Foursquare: what is it and how do you use it for business? Foursquare is a social media channel with tremendous potential to attract customers. It is very effective for your business and will definitely contribute to your business’s success.

Foursquare allows you to know where your customers are at any given time. This deepens the connection that you have with them. This connection gives you deep insight into your customers. It can also help you to identify the thinking of your customers through their visiting patterns.

Additionally, Foursquare will allow you to track what your customers are saying about your brand. This is vitally important because you gain customers through word of mouth connections and the people who are paying attention to your brand and your business will tell their friends, who will tell their friends, etc.

Engaging your customers

Foursquare helps you to engage your customers, especially those customers who are on the go a great deal of the time. It is much easier to communicate about all of your offerings if your messages reach your customers wherever they may be instead of having to wait for them to read your messages at the end of the day or at the end of their business trip. We are now in the age of instant gratification and instant information. Foursquare really helps make that easier for you as a business owner.

Enticing your customers

The Foursquare premise is based on checking into places around the neighborhood and within your online communities. When your customers check in, they are rewarded. The concept is often referred to as a game.

The following are some tools that will allow you to connect easily with your customers through Foursquare:

• Mayor specials: These specials can only be released by the Mayor of that particular community. The Mayor is your most loyal customer (you determine this by identifying the user who has checked in the most in the last two months). Once you have identified the Mayor, you should reward him or her with a special little gift.
   
• Wildcard specials: Wildcard specials are always available. However, your customers have to qualify before they can take advantage of those specials.
   
• Check-in specials: The specials are not released to the customer until they check in a certain number of times (you can set that number).
   
• Frequency-based specials: These specials are released every certain number of check-in times.

Communicating with your customers

When you are reading the customers’ comments, you will be able to glean a lot of value that you can apply to your business. It is very important for you to interact with your customers after you have become aware of how they are thinking and feeling. However, before you do interact with them, it is essential that you really listen to what they are saying.

That customer feedback will contain information on what your customers want and need from you. The more you pay attention to the needs and wants of your customers, the closer they will feel to you and the stronger your relationships with them will become. You can use Foursquare as your vehicle to keep in touch with your customers and to continue strengthening your relationships with them.

Measuring the success of your business on Foursquare

You can monitor the total amount of people who check in, the users who share updates on Twitter and Facebook and the number of unique visitors. Also, you are able to track the demographics of the users on Foursquare.

Once you are armed with that information, you can use it to reward your loyal customers. When you reward your customers, they want to be in a relationship with you. Everyone loves to be rewarded. The stronger your relationships become with your customers, the more those customers will tell other people about your business and recommend that those other people also become your customers.

Foursquare gives you a very good opportunity to increase the visibility of your business online, to strengthen your credibility, increase brand identity and awareness, and give your customers the feeling that they are important to you.

Exploring the neighborhood

With Foursquare, you are rewarded for checking into your community. As people build their communities on Foursquare, the interactions become more and more interesting. The more they check in, the more they are rewarded. The incentives make them want to keep interacting. When your customers check into a certain location, they will see which particular promotions you are offering. Everyone loves to get something for nothing or at least for doing very little.

Conclusion

Foursquare is an effective way of doing business and it is a great way to get your customers excited about your business and your business offerings. Your customers will find the Foursquare approach fun, interesting and entertaining. Because you have their attention, they will be connecting with you on a regular basis.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You own your own business and you offer products and services. How do you get people to buy what you are selling? That’s easy. You create a buzz about your offerings and you communicate through your social media marketing strategy.

Accomplishing this has absolutely nothing to do with magic. There is no fairy dust that you can sprinkle to cause the members of your target market to automatically start coming in droves to your website. In fact, what works well for one business may not necessarily work for another business. Creating a buzz involves social media and marketing that is spread by word of mouth.

When you first start designing your social media marketing strategy, there are several tools that you should include to make the strategy successful. In our article Developing Your Social Media Marketing Strategy, we discussed the importance of a strategy and how it is key to the success of your business. In this article, we are discussing the tools that you should consider using to implement the strategy.

The following is a list of some of the more useful and effective tools that will help you create a buzz for your business:

• Social media networks: Social networks are an excellent way to offer and share your knowledge as well as to build and maintain relationships. There are many popular social media sites that you can take advantage of and at List of Social Networking Websites, you will find a list of some of the most popular.
   
• Photos: Sharing photos as part of your social media marketing campaign has a similar, positive effect as videos with regard to the visual aspect of it. People like to be able to connect the name with the face. Some great photo sharing websites are Flickr, Memeo and Photobucket.
   
