Most everyone is familiar with LinkedIn for business networking and facebook for sharing with friends and family.  Twitter is a profoundly different social networking tools that has created a new environment for people and business.

Twitter enables you to keep in contact with friends and family, meet new friends or even enhance business brand and customer communications. Twitter asks people “what are you doing” in 140 characters or less. Some people take this question literally, sharing topics like their breakfast or bio break frequencies.  Twitter is useful for so much more than just status updates.

Twitter helps connect people as well as businesses instantly and globally, and it’s being used for business networking, sharing photos, videos, and thoughts amongst a mass audience and more. You will be surprised to learn that there is much going on with Twitter than just daily reports on what you’re doing. In fact, you may find Twitter to easily be the best free marketing resource for your business or personal branding out there.

Before you get too excited, remember that the Twitter community doesn’t take kindly to spam, so if your goal is primarily to get online to spam links, perhaps do yourself and everyone else a favor and don’t.  It’s OK to share links and talk about your business, but listen and learn.  Learn how to build up your social currency.  Twitter is about building great relationships. Here are some tips to get started:

• Search for people you know by their email address
• Search directories for people who share similar interests
  • Good places are WeFollow.com and Twellow.com
• Begin following people who seem to share interesting updates
• Send replies to the Tweets you enjoyed or ones sent to you
• RT (retweet) posts that you think others will benefit from
• Take time to say hi to your followers and build relationships
• Use TwitterFeed to automatically post when you write new articles, etc.
• Tweet about contests, competitions, events and promotions going on
• Make friends with other people and businesses in your industry
• Include a Twitter widget on your website or blog
• Avoid illegal tactics to try to gain more followers
• Actively engage in conversation as often as you can
• Think of unique things you can offer your followers

Twitter is fun.  It’s a great new communications tool and much more than just a social media site or a place to share what you eat.  Over time, you will see your friends on Twitter begin to grow. You can share in the experience by giving and receiving valuable information through your tweets.  Twitter is a great way to find out firsthand about things that are happening in the world, get real time first-person news reports and more.

It’s fast, it’s simple and it’s fun with 140 characters or less. With these basic tips, you can learn to make the most of Twitter. Take advantage of all that Twitter has to offer by taking advantage of all the ancillary tools, reporting, and feature enhanced additions.  You will quickly learn how to make new friends, drive traffic to your websites, create awareness of your offerings and define your online presence by using Twitter.

When you are planning a social media campaign for your business, it’s critical to 1st define your goals. You can use social media marketing successfully within several different aspects of business but to find the best ways to engage, you need a plan!

Take time to research different social media networks and consider which ones are most appropriate for what you are trying to accomplish. Take the time to learn who the players are and how people are engaging successfully in your chosen networks. For example:

1. Consider your target audience. This is an important factor to think about initially. Who are you targeting, what do they like and how do they prefer to network? What types of social media tools are your targets currently using? Knowing the answer to this will help you see the best methods that you can use.
2. Look at your competitors. It’s important to see what the competition is doing. Do Do they have any social media presence at all? If they have a large social media presence, what has been the most successful aspects of social media for them?
3. What are your goals? It’s very important to have clearly defined roles in place in the beginning if you plan to be successful with your social media attempts. By defining your goals in advance you can best be prepared to reach them.
4. Learn about social media tools. There are many different tools – from websites that will allow you to schedule and track metrics on tweets, to tracking sites that will show you where you are strong or in need of improvement in building up your clout, generosity, and overall social currency.

What defined goals do you have in place and what metric tracking tools are you using to track your social media campaigns? How do you plan to market your different social media identities and what are you using to measure your results? It’s important to have a good plan for tracking goals to see what’s working and what’s not.

Different businesses benefit from using social media in customer service, sales prospecting and customer relations, marketing of new offerings, and more. It’s crucial to have a plan in place, and to keep it fluid – you will learn quickly and if you are prepared to move quickly can best engage and benefit from the dynamic that is social media. Understanding what your competitors are doing will give you a better understanding of how you can make social media work for you.

It’s time already to have social media working for you. Utilizing social media in business takes a thorough understanding of social media and business communications. Proper use of social media in business is the most powerful and least expensive tool you have!

We keep hearing social media thrown around over and over these days. You can’t turn on the television or radio without hearing a mention of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. So, what is this thing called social media and why is it becoming so popular these days?What can social media do for you? You most likely already use social media before and perhaps don’t even realize it or the true potential that it stores. The more you learn about what social media is, the better able you will be to determine the different ways in which it can help you.

There are so many different venues for social media today. New sites are popping up each and every day to help you find freshly innovative ways to interact with other people online. Here are some examples of types of social media:

• Micro-Blogging
• Blogging and Articles
• Social Bookmarking
• Social Networking Sites
• Business Network Groups
• Content Based Sharing
• Photo Share Websites
• Book Discussions

Much More! All of these things are part of what we call Web 2.0 – connecting people and information, and is used throughout social media. Here’s a breakdown of some of these.

It seems every day that new social networking sites are popping up. A few popular ones are LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Plurk. These sites are mostly utilized to help people make friends or keep in touch with their family or friends who live far away. Social networking sites allow you to also share pictures, videos and other content.

The ease of use and low entry cost makes social media sites great networking for businesses as well. Blogging plays a major role in Web 2.0 and several businesses are using blogging to better convey their message and create a better connection with their customers. Social media can be a substantial differentiator between you and your competitors. You can advertise and market your blogs with social networking sites as well as reach prospects and engage with customers at an entirely different level.

Squidoo and other content sharing are another popular choice. These let you add articles, reviews and other information easily to share with others. This can be a great to promote products, new business offerings and more. This is an important way and simple platform to express your talents on the Web and share with a mass or focused audience.

A whole different dimension we will delve deeper into in different articles are bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites help people bookmark favorite web pages and share with others – sometimes with reviews. Some examples include Technorati, Mister-Wong, Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and more. You can create and network through these social bookmarking sites to help you manage and promote your content online.

The type of social media content use will help you determine which types of sites to focus on. There are so many options than ever before – and more importantly it’s a way to connect and share personally and professionally at a different level. Anyone can learn to use and benefit from social media. How will you make it work for you?