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.

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.

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.

You understand that Twitter is one of the most popular social media channels and you know that you can use it to increase your business. So, how do you get others to retweet what you post?

There are several ways to get people to retweet (or share) what you post on Twitter.

• WIIFM: People don’t want to know how wonderful you and your offerings are. They want to know how you will be able to solve their problems. If you follow the concept of “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM), they will pay attention to what you are saying.
• Short and sweet: Each tweet must be no more than a maximum of 140 characters long. If you keep your tweets to 100 to 120 characters, you will be allowing people to share what you post and still have room for comments of their own.
• URL shortener: Using a URL shortener with a medium like Twitter (where you have such a strict character limitation) is essential. It will allow you far more effective communication with your followers.
• Links: A high percentage of retweets contain links. The reason for this is that when people read something that they consider useful, their natural inclination is to share it with other people. Twitter is an extremely effective medium for creating conversations and sharing the valuable pearls of the conversations with other people who were not a part of the original conversations.
• Great content: One of the best ways to get people to share your content with others is to make sure that the content that you offer is of the highest quality.
• Long words and syllables: Most retweets have long words and numerous syllables in them. They grab the attention of the followers very well.
• Popular keywords: Some words that are popular with Twitter users and will cause others to want to retweet your content are: you, Twitter, post, blog, social, retweet, free, media, help, social media, check out and new blog post.
• No self-promotion: Twitter is about valuable and useful content. It is also about helping other people. It is not directly about selling your products and/or services.
• Wise words: Generally, people tend to scan rather than actually read tweets. With that in mind, remember that the words that you choose must be real attention grabbers. You have very little time to make an impression.
• Intelligent retweets: Most retweets use sophisticated words and content, in general. It is not necessary for you to use simple and unsophisticated language to get people to pay attention to what you are saying.
• Unique: Retweets tend to be unique. In other words, the terminology and the concepts are not used that often. If the topics of your content are unusual and interesting, people will find it fascinating and compelling and will want to share them.
• Lots of nouns: Most retweets contain a lot of nouns, proper nouns and adverbs. The more you put in, the better.
• Emotion: You should make sure that your tweets contain concepts and a voice that touches other people in some way. People react on an emotional level. If you do that, people will want to share what you have to say.
• Logical order: The most popular categories of tweets that are shared with others are News, educational material, entertainment, opinion-driven tweets, products and small talk (in that order). You should start with News and work your way down the list.
• Target audience: It is very important to understand your audience when it comes to retweeting. You need to educate yourself about what their interests are and where their passions lie.
• Timing: The most effective time of the day to tweet is in the afternoon (between 1 pm and 10 pm). Those are the hours when people will be most inclined to be using Twitter. The morning is not as good in general because people will either be sleeping or trying to work on other tasks in the morning.
• Show gratitude: You should express your thanks to your followers. People love to be appreciated and valued. Another way of expressing gratitude is by sharing their content.

Conclusion

If you follow the tips that have been offered here, you will see that people will start to retweet your tweets much more than they did in the past. Using Twitter (whether it is for business or personal use) is all part of your online communication strategy. The more people share what you have to say with other members of their online communities, the more people will get to know you and to consider you an expert in your industry and niche.

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.

All of your social media sites work a little differently. You may wonder how often you should update your status on the various social media channels of which you are a part.

Some of the more popular social media sites will be discussed here and if you follow the recommendations, you will start to see some positive results when it comes to your business connections on social media.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a status update function that a large number of people were not sure how to use or what purpose it actually served. Currently, LinkedIn is integrated with Twitter. A large number of LinkedIn members are also on Facebook and those people have a large number of ideas about how they want to update their LinkedIn status. Because of the fact that LinkedIn does not work in the same manner as Twitter as far as timing is concerned or like Facebook’s News Feed, it is not really advantageous to post information on LinkedIn more than once a day. Also, if you really don’t have any significant status change (or an update that ties into your objective) to post on LinkedIn on any given day, don’t worry about it. You should also be mindful of the fact that people are not going to want you to send frequent status updates too much. If you do, they may consider what you are sharing with them as spam. One very important fact to remember is that LinkedIn is a site for professionals and you need to make absolutely certain that what you are posting on LinkedIn is appropriate for everyone.