• Videos: Online videos as part of your social media marketing campaign have become very important. Videos are an effective tool in a social media marketing strategy because many people react more favorably when they are able to see you and listen to what you have to say than merely reading what you have written. Also, a lot of people don’t have the patience or the time to read a lot but when they are watching a video that you have made, it is received more easily. Two of the more popular video-sharing sites are YouTube and Vimeo.
   
• Blogging: Blogs are a wonderful tool when it comes to social media marketing. The reason that blogs are so effective is that, if they are optimized properly, they can drive a high volume of traffic to a website. An effective blog will be instrumental in creating internal links, content that is always fresh and appealing, active community, and website traffic that has nothing to do with the search engines. Always ensure that the content that you offer is enticing to your audience and that they find it helpful and informative. Some of the more popular and more widely used blogs are WordPress, Blogger and Typepad.
   
• Microblogging: In the same manner that blogs allow huge opportunities to promote your business, microblogs do the same thing. Those opportunities are a result of both consistent content and good-quality optimization. Two popular microblogs are Twitter and Posterous.
   
• Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a social media marketing tool that allows online users to search, organize, share and manage bookmarks of resources on the web. Some of the more widely used bookmarking websites are: delicious.com, Digg, Diigo, Fark, Mixx, MyBlogLog, Newsvine, Reddit, Propeller, Slashdot.org, Yahoo!, StumbleUpon, and Buzz.
   
• Presentations: Another excellent way to get your brand noticed is by offering presentations on interesting and informative topics in your niche or industry. Presentation-sharing websites are becoming more and more popular these days. Some of the best ones are: SlideShare, Scribd, MyPlick and AuthorSTREAM.
   
• Forums: If you are looking for a new way to market your products and services, as well as a way to interact with other colleagues and customers/potential customers, use an online forum. You will see very valuable results if you engage your online audience for your brand and your business.
   
• Podcasts: Podcasts are a social media marketing tool that is used to promote your brand and your products and/or services. If you are interested in podcasting, you should check out Blip or RadioPodcast.
   
• Wikis: As I am sure you know, wikis are online encyclopedias. Wikipedia, AboutUs, Pbwiki (PBworks.com), Citizendium and Wetpaint are all informative and useful.
   
• Monitoring your brand: It is extremely important for you to understand the positioning of your brand in the market. Some great websites that you can use for this are: Buzzlogic, ReputationDefender and Radian6.
   
• Ratings and Reviews: One of the best ways for you to find out how your website is viewed by other people is through ratings and reviews. You can go to Yelp or GetSatisfaction to help you with this.
   
• Widgets: If you are trying to promote your own brand, you can create personalized badges using unusual widgets on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels by using SpringWidgets or WidgetBox.

Conclusion

The various tools that have been discussed are important for the success of your social media marketing campaign. Bear in mind that in order to really create a buzz around your brand and products and services, you also need to publish your content on business directories such as EzineArticles, eHow, Google Docs, IdeaMarketers and Yahoo Articles Group. If you do this, you will be gaining even wider exposure and creating even more buzz. Remember that it is important to choose the mix of social media channels and business directories that work the most effectively for you.

Always remember to be proactive in your marketing approach rather than reactive. It is important to constantly let people know that you are not just a brand and some products and services. You are a human being who has their best interest at heart and you have a solution to their problems.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

These days, many people are beginning to understand the potential use of social media to create event buzz. Whether the occasion is large or small, it can be enhanced tremendously through online communication.

With the popularity of social media, everything is different now. Social media allows planners and the organizations sponsoring the events the opportunity to have long-term interactions with the attendees well in advance.

Events have become much more exciting and part of that excitement is the anticipation or buzz that starts to build around the event long before it ever takes place. There are many ways to create buzz, and several of them will be discussed here.

• Intrigue your attendees: The vast majority of events have a website. However, not very many take advantage of the event management opportunities and free listings that are available to them. At the very least, you should have event pages on your website:
  • Facebook events
  • LinkedIn
  • Eventbrite.com – Eventbrite allows you to sell tickets, if that is something that you want to do
  • Meetup.com
  • Upcoming.yahoo.com

  Granted, it is a little more work to watch over all of the pages, however, it will be well worth it for you and the people who are going to your website. Additionally, another distinct advantage is that the search engines will recognize the pages and rank them.
   

• Engage your attendees: You should reach out to your potential attendees very early on. A good way to effectively accomplish this is by sending out a survey and asking for their opinions on a venue that you are considering choosing for the event, speakers that you are thinking about inviting, etc. Another way that you might want to engage your potential attendees is by asking their opinions on content topics. After you have been able to gather several topics for the content, you can ask your potential attendees to vote on the topics.
   
