings have increased based on traffic and links.
• Social media users are actually engaging with your content and/or converting (hint: Crazy Egg is awesome for this).
• You’ve had more success on the social voting sites?
• You increase awareness about a product that led to sales.

Whatever you had outlined as determining “success” before, now is the time to see if you’ve gotten any closer to that goal. If you have, congrats. Keep on doing what you’re doing. If not, figure out what’s broken and fix it.

Cross Posted from Greg Martin’s Blog

Twitter Marketing Tips

Here is a brief overview of what you could be doing…

Promote other people as much as you can - this shows people that you are not just interested in pushing your own agenda and that you have others interests at heart.

Post valuable and helpful information - that hasn’t come from you that you think would benefit those who are following you. Remember that people are looking for answers to their marketing problems and if you are providing valuable content that helps them you will be seen as a valuable person that is worth following.

Post valuable information that you have created - finally it’s time for you to promote your own content. There is nothing wrong with promoting yourself as long as it isn’t all sales and spammy. I like to direct people through to content on my Blog that can help others in a big way. My goal is quality first before quantity.

Answer the questions going on in your followers minds - This is an important tip, like any other form of marketing online you need to consider what the conversation is that is going on inside your prospect or followers mind. They have followed you for a reason and you need to be catering to that reason.

I personally think it’s ok to be posting non-marketing content like “having dinner at my favourite restaurant”. But if that is all you do then your followers will get a little tired of that. Your postings still need to be targeted to the niche of people who are following you and that is best achieved by asking yourself the question “what is going on right now in my followers mind?”

Thank people for following you - this is the right thing to do but it can become a time consuming issue if you don’t automate your activity. I will get to automation in a moment but thanking those that follow you is very important and you need get this happening ASAP.

Engage in conversation - This is a powerful way to get followers. You need to realise that whenever you do this the entire following of the person you are conversing with gets your posts with your Twitter name on it. This works powerfully when you are conversing with top industry leaders who have large lists.

My first encounter with this was with @Mike_Dillard who at the time had a following of over 12,000 people. From the brief conversation I had with Mike I saw my follow numbers escalate for almost a week. Believe me it works.

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Twitter Automation

This is seriously awesome and worth your attention. Automation is your key to growing a profitable list.

TweetLater combined with Twitter has become the fastest method I have ever engaged in to create traffic. Twitter is very responsive and by using this service you can be guaranteed of instant response to your postings.

TweetLater is a free service which is great to get you started however you may be interest in the Pro account. With the Pro account you can create a series of posts that can be sent to your list 24 hours a day completely on Autopilot.

Of course there is a fee for the Pro version but the return I am receiving from my Twitter marketing more than recovers the cost of the Pro service. It’s a great way to generate leads and revenue at the same time.

Rather than me telling you about it here just follow the link and check out Tweet Later.

Check Out TweetLater Here

Check Out My Twitter Spam Post Here

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Automatic Exponential List Building

I would like to introduce this totally free service to you as a great way to build your following on Autopilot. I don’t recomend that this be your only way of building your following however it is a great way to at least get started… and very simple to use.

I guess you could say that this is a combination of Twitter and network marketing.

Check out Tweeter Getter Here

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Follow Those Who Interest You

Another great tool I use for folliwing people automatically who are in the same market I am interested in is Twollo.

With Twollo you can automatically follow anyone that uses certain keys words. For example if you are into Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short, you can enter SEO into Twollo and it will automatically the person who posted SEO in their tweet.

I have dozens on word combinations I am tracking and have followed hundreds of people automatically with this tool. And they are all discussing the subjects I am interested in.

How cool!

Click Here To Go To Twollo

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Advanced Twitter List Building & Marketing

Once you have grasped the basics of Twitter etiquette & automation it’s time to get involved in some serious list building techniques.

The program that has opened my eyes in a dramatic way to building a large list fast is Brute Force Twitter. Using the techniques described in the training I am watching hundreds of people follow me everyday. Some days I have had close to a thousand follows but you need to keep in mind this is being done over multiple lists.

As of this writing I am still in the early stages of my list building activities so what ever you do, don’t take my word for it, go and check out the guys page and read it for yourself.

Click this link to visit Brute Force Twitter

Additional Notes - As of July 2009 I have just updated this post now to include this new tool I am using called Himmingbird. In fact after using Humming bird for two months now I can safely say that there is simply nothing else you should be using to build a large Twitter list with.

Click here to check out the Humminbird review I did… and click here to check out the Hummingbird site.

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Engaging The Twitter Community

You may have already noticed that using the Twitter website to interact with the community is a proverbial pain in the butt. It’s not designed for ease of use.

The best tool I have come across for to engage with my Twitter following is Tweet Deck. If you haven’t yet used this service then you are not getting the best out of Twitter. it’s an absolute must.

Click Here To Ckeckout Tweet Deck

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Tracking Your Traffic & Clicks

If you are thinking of marketing like a professional on Twitter then you are going to have to track your traffic and clicks.

As of this writing I am receiving around 1,500 to 2,000 clicks per day from two lists of around 12,000 followers. These tweets are being sent for different blog posts and for different target audiences. But that’s the overall result as it stands now.

That’s not a bad effort and the way I can know how I am doing is by using a service called Bit.ly I have also used Budurl but I like the graphs on Bit.ly better.

Google those terms and open your free account, add your links and include the shortened links into your tweets and your away.

Who Am I And What Am I Doing?

In May of 2008 I started using the Internet to help me build my home business that I was involved in. Since then I have studied and learnt from some of the top Internet marketers on how to use the net for marketing and attracting prospects to you to build a successful home business.

I now have people from all over the world contacting every week wanting to know how they too can use the Internet to build their home business. I currently build more than one home business as well as being involved in marketing many affiliate products online.

I also consult to successful home business builders that are wanting to use the Internet to build their home business.

If you would like to connect with me then please feel free to click here and visit the contact page. I appreciate all enquiries. Or you can network with me below…

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Network With Me And Market Your Business

I am building a nice little online community and I would love to see you there. It’s called That’s Business… Check it out and maybe I can market your business for free on the internet.

Click here to go to That’s Business

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