Facebook

There are numerous people on Facebook who want to take up space on your New Feed and if you don’t post often enough, you won’t get noticed. Posting once a day on Facebook is totally appropriate and the nature of the content that people post is more personal on Facebook than it is on LinkedIn. When it comes to frequency, Facebook is not Twitter, of course. Once a day is fine but every half hour or every hour would definitely be too much. With that said, you may have times when you want to update your status on Facebook more often than once a day, depending on how much you need to communicate and how much is going on in your business. Always be sure that you post content that is relevant to your readers and that they will find interesting and useful. The more useful the information, the more often they will return to your website.

Twitter

It is completely appropriate for you to tweet as many times a day as you wish. However, you need to be selective about what you convey in your tweets. If you are followed on Twitter by some business colleagues, you may not want them to know that you just ate the most delicious candy bar ever or that you just came back from getting a pedicure.

Blogging

You should blog as often as is humanly possible. You should shoot for your minimum blogging frequency of once a week, although more often is better. It is very important to be consistent with your postings when it comes to blogging. The best thing to do is to have the same frequency, same day of the week and same time of the day each week. Remember that you can never blog enough. It would be amazing if you could blog daily, although it might be difficult to find the time to do that. Each time you post a new blog, the search engines will visit your blog. The more content you post, the more the search engines will pay attention to you. Also, if you don’t continue to post fresh content, people will lose interest in your content and stop coming to read what you have on your website.

Conclusion

Fresh content generation and syndication are the keys to using social media to its fullest potential for your business. Content that is static does not have a very positive effect on your readers or on your business. However, content that is updated frequently and always appears fresh and new has a very positive effect on your readers. The more frequently you share valuable content that is interesting and helpful to other people, the more they will want to read what you are saying and the more they will trust you and find you credible.

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 are connected with a large number of people online. Of that large number, there are several whom you have never met face to face. Is that enough for you and for them?

Why a photograph online is so important

Having a business relationship with someone whom you have never seen in person is very different than having business relationships with people with whom you have telephone relationships. You don’t need to see them because you interact with another human quality—voice. In the social media world, connecting a face with a name (as well as whatever else you learn about the person) is essential for the success of your business.

With the ever-increasing popularity of social networking and social media sites, there are more and more people who don’t complete their profiles and who don’t understand how important it is in business for them to share more of themselves than just a name, where they went to school and where they are currently working. A little education goes a long way in this situation.

Not only are the details of your various profiles important to other people with whom you share a business relationship but your photo is also of utmost importance. You don’t display your photo as part of your social media profiles because of how good looking you are, you display your photo so that others are able to relate to you on a more human level. That is an essential part of developing and deepening your relationships with them.

Giving the entire picture

Your photo gives others a comprehensive and complete profile of you. When people have relationships with others online, they want to be able to see who is engaging them. This builds a deeper trust in the relationship, it builds more credibility and, perhaps most importantly, it makes you more human to them. The foundation of social media is engagement, valuable conversations and exchange of information and trust.

You should use the same photo in all of your online profiles because this will create stronger branding for you and your business and people will start to remember your photo and connect it with what you are offering.

With that in mind, it is very easy to see why a photo of you is so critical when it comes to interacting with other people online. Another very important thing to remember is to use your own photo and name in your online profiles. It is not a good idea to use your company name, company logo, or other impersonal images. You are trying to bring in the human factor, not remove it.

Your company brand is extremely important but in your business relationships with other business people online, people want to interact with you, the person, not your company, even though you represent your company and brand. If you make your profile personal, it will help to build the credibility of your business as well.

How to choose a photograph

You might ask how you should choose your photo. When it comes to actually choosing your photo, you should use a close-up shot or head shot. That way, you will also be recognizable in a thumbnail version of the photograph. Your photo should be professional looking (no silly faces, etc). Remember to choose a professional photo for a professional profile.

If you have a photo that you would like to display but it might need some updating, Photoshop is an excellent tool. It will enable you to make your photo as perfect as possible in your eyes. The end result will be that you will have a photo that you have been able to update and one that you will be proud to display to everyone online.