• Inform your attendees: It is a good idea to allow your attendees to vote on certain aspects of your event. It is a great deal more efficient and “green” than using a lot of paper. Another type of document that you can offer online is the program evaluation. There is no need to put that on paper.
   
• Integrate information: Once you are on site, you will have a wonderful opportunity to leverage social media in a really big way. The impact will be huge and people will start to buzz about what you are doing. You will need a hashtag for your event so that people who will be attending can monitor the event on Twitter. The shorter the hashtag the better. After that, you should tweet about your event, which will start to get your attendees excited and really motivated.
   
• Syndicate: You should take all of the content from the event and syndicate it as much as possible. Your ultimate goal is to entice people who did not attend your event to want to come to the next event, based on reading your content. Of course, you also want to get those people who did attend to come back next time. You can syndicate all of the event presentations as well as giving Twitter transcripts to all of the event attendees. You can also post the content on your event pages (which were discussed earlier on).
   
• Propagate: It is a great idea to take photos of your event (or have someone else take them) and upload and share them with people who were not able to attend the event. As an incentive, you can offer a prize for the best photo taken. You can also do a podcast after the event has finished and interviews of the speakers, attendees and sponsors. You should try to learn from the event to improve future events and connect with even more people as well as interacting with people who had questions for you.
   
• Blogs: Get bloggers to blog about your event and you can syndicate their blogs using a blog widget.

Conclusion

There are so many ways to create buzz about your event. The harder you work on letting people know what you will be offering and how you can involve them in some of the decisions that will go into making the event interesting, exciting, and buzz-worthy, the more positive their reactions will be and the more attendees you will gather.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Many people try to avoid using Facebook to market their business. They don’t really know enough about Facebook and how effective it can be for marketing purposes. Some of the more popular myths will be dispelled here.

If you are looking for a great way to really increase your visibility and reputation online, Facebook is an excellent way to do it. It has a phenomenal number of users and they are growing in number all of the time. When you think about that in terms of growing your business, it makes no sense whatsoever for you not to get involved (as a business person) with Facebook.

The following are some of the myths that people have bought into about Facebook.

• Only kids use Facebook: Many people believe that Facebook has no benefits for business because the largest part of its demographic is young. That has actually started to change. The older demographic (35+) of Facebook has grown dramatically and is still increasing to this day.
   
• You are too old for Facebook: At the other end of the spectrum from the myth above, in addition to the demographic now being older, age has very little to do with your successful use of Facebook. All that really matters is that you have something to say that is valuable and interesting to other people with whom you connect online. If anything, older age can be an advantage because with age comes wisdom and insight.
   
• Using Facebook is too time-consuming: Regarding the amount of time that is necessary to make Facebook work for your business, it all depends on how you manage your time.

  If you put yourself on a structured schedule and you really are committed to sticking to that schedule, the amount of time that you devote to Facebook does not have to be overwhelming and all consuming. The benefits that you will receive from spending the time and effort far outweigh any disadvantages that you can think of.

  In order to get the most out of your Facebook time, it is best to have a strategy in mind before you even start. Ask yourself what your strategy is and which goals you hope to achieve by interacting with people on Facebook. It is very important to have a clear understanding of why you are actually using Facebook to interact.
   

• All you need is Facebook to get clients: We all wish that this were true. However, it usually takes more effort than that to build up your business and acquire new clients. Unfortunately, many people believe this myth and are so disappointed when it doesn’t happen that way that they totally give up on Facebook after that. Facebook should be a part of your overall marketing strategy. It cannot be the entire strategy. Facebook is a great way to demonstrate your credibility and expertise. As you start to build relationships through Facebook, people will come to trust you and to turn to you for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems because they will consider you to be the expert.
   
• If you have a personal profile on Facebook, you don’t need anything else: This is a myth that many people accept as the truth. You should have a personal Facebook page that includes friends and family and a Facebook Fan Page that you use solely for business purposes. It is very important to separate the two. You certainly don’t want your business associates to know about the details of your life that is personal in nature.

  Facebook fan pages are public whereas Facebook pages are private. Because fan pages are public, the search engines can detect them and can rank them accordingly. You can also use your fan page to spread the word (virally) about your business offerings and your brand.

Tips to help you to get a lot out of Facebook without putting a lot into it

• Turn off most of your alerts: Based on your schedule, your goal is to spend a specific (and relatively short) amount of time on Facebook. If you leave all of your alerts on and you receive frequent notifications that tell you when someone has reached out to you, you will become very distracted and you will end up spending more time on Facebook (most likely for non-business purposes) than you should or than you intended.
   
