More Tips for Tweeting on Twitter

If you signed up for Twitter and just love sharing things that you have learned that are making your business bigger and better you probably have some of the basics of tweeting down. Maybe you read our post “Tweet, Retweet, Hashtags: The New Language of Social Media” that showed you a few of the basics. If you are finding that Twitter has been an amazing tool for your business and are in need of more, this article will take your tweets to the next level. While tweeting can be a great way to share information you shouldn’t forget that Twitter is a two-way-street and may teach you a few things, too.

A great tool, that isn’t the easiest to find, is Twitter’s advanced search. The advanced search feature can help you find posts about a term, a person, a topic, a location or even a certain date. The tool can be found by scrolling to the bottom of any page on Twitter and look for the “Search” link. There is also another link there that lists all the Twitter search operators like “from:” which allows you to find tweets from a specific person or shows you that putting words in quotes to find tweets about a specific term. Advanced search can really help you find information on exactly what you may need help with at the moment you need it.

Another cool feature that is available to Twitter users that also have a Facebook account is the ability to install Twitter on Facebook. This allows you to update your status in one place, instead of two and keep your social media endeavors efficient. All you need to do is go to twitter.com/widgets/facebook and click on the button that says “Install Twitter on Facebook”. You will be taken through a few steps and you can choose to either let Twitter update your Facebook or Facebook update your Twitter status. It is a bit easier to configure your Twitter account to update your Facebook and doing things this way will help you keep your tweets to the 140 character limit.

If you are used to desktop applications like AOL Instant Messenger there is a Twitter application that can be added to your desktop to make tweeting a breeze. Digsby is an application that Windows users can use to view postings from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all your email accounts in a long window that looks like an instant messenger window on steroids. It is a great way to keep track of things without having to sign in to multiple accounts. If you like a larger view you can use an application called TweetDeck which allows you to personalize how you see your tweets and can also be configured to see your Facebook updates and also has a ton of other features.

If you have realized how important social media marketing is to your business, it is important to make the process as efficient as possible, or you can easily find yourself spending all your time tweeting and updating your Facebook account. While these tools can be amazingly beneficial to you, it is a good idea to specify how much time each day you want to dedicate to this form of marketing. Remember, it is very important to utilize multiple marketing techniques for your business and never put all of your eggs in one marketing basket.

Keeping Your Social Media Strategy Professional

For those of us that have Twitter and Facebook accounts it can be a difficult task to determine how to keep things professional if your main focus is to build a strong business network. Even if you start with the intention of keeping things professional, all it takes is one tweet or one photo to transform a professional site into something that some may find a bit unprofessional. We love social media sites because things are so instantaneous, but we forget that a single tweet can generate a rush of replies in mere seconds. So, policing your own accounts can become a full-time job. It is very important to make the purpose of your account clear from the first moment it is activated.

One of the things that can cause an issue on Facebook is the fact that people can tag you in on pictures they post without your approval. Therefore, your profile can be open to risk of unprofessional exposure. It is very important to monitor your Facebook on a daily basis for photos that may not align you as a business professional. All it can take to turn a potential business contact away is an unprofessional photo that you may not even be aware of.

Facebook has a number of privacy settings that can help you keep things separated. For example you can create a number of different friend lists so that you can have one group for friends, one for family and one for business contacts. This allows you to set up privacy settings for each group. For example, you may want to share photos of your family vacation with your friends and family contacts, but not your professional contacts. There are also settings on Facebook that allow you to remove yourself from public search results. This will help keep your personal information separate from your professional information. It also may be helpful to remove yourself from Google. This can also be done by going to your personal settings page.

There are also settings on Twitter that can help keep your postings private so that only people that you approve of can see them. It is important to understand that once you change this setting it will make any new postings private, but postings made before you changed the setting will still be public.

Doing a little research and taking the time to learn how to safeguard your personal information is a good idea on many levels. It will also help you to separate the information that you want to share with your family and friends from that which you want to share with your professional contacts. These things will help you to keep a professional rapport with your professional contacts while still sharing photos of your vacations with your family and friends. This will help you keep things professional with your professional contacts and they will not be distracted by personal information. Social media sites can be a great benefit to your business if you just take a few precautions.

Tips for Outsourcing Your Twitter Posts

Twitter has finally blasted into the social media world and its 140 character posts, though short, can really make an impact to your SEO strategies. Now, with all these different social media sites such as Facebook, My Space and Twitter it seems that small businesses have more ways than ever to expand their online presence and reach more potential customers. These networks, in reality are giving you the opportunity to advertise your business to a potentially enormous audience for free. All you need to do is post something interesting enough to keep your existing followers interested and to entice new people to follow your Tweets.

Like many of the other internet marketing tools and strategies, Twittering takes time, maybe not a lot of time, but when you add this to an existing social media campaign, it all adds up. This is why Twitter is a great task to outsource to someone that has experience in social media marketing and can do it right. The last thing you need, as a business owner, is to have to clean up a mess of unsightly tweets that some inexperienced freelancer placed on your Twitter.

The good news is that there are many people out there that do understand the importance of social media and have experience helping other businesses gain exposure with it. That brings me to my first tip. If you are going to outsource your Twitter projects do a bit of research and find a person that already has experience with these types of projects. While you may have to pay a little more for a person with experience it will save you lots of time and money in the long run.

There are some challenges with using Twitter. The main challenge is understanding how to deliver a great message to an audience in 140 characters or less. One of the great ways that Twitter is being used it to point people to your blogs or online articles. Sometimes url’s alone can run well over 140 characters. There are tools that you can find online that will shorten your url’s so that you can squeeze a bit of information into your post, too. This is an example of why you would want to find a freelancer who does have some experience working with Twitter, because they will know the tricks to getting the most out of your posts.

Twitter posts can be a great way to get more traffic to your website, blog or online articles, but as with any project you are outsourcing you want to make sure you are getting what you need. Assigning small tasks, at first, is a good way to get a feel for how well the freelancer will perform before committing to a large project and finding out too late that they are not the right fit. Also, make sure they have some experience with the type of project you need help with; this will make things go much smoother. And the biggest tip is to provide as much detail as possible about your project to your freelancer. This will ensure that they have a clear understanding of what you need and will lessen the amount of time you will have to micromanage them.