Conclusion

Your online presence is made up of many components. Some of them are connected to your “voice” and some of them are connected to your “image.” Since the main goal and the heart of your online relationships in social media has an extremely human basis, having a photograph that allows others to see you as well as to hear you rounds out the relationship. People are not interested in doing business with corporations. They want to do business with people. The relationships will always be on a one-to-one 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.

Twitter is often misunderstood by people. Many people view Twitter as a fun and fast social media channel that lets people know your every move (literally). It is so much more than that.

Twitter has tremendous potential and should be viewed as a social media tool that can help you to increase your business, and hence, your business’s revenue, in many different ways.

There is a great misconception about Twitter and that is that a large group of people are just sitting around discussing their most recent shoe purchase or the fact that they are sitting on their deck, sunbathing. That is only a part of how people use Twitter.

People who are not very comfortable with Twitter yet may dismiss it as fluff compared with other social media channels. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Twitter allows you to interact with a very large number of people at once, including industry thought leaders; share industry-related headlines; and find out easily what your competition is up to. It is an extremely helpful and useful tool for your business.

Twitter allows you to share valuable information that can have an impact on individuals in business as well as the companies themselves. It is very important to start to think of Twitter and its usefulness from this perspective. Once you do that, there is tremendous untapped potential that can have wonderful implications for your business. Additionally, an excellent feature that you should take advantage of for your business as often as possible is Twitter’s search feature. You can search Twitter on a very wide range of topics, which you can then communicate to others. It is a good idea for you to have Twitter in your toolbox in order to keep it at your fingertips.

When you use Twitter as part of your social media marketing strategy correctly, it is very powerful and will help your business a great deal.

The following are some tips on how to use Twitter for business purposes:

· Make sure to have a plan in place: In order to be able to achieve the best possible results for your business, you need to have a plan in place and really follow it. A plan in this case is a social media strategy on how you will leverage Twitter for your business. You need to have an extremely clear idea of what you will tweet about for your business, the frequency of your tweeting, whether your tweets will serve to brand your business, how your tweets will drive traffic, etc.

Many business people have the problem of not having enough time in their day to accomplish everything that they want to accomplish. It is very important to put yourself on a schedule for when you will be communicating for your business through Twitter. If you don’t do that, other things will start to take precedence and before you know it, you will have forgotten to use Twitter altogether. Whether you choose to tweet once a week, twice a week, or three times a week, it doesn’t matter as long as you stick to a consistent schedule.

· Make sure that the appropriate people are targeted: There are many ways to focus your Twitter interaction on the appropriate location, industry, keywords, etc. It may help you if you build a list of followers who fit exactly what and whom you are trying to target. If you want to really reach people with your marketing messages, you need to find a way to do it as easily and quickly as possible.

· Make sure that you communicate: Twitter has the potential to become your central communication tool online. You can connect your tweets to your LinkedIn account and post your tweets on your Facebook page and Facebook fan page.

You can categorize your tweets separately: branding tweets, informational tweets and follower tweets.

• Branding tweet: A communication without a link. You might use a quote that you find valuable to share with others or you might ask a thought-provoking question.
• Informational tweet: A communication that allows you to share information that others have shared with you. It might be in the form of an article, an interesting application or a new social media tool.
• Follower tweet: A communication that includes a link. The purpose of this tweet is to compel people to click on the link. This is an excellent tweet for sharing blog posts, articles and driving someone to a landing page.

· Make sure that you pace your tweets: One good way to slow down the pace of your tweets is if you filter them through LinkedIn or Facebook. In LinkedIn, your lastest tweet will show on your status until you post a new tweet and in Facebook, your latest tweet will remain on your wall for three or four days.

Summary

Twitter is an excellent means of communication to numerous people. There is a lot of valuable information that is being exchanged all of the time. It might take a little getting used to but before you know it, you won’t understand what you ever did without it for your business.

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.

“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving soul over another.”—George Eliot. When it comes to accepting friends and connections for your business through social media, discrimination is critical.

What do you do when people invite you to connect with them on LinkedIn or invite you to become a fan on Facebook? Do you accept any and all invitations that you receive just to gather large numbers of people in your online communities or do you only accept invitations from people with whom you have a genuine and solid connection?