• Ignore meaningless applications: Facebook has a great deal of applications that are fun but that serve no purpose for you when it comes to business. It is different if you want to get involved with them in your “play” time.
   
• Update your status on a regular basis: You should choose regular intervals to update your status and if something significant changes in your status in between those intervals, you should update it as it happens also.
   
• Peruse your newsfeeds: You should pay regular attention to your news feeds, which consist of the status updates of your Facebook connections, and if something is of interest to you, either share it with others or make a comment on it.
   
• Respond quickly: If someone has placed a comment on your wall, respond in kind with a comment of your own. You should respond as quickly as you can.
   
• Announce your events: If you are involved with an event, share the information with other people. You should try to get as many people as possible involved.
   
• Share your blog: Use the NetworkedBlogs or Notes application to import your blog postings, which will subsequently in your Facebook fans news feeds.

What do you do next?

• Continually update your page with fresh content: An effective way to accomplish this is by posting blog articles on a very regular basis.
   
• Pose questions that require answers from other people: It is very important to engage your readers as much as possible. The more engaged you make them; the more discussions will be generated.
   
• Be good to your fans: Allow your fans to take advantage of your business offerings, including special promotions, events and free giveaways.
   
• Communicate: Let your fans know what you are up to in your business and allow them to interact with you regularly.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you have hopefully been convinced that what you might have been feeling and what you believed about Facebook for business are not true. You can use Facebook for your business and all that it has to offer. So, jump right in and start connecting.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

My mother always told me (even as recently as last week), that if you lie, eventually you will get caught and if you lie often, you will start forgetting what you have said. I believed her when I was little and I believe her now.

"How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking" is a humorous video that illustrates how people can totally change what they really look like and pretend to be somebody that they are not. WARNING: video is for mature audiences only!

My mother's advice can be applied to both personal and professional situations. With the increasing empowerment and sophistication of technology and by leveraging social media marketing, companies are compelled to stay true to their word and their brand promise. If they don’t, the world will hear about it. Many celebrities recently have seen how quickly news spreads when their secrets or indiscretions are revealed. With social media, it is possible to create the illusion that you know what you are talking about and have the experience and expertise to back it up; however, you can’t get away with that forever. Eventually, people will catch on to you.

Social Media has completely changed the landscape in the world of business. It is imperative for business owners and everyone else in a company to understand the impact of these new communications technologies. If they don’t, and they are not completely honest about who they are or what their service offerings are, as soon as one person uncovers the truth, the negative publicity will spread like wild fire thanks to the power of the internet and social media.

The Internet makes it easy for anyone to portray themselves as anyone they want. The term “expert” is one that has been adopted by many yet not everyone is truly an “expert.” If you promote yourself as someone who you are not, rest assured – eventually – your deceit will be discovered.

Recently, it seems as though a large number of people are branding themselves as coaches. Coaching certification is relatively easy to obtain. However, merely by being a certified coach does not necessarily make you qualified and experienced enough to really help other people.

It might not be immediate, but if you are creating a perception, as soon as one person discovers that you are not what you say you are, they will share it with someone else, either online, offline or both. The next person will tell someone else and before you know it, the truth will become common knowledge.

In this age of transparency, don’t pretend to be someone who you are not because the real you will eventually become evident and you will be exposed.

You have a social media campaign for your business and you feel that it is unique and much better than the campaigns of all of the other businesses around you. What makes your campaign special and successful?

There are many possible characteristics that can contribute to the success of your campaign. When you are involved with social media marketing for your business, you are creating a buzz about your offerings and more and more people will want to buy what you are selling. Please see some valuable tips below:

• The viral quality: Successful social media campaigns spread very quickly. If your campaign is not spreading quickly, it is not effective. A good way to gauge the potential success of your campaign is to try a micro campaign. It is much easier to test the effectiveness on a small scale than to jump in with both feet in a grand manner without testing the waters first.
   
• Value: An effective social media campaign is one that provides value to other people. There are several ways to provide value; among them is sharing important and useful information that solves the problems of the people with whom you connect.
   
• Quality: It is extremely important to not only share information but to make sure that the information that you are sharing is of high quality. Remember to continually share original content. It is a very bad idea to keep recycling the same content over and over again.
   
• Good branding: Your campaign should “sing” your brand. You should use your logo, tagline, colors, and any and all other aspects of your brand in facets of your campaign. If you should happen to include videos in your campaign, make sure that your brand is on them also.
   
