Let's Talk About Twitter

I love Social Rabbit, whose very helpful post will provide you (and beginners) with 5 essential Twitter tips, to help you get to know and use Twitter effectively.

Have a look around the Social Rabbit site, Lara Solomon is an excellent business women, who provides very valuable tips and information about social media (and training) she is very interactive on social media, follow her example and you will learn how to use social media wisely!

Twitter is an excellent business tool, it will help you find people in your industry, find you like minded people and help you market and promote your products and services.

One advantage with Twitter is the ability to know your competitors and you will find that a lot of companies are followed by or do follow companies who have similar products and services. I feel that places your business or organisations amongst peers who have different ways of getting their messages across. It helps to see what similar organisations are saying and you can ReTweet their links and get inspired to write Facebook updates and blog posts from regular updated information which you can source on Twitter.

Following competitors at the beginning of your Twitter journeys means you can get a feel of the content, links and blog posts you can add. It also gives competitors a feel of your company and as far as I know, this method of sharing, ReTweeting, being inspired by content to write your own will not be harmful to your business.

I recommend that you find and follow people who have your interests in common and such as charities/authors or anything really where you get your inspiration and motivation from. Being human on Twitter, communicating with others, responding, answering questions, going off topic ( just a little bit) will help. This means that you will be truly connecting, think of it as being at a professional networking function, sure you talk mainly about work and work issues but you end up talking about other things - on Twitter many people have benefited by the authenticity of their accounts and by being connected and receptive.

Please note a link at the bottom of Lara's Post refers to Google + please have a look, this is Google's social media platform , which will be open to the public soon. Google+ is going to be another form of social media, another way to get your message across, a site  to find and to reach your clients and certainly will be another tool which will be useful for marketing your products and services.

Let's get real with social media - how to find content - so you can update often!

We don't always have the time to find information and spend hours writing and editing our own content.

Social Media needs at least an hour a day of work.

Whether it's checking/ monitoring accounts, checking feeds, responding to comments or queries, social media is becoming a part of the other work you need to do daily.

So here is a link which helps you find ways ways to stay updated, to find and use content, to share relevant links via Twitter, the blog and the Facebook page and a way for you to find any info, to update, to link, to respond to, to share, and keep your accounts active.

While writing unique content is important on social media, so is sharing, linking to and acknowledging other relevant content as well as building a like minded community.

You can write/ schedule a unique blog post every few weeks or so ( I will be blogging about why