This is a highly controversial issue and one that deserves a great deal of discussion and examination. The viewpoint that is discussed in this article is that of CompuKol Communications. The viewpoints of others will be presented here as well in order to show fair balance.

Many social media channels, including LinkedIn, for example, advise that you only accept invitations when you know the inviter and want them to be a part of your network. You should accept invitations when you

• Want to stay connected to the person inviting you.
• Find the inviter credible and trustworthy.
• Have had some direct connection with the inviter.
• Are very well acquainted with the inviter’s work and feel that there is a potential to work together in some capacity.

If you don’t really know the inviter, you should either ask him or her for more information about why he or she wants to connect with you or ignore the invitation altogether.

Quantity without quality, especially when it comes to your business, does not have a great deal of value. There is no point in gathering people if you will never have any sort of relationship with them on an ongoing basis after the initial connection. You should be connected with people only if those connections bring value to both sides.

Relationships are the foundation of the success of your business. Before anyone will do business with you, they must get to know you as a business person, learn that they can trust you and find your credibility to be rock solid. On your side, if you want a meaningful relationship with others, you must consistently strive to fulfill their needs and provide them with valuable information that will help them to solve their problems.

Your online network is very important to you and your business. You need to make sure that you never do or say anything that will jeopardize the strength of your network and how you treat those people who are a part of that network. You have worked long and hard to build and maintain relationships. The last thing that you want to do is cause them to disappear.

On the other side, there are many people who are willing to accept everyone who requests that they become an online connection. There are many people who feel that merely by the fact that you are connected to social media channels, you have the capability of creating a global network on a scale that wasn’t possible 5 years ago.

Sometimes those people will try to get to know others with whom they have not had any face-to-face interaction through forums, Email and social media channels that they share. The opinion there is that if you don’t connect because you don’t know those people personally, you are defeating the purpose of social media sites in general.

There is a third school of thought that says that people who invite others to connect do so with some caution. One of the driving criteria is that there must be something between the two parties of mutual benefit and value. If accepting invitations from people just to acquire a higher volume of connections, it may not help your credibility and your business.

What Is a Relationship?

A relationship is normally perceived as a connection between two individuals. Individuals can also have relationships with groups of people, such as the relationship between a rabbi and his congregation, and uncle and a family or a mayor and a town. Online relationships coexist simultaneously within many online communities or groups.

Fans vs Friends vs Business Connections

When using social media channels such as Facebook for business, it is important to understand what it means to be a fan as well as understanding the difference between a fan, a friend and a business connection.

Fans

According to Wikipedia, a fan is someone with an intense, occasionally overwhelming liking and enthusiasm for something. Fans of a particular thing or person constitute its fan base. Fans often show enthusiasm by starting a fan club, holding fan conventions, creating fanzines, writing fan mail, or promoting the object of their interest and attention. Fans are accepted automatically, without any screening process.

A good analogy here is a celebrity who has no control over who becomes his or her fans. Typical social networks where this model is used are Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

Friends

The definition of a friend is more complicated and falls under the category of interpersonal relationships. A friendship or interpersonal relationship is a relationship between two or more people. It may last a very long time or may be brief. Interpersonal relationships take place in many contexts, such as family, friends, marriage, associates, work, clubs, neighborhoods, and churches. They may be regulated by law, custom, or mutual agreement and are the basis of social groups and society as a whole.

A typical social network where this model is used is Facebook friends. In this case, the connection with your friends is personal and you should not accept anyone to be your friend unless you have that personal connection. If someone whom you don’t know invites you to be his or her friend, in order to create the personal connection, which may result in a friendship, both parties need to learn more about each other first.

Business Connections/Relationships

Business connections are a broad spectrum of inter-business relationships associated with providing and consuming knowledge and services. Online business connections emphasize the emergence of social networks as a primary medium through which business relationships are conducted.

Typical social networks where this model is used are LinkedIn, Biznik, Ryze, etc. You need to have established a mutual knowledge of the person with whom you are creating this business relationship. If someone whom you don’t know invites you to connect with them professionally, you need to establish that both parties are able to fulfill the other’s needs first. Although the needs of both parties may not always be apparent initially, both parties will always have some need that must be fulfilled.