• Metrics: It is critical that you keep track of your social media campaign efforts and the results that they produce. It is very important that you pay close attention to the analytics on a regular basis. You should constantly strive to improve upon what you have to produce better and better results.
   
• High-quality content: You need to make sure that the content that you offer is always very well written and grammatically sound. The most sensible approach is to have the writing be simple and to use short sentences.
   
• No hard sell: The point of your campaign is not to sell your products and/or services. It is to establish and maintain relationships and to provide valuable information to other people. Others will start to trust you and feel that you have strong credibility if you use this approach. Interacting with others is the way that you will strengthen those relationships and eventually, your business will become more and more successful.
   
• Innovation: In order for your campaign to be successful, you need to get people to notice you and your business. If your campaign is dull and boring, nobody will pay attention. You need to make sure that your social media campaign has your unique voice, which is genuine, exciting, creative, and touches them in some way.
   
• Listen hard: Feedback is essential to the success of your business and your social media campaign. A lot of people have something to say that is valuable for your business and you have a responsibility to listen to them. It is an important part of your relationships to express appreciation for the feedback that people go out of their way to give you. If you are not able to respond to them immediately, you need to acknowledge their feedback and tell them that you will get back to them soon with a more comprehensive response.
   
• Good organization: Even before you start your campaign, you need to plan the strategy. You should know your entire strategy before you start step 1 of the process. You must go in sequential order and not skip anything. You originally created the plan in a certain order for a reason. Deviating is not a good idea.
   
• The human touch: When it comes to marketing through social media, it is not a good idea to count on automation. You are building and maintaining relationships with humans, not robots. In order to successful continue to do that, you need to be directly involved. Your relationships will not grow themselves.
   
• Consistency: Your campaign must always be consistent. It is vitally important to publish content on a consistent and regular basis. Whichever schedule you choose, it is important to stay with it consistently.
   
• Enticement: In order to convert visitors to customers, you need to convince them that you have something that they need. You can lay the groundwork with incentives such as free eBooks, free products, white papers, free vouchers, free samples, etc.
   
• Blog: Before you do anything with your campaign, it is a good idea to have a blog for your business. Your blog should be the focal point of your campaign. It is helpful if you have social media sharing buttons on your blog so that other people can share your blog content.
   
• Discrimination: It is very important to be discriminating when it comes to your campaign. If you are connected to too many social media channels, your campaign will not be successful and you will get burned out.
   
• Different types of marketing: Social media marketing plus traditional marketing work together to make your business more and more successful. Just as you have put your brand everywhere possible, you can put your brand on products such as t-shirts and mugs. The more exposure your business gets the better.
   
• A Call to Action: Another extremely important element to a successful social media campaign is the Call to Action. The Call to Action is the way for your visitors to connect with you on a deeper level after reading what you are offering initially.

Conclusion

More and more businesses are involved with some sort of social media campaign nowadays. One of the most important reasons is that there is no cost involved. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, can be quite expensive at times. Additionally, social media marketing allows you to interact easily with your potential customers and existing customers. Businesses are experiencing an extremely high return on investment (ROI) for the effort that is put forth.

As you know, there are many different elements that are involved in a successful social media campaign. If you feel that your campaign is not working as effectively as you would like it to work, use the tips that are mentioned here and you will see that more people will be drawn to you and your business and you will start to enjoy greater and greater success.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” — Rachel Carson. Social media has made sure that people will never be alone. There is always a way to connect to others.

Many business people regard social media as unexplored and mysterious territory. There is a vast volume of content that is being offered up online on a very regular basis. It may seem difficult at times to sort through the massive amount of content in order to find the gems that are really valuable.

The actuality is that social media marketing is a lot more straightforward than you might think. Basically, social media takes ideas that have already been presented to the world and presents them in a new way. The ideas are not new. Only the method or approach is new. In essence, social media is based on some very simple activities or techniques. They are:

• Listening: When you listen (really listen), you are embracing information that will keep you on top of what is happening in your industry or niche. You pay attention to what your competitors are doing, which trends are important to follow, which new products and services might help you in your business, what is going on with pricing, and of utmost importance, what people are saying about you and your business.

The concept of listening is certainly not new. Business people have been listening since the beginning of time. They have used a large number of tools to help them listen more effectively and efficiently, such as conversations with vendors, reading trade publications, analysts’ reports, trade association newsletters, seminars and other sources.

With the popularity of social media, your listening skills have become better because it is now easier to talk to people about your business and you have many more and newer tools with which to listen.