How you value business relationships and how you develop them, whether in-person or online, also extends to referring other vendors to your trusted customers. If your customers need something that you are not able to provide them with, you should feel comfortable referring them to vendors whom you have come to know and trust through business. This will serve to strengthen your credibility further and your customers will want to continue to do business with you.

It will never be enough of a reason to refer a new vendor to one of your customers simply because the vendor has expressed to you a feeling of wanting to increase his or her business. You will have to really get to know that vendor well enough first to be able to trust his or her credibility and integrity. Before you connect the vendor with your valued customers, you need to be absolutely certain that your customers will be satisfied with the products and services that the vendor offers. In other words, the other vendor is an extension of you and your business.

If you treat your online relationships (and in-person relationships) delicately, you will be rewarded for your efforts. The more integrity you display, the stronger your relationships will be. Networking and continuing to build relationships is one of the most effective ways to increase business as long as you do it the proper way.

You have to put a great deal of effort into your relationships, which will usually have a tremendous amount of rewards that go with the hard work. Even though your ultimate goal is to increase business, it is important to concentrate on what is essential along the way. That is building strong, meaningful relationships. The rest will follow. It is, of course, very important to remember that relationships take some time to develop. Nothing meaningful happens overnight.

Conclusion

When approached to connect with people you don’t know on social media channels, it is a good idea to have a scripted Email with which to respond. You should thank them for inviting you to connect with them but, at the same time, you should ask them why they want to connect with you and ask them to tell you a little more about themselves and how you might be able to help each other.

You will see that some will never be heard from again but others will respond to you with more information and that will be the beginning of new and meaningful relationships. This approach really combines all schools of thought on whether to accept new business connections.

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.

“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises” –Demosthenes. At first, Twitter seems small and insignificant. So, how does Twitter lead to more business success? It isn’t enough for you to use Twitter just because others are using it.

Using it to maintain the advantage over your competition, however, is definitely a good enough reason. Numerous business owners want to leverage social media in order to get the very most out of it for their businesses even if they do not understand social media. Understanding Twitter’s potential and how it can positively affect your business is critical.

When you first start getting involved with social media, you should be careful about your expectations. Social media is an extremely powerful and effective tool for increasing your business and acquiring more and more success. However, just like anything else of value, it takes some time before you are using it to its full potential.

Twitter was established in 2006. Twitter was originally intended to be used as a fun and easy way for people to share their thoughts with other people on a global scale. Twitter became so popular, however, that it has moved way beyond its original scope.

It is no longer considered just a fun and casual way of communicating. It has also evolved into a serious, real-time network for sharing and discovering information in a business context.

People keep pursuing information and Twitter keeps feeding it to them. With Twitter’s limitation of 140 characters per tweet, all messages are concise and are communicated to others very quickly.

Many popular brands have been extremely successful using Twitter, including Dell computers and Starbucks coffee. Why do you suppose that is?

Dell and Starbucks follow the basic concepts of engaging fans.

• Dedicated resources: Twitter communicates real-time information. If you, as a business owner, receive positive or negative feedback, you need to have the ability to respond quickly in order to be deemed credible.
• Adding a Return on Investment: Dell computers routinely use Twitter to give their followers special offers and have generated a tremendous amount of sales because of Twitter. Both Dell and Starbucks really listen to their followers on ways that they can improve their products and customer service.
• Understanding the environment: When you are using Twitter, you are contributing. You are part of a community. In the Twitter environment, you are an extension of your brand. You should not expect all (or even most) of your followers to actually interact with you. You need to understand that just because some of your followers are not interacting with you does not mean that they are not listening to you.

Now, back to the original question of whether you should use social media for your brand. If you have made it part of your marketing strategy to increase the exposure of your brand online, to get people to start talking more about your brand, to generate awareness of your brand, and to learn of new ways to improve your brand and to provide better customer service, then yes, you should definitely use social media for your brand.

An extremely important aspect of Twitter and a goal that you need to try to achieve every time you use Twitter is to get people to retweet what you write. One very good way to accomplish this is by always writing good-quality content. You should always write content that is meaningful to other people.