One very effect that social media has caused to happen is the elimination of a great deal of the negative feelings that existed in communications with customers. In the old way, people would write and mail letters to companies if they had a complaint about a product and/or service. That took a great deal of time and effort. However, with the advent of social media, it is much easier and quicker for customers to express their opinions, as well as people being able to reach many more people.

• Networking: Business people have been networking forever. Networking has always been an extremely important way to meet people and start to build relationships for business. For a very long time, all of the networking was in the form of face-to-face meetings, at conferences, forums, seminars and a myriad of other industry events.

Face-to-face networking should not be replaced with online social networking. Both types of networking are important and one complements the other. Everything that is connected to social media seems to happen much more quickly than when it is real time. The beauty of establishing and maintaining relationships with people through the Internet is that you are not limited to a specific geographic area. You can interact with people anywhere and everywhere.

Regular networking etiquette applies whether you are networking online or in person. You introduce yourself, ask the other person what they do, try to contribute something interesting and valuable to the conversation, etc. Just don’t try to give them a hard sell.

Also remember that your approach to social media networking is not the same as your approach to your social media marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy is something that needs to be well thought out and executed carefully. The results will not happen overnight but they will happen. Social media networking will give you immediate gratification but your social media marketing strategy will not.

• Interacting: After you have successfully networked, you will want to interact with your fellow networkers. When people interact, they are starting to get to know each other better, gathering more information about one another and asking questions. Interacting used to be done over the phone traditionally. Over the last two decades, the phone has been replaced with Email.

Social media makes interacting with other people easier than in the past. It is very simple to answer questions from customers and potential customers and customers who haven’t even reached the stage of being potential customers yet. When you respond to questions, you are providing many people with instant gratification. When people interact, they discuss matters that are important to them and topics of interest to them. Many times, that includes speaking about products and services that are on the market, including yours.

• Engaging people: Engaging people online is a vital part of your success with social media channels. An excellent way to engage people is to end your content with a provoking question. You can even be the first to answer your own question to get things moving. You will see that people are interested in the discussion and everyone will want to give their two cents.

Conclusion

It is critical for all businesses to keep up with social media and what people are saying, feeling and buying. Any business that chooses to ignore social media and connectivity with other businesses will not be around for a very long time. Social media isn’t really mysterious at all. It is exciting, highly effective, and wonderfully compelling but it is not mysterious.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You have gotten used to using Twitter for your business. You have many followers by now and many people whom you follow in return. You must have noticed some tweets with a word and a # symbol attached.

Those words and symbols are Twitter hashtags. Hashtags are basically an easy way to catalog and join tweets together on a certain topic. Hashtags make it easier for you to find other tweets on the same topic, while at the same time, you are able to eliminate other tweets that are not relevant.

Organizers of events and conferences also commonly use hashtags for business. They use them as a way to keep all of the tweets about a specific event in one stream. The organizers may also use hashtags to organize and coordinate updates about events during emergencies.

How to use hashtags effectively

Using hashtags is an excellent way of extending your influence on your Twitter followers. Many times, Twitter users search for content that comes from people from all over.

Hashtags provide you with a way to build deeper relationships with followers with whom you have already established some sort of relationship online. There are many hashtags in existence that you can join as well as new ones being created on a regular and frequent basis.

You should use hashtags in your tweets. The hashtags should come before your keywords. To make it easier on yourself, you can do some research before you use the hashtag in your tweet to find out if the topic that you are tweeting about already has an existing hashtag.

Make sure that you introduce your hashtag to your followers by informing them about what purpose it serves and by requesting that your followers use it in their tweets on the same topic.

Hashtag etiquette

The rules of hashtag etiquette are still quite new and have not totally evolved yet. Common sense and proper social manners are good guidelines to follow. You need to make sure to use discrimination when it comes to deciding which tweets deserve hashtags and which don’t.

You should tag only those tweets that add significant value and interest to the discussion. Additionally, you need to be discriminating about how many hashtags you use in any given tweet. One hashtag is good, two are ok and three is the absolute maximum. You should be careful about using three hashtags on more than the rare occasion. You certainly don’t want to seem irritating to your Twitter community because of your contribution of hashtags.

Spam

With the wide usage of hashtags, unfortunately, the down side is that they have also become a vehicle for spam. Make sure that you don’t use hashtags on a tweet that is not related to that particular topic. Another thing that you shouldn’t do is fill your tweets with popular hashtags just so you will appear high in the Twitter results.

Choosing the proper hashtags

Your choice of hashtags depends completely on the type of business that you have and what you wish to get out of Twitter for your business. You need to make sure that your hashtags and topics are of the utmost relevance and usefulness to the people who are following you and to people who will be searching for you.

Starting your own hashtags

Hashtags can be used effectively to track social media campaigns that assist in creating a strong sense of community; a community that unifies your clients and colleagues with you. The first thing that you need to do in starting your own hashtag is to choose a tag word.

The tag word should be something that can be easily remembered, is easy to spell, and is as short as possible. Keep in mind that Twitter has a maximum of 140 characters per tweet and you certainly don’t want to use up most of that with your hashtag. Once you have chosen a tag, start using it and promoting it as much as possible.

Always make sure that your tweets that include hashtags are valuable and memorable to your followers. Remember that you can promote your tag via other social media channels, such as your newsletter and blog. Remember to include calls to action in your tweets at regular and reasonable intervals.

Monitoring your hashtags

One of the best ways to monitor your hashtags is by using Twitter Search. Twitter Search will allow you to watch people using your hashtags in real time and you can subscribe to an RSS feed so that you can see the results.

Conclusion

Hashtags are great way to boost the credibility and professionalism of your tweets for your business. They bring an entire new level to the quality of your Twitter content and it is yet another way for you to strengthen your credibility and expertise in the eyes of your followers.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

When you are choosing your online marketing strategy and executing that strategy, you need to make sure to really give it a fair chance at succeeding. The success or your strategy and marketing flow won’t happen overnight.

There are numerous online marketing strategies that you can use to grow your business and to attract people to your website and to what you are offering. You need to remember that the secret to making a success of any strategy that you choose is persistence and consistency. A very positive aspect of online marketing is that your customer base is much larger than it would be with traditional marketing. You must keep in mind that whichever online marketing strategy you choose will take some time until you see results.

Just like all forms of marketing, Internet marketing takes time before you start to see results. There are many elements that go into a successful online marketing strategy (article marketing, social networking, blogging, etc) and they are all very important and essential to the success of your online marketing strategy.

The following steps, which are easy to follow, will help you to increase your marketing flow, assist you in increasing your website traffic and will help to convert your business prospects into customers.

It is recommended that you choose a few Internet marketing techniques that work best for your business and make sure that you use them consistently. You will need to use them on a regular schedule (a specific number of times each week). If you aren’t yet sure if the techniques that you have chosen are the most effective for your business, it is recommended that you try them out for three months and then decide whether you will go with them on a permanent basis.

At the end of the three-month period, you should analyze the results in order to identify which strategies were most effective and successful. If they were successful and effective, you should continue with them and also add others that you think might add to the success of your online marketing strategy.

• Driving traffic to your website: In order to drive traffic to your website, you should be do article marketing, social networking, blogging, podcasting, etc. You will need to get involved in techniques that will result in more traffic being driven to your website. You must ensure that whatever techniques you use are effective in communicating to your readers that you are the one who will be able to solve their problem(s).

  It is recommended that you choose a few Internet marketing techniques that work best for your business and make sure that you use them consistently. You will need to use them on a regular schedule (a specific number of times each week). If you aren’t yet sure if the techniques that you have chosen are the most effective for your business, it is recommended that you try them out for three months and then decide whether you will go with them on a permanent basis.

  At the end of the three-month period, you should analyze the results in order to identify which strategies were most effective and successful. If they were successful and effective, you should continue with them and also add others that you think might add to the success of your online marketing strategy.

• Enticing visitors to continue visiting your website: Once you have gotten visitors interested in your website, you need to keep the relationships going. A good way to entice your visitors is to have a box on every page where they can sign up with you. You can offer them an incentive, such as a free item (product or service) in exchange for their name and Email address. It is vitally important that you automate this process.

• Converting your visitors into customers: After your visitors have agreed to sign up on your website, you need to continue to maintain contact with them. A great way to accomplish this is to send them a newsletter that you publish on a regular basis. A good format to follow for your newsletter is:
  • A personal note from you
  • The promotion of a new event or product
  • A feature article (this is the main section of your newsletter)
  • A section titled “About You”
  • A section where you make recommendations and/or a section titled “Market Place”

The majority of your newsletter content should be valuable content and a small amount should be reserved for promotion of your business’s products and services. It is imperative that you send out your newsletter on a very regular basis. There may be other ways in which you would like to stay in touch with your prospective clients, with the hope of converting them to actual clients at some point in the near future. Whichever methods you choose, the newsletter should also be included.

Conclusion

The few recommended steps that have been discussed here will help you to attract visitors to your website, compel those visitors to want to become loyal to you and your business and eventually take the leap from prospect to customer. Networking with other people is a tried and true form of human communication. Social networking offers endless possibilities for relationships and for education.

The more buzz you create surrounding your offerings, the more successful you and your business will become. Another benefit is that once you have turned your prospects into loyal customers, they will tell other people about your products and services and those people will also become loyal customers.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

As a business person, you have great needs to search for information that relates to your business and your clients. Twitter has tremendous search capabilities that many people are not aware of and therefore, don’t tap into.

Within Twitter, Twitter Search is an incredible resource when it comes to finding answers to your questions and the questions of your followers, as well as finding a whole slew of valuable information. The information that you will find on Twitter will be relevant, timely and very valuable.

Twitter can also be an excellent tool to assist you in building, strengthening and promoting your brand. The search tools also give you tremendous opportunities to find useful information for your business that you can, in turn, share with your followers.

Using Twitter Search

There are many search tools available, such as Tweetdeck and seesmic. These tools allow you to follow a keyword or search term instead of a person. Another excellent way to keep up the pace with social media is to follow a social networking search. For example, if you are interested in finding all of the new links about social media, you would type “social media” OR “social news” into the search bar. You will be amazed at the results that you turn up.

Advanced Search Operators

Twitter provides an advanced search tool, which is also extremely helpful. You will be offered an online form to fill out, which gives you the option of finding tweets based on words and people. In the “People” section, you will be asked to list who the source of a particular tweet is, who the tweet went to and/or a reference to a particular person. An alternative to using the form is to type “search operators” straight into the search box. If you would like to find out what your competition is saying about you to other people, type “from:janesmith OR to:janesmith.”

The following are helpful and commonly used advanced search operators that you will want to use when you are searching:

• news source:twitterfeed This is for finding tweets that contain “news” and searched through Twitterfeed
• traffic ?  This is for finding tweets that contain “traffic” and asking a question about that subject
• flight This will give you a search result about “flights” and tweets with something negative
• movie romance This will give you a search result about tweets that are about romance movies and a positive message
• near:NYC within:20mi This will bring up tweets that have been sent from within 20 miles of New York City
• “happy hour” near:“Buffalo” This will bring you tweets about happy hours. The tweets will have been sent from near Buffalo
• @mashable These are tweets that reference an individual on Mashable
• superstar since:2008-04-08 These are tweets that contain “superstar” and were sent since 2008-04-08 (year-month-day)
• writer until:2000-01-02 These are tweets that contain “writer” and were sent up to 2000-01-02
• to:Microsoft These are tweets that have been sent to Microsoft
• from:johnsmith These are tweets sent from John Smith
• #sonnet These are tweets with the hashtag “sonnet”
• pea –nut These are tweet that contain the word “pea” but not the word “nut”
• black OR white These are tweets that contain the word “black” or the word “white” or both
• “strategic partnership” These are tweets that contain the exact phrase “strategic partnership”
• twitter search These are tweets that contain “twitter” and “search.” This is the default operator.

Another way to search in Twitter is to use the Advanced Search interface. This tool allows you to drill down your questions in a detailed manner. The search tool will even allow you to search for date ranges, tweets written in foreign languages, tweets that originated with a specific individual or an individual to whom a tweet was sent, and referencing specific individuals. Another interesting feature is that it will allow you to search for tweets with a specific “attitude,” (for example, positive-sounding tweets).

Location

With Twitter, you are able to search for tweets in specific locations. You can use a certain mile radius as part of your search criteria. You can use the feature “Allow Twitter to see your actual location,” which will really produce accurate results for you.

Tweets with URLs

If you only want to search for tweets that contain URLs, you should use the “filter:links” feature and look for updates from specific sources, use the syntax “source:Tweetdeck” and replace Tweetdeck with the 3^rd party application that you are looking for.

Saving searches

In Twitter, you are able to save any and all search results that you turn up. It is a good idea to save whatever you want to come back to at some later point. On your Twitter homepage, the sidebar on the right side of the page has a search box built in. Whenever you run a search query, you will be offered the option to save the search string for later. Once you have saved the search results, it will appear in the “Saved Searches section of your Twitter page under the search bar. If you ever want to delete the saved search, all you need to do is click it again to run the search and click on the “Remove this saved search” box.

Conclusion

Twitter searches are very effective, quick and valuable for you and your business. Remember; however, that this is only one component of your online marketing activity. You need to establish the best and most efficient way to use Twitter to find what you are looking for. It is important to use as many online tools as possible for your business so that your capabilities and resources are rich and diverse.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.