You should also always write content that deals with subjects in which you are an expert. Write on subjects that interest you but that are also of value to your followers.

Another important and effective thing to include in your tweets is links. When people are reading tweets of interest, they will want to see links in the content so that they can easily pursue additional information. If you do include links, you should make sure to use a URL shrinking service, bearing in mind the 140-character maximum that Twitter allows.

Social media is very important to your business’s success. If you don’t incorporate social media into your business, you are doing yourself a huge disservice. Of course, this can only happen if you have the resources to dedicate to that type of marketing strategy and if you intend to make a serious commitment to leveraging social media for your business on a continual 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.

Twitter is a popular, successful and exciting social media channel. Everyone wants to tweet and be followed. Many have become addicted to the social media site and can’t seem to stay away from it. So, what is Twitter?

Twitter is actually difficult to describe. It doesn’t have any tangible product direction or primary use behind it. Although Twitter is extremely relevant as a business tool in this age when social media is all the rage, it is not easy to explain. Twitter doesn’t have too many rules; however, one rule that it does have is that your tweets (messages on Twitter) cannot be any longer than 140 characters each.

Twitter is a great way to share thoughts, news and other interesting tidbits of information. It is perfect if you want to engage a whole group of people and give them the benefit of what you are saying. A great way to share your ideas and other valuable information is by adding links to your tweets. Because of the limit of 140 characters, you can put in shortened links, which will allow you to post a longer tweet. There are services such as tinyurl.com, cli.gs and bit.ly that can help you to accomplish this.

Twitter is an amazing source for people connections, unifying those with similar interests who want to bring about social change and work on worthy causes. Twitter has tremendous search capabilities. It not only searches the text of tweets but can also scan (or crawl) the links that are included in the tweets and index the results.

The Twitter search results include millions of web pages. Twitter also has the same capability as Google with regard to indexing pages. However, the one difference is that Twitter is faster than Google because tweets are sent so rapidly (as opposed to web pages, which take time to build).

Twitter search capabilities are very sophisticated. Twitter has a reputation of being a ranking system, among other things. That is to say that when the Twitter user searches on a popular topic (one that has its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter considers the reputation of the author of each tweet and rank search results are based on that, in part.

Twitter is customizable. In other words, Twitter is whatever you want it to be. When people express that they are still trying to figure Twitter out or trying to adjust to it, it is because of this intangible concept. Once you create an account on Twitter, you are, unfortunately, left with the task of trying to figure out how to use it to its full potential.

There are many things that you can do with Twitter that won’t cost you anything.

• Provide updates on your products and services for your Twitter followers
• Offer your Twitter fans valuable information
• Offer scheduled information. You can send it out daily, weekly, or monthly
• Follow other experts in many different industries so that you can provide fresh information to your followers
• Post last-minute promotional deals to your fans on Twitter
• Have your tweets retweeted by organizations that have very large numbers of followers.

When you first look at Twitter, it seems as though it is just a large bunch of random thoughts. It is actually much more than that. Some of the positive ways that you can use Twitter are to:

• Allow clients and colleagues to get to know you as a person
• Show your intelligence, wit, charm and charisma
• Open up communication channels between the public and your organization
• Seek out and find new partners, members, clients and volunteers

One of the most important reasons to use Twitter for business is that you can learn what people think. You can receive instant feedback on anything and from anywhere. You might want to look at Twitter as a social news channel where you can gather news from everyone. Your news will come directly from the source in real time.

You choose who is important to you and your business. You choose whom you want to influence you. You can choose to follow people who give something of value to you. Remember, you need to listen before you speak. A great deal of listening is very beneficial when it comes to Twitter.

You might ask why other people use Twitter. Some people use Twitter to find information that they don’t feel they can find anywhere else. Sometimes, the search results are incredible. People use Twitter to continually learn new information on a variety of subjects that interest them. Twitter is also used to build relationships.

Another thing to remember is that when you use Twitter, you are greatly increasing your chances of being found by the search engines.

Twitter is used for commercial and personal reasons. Now that Twitter is in the mainstream, with all of its tentacles reaching as far into society as it does, it is not going anywhere anytime soon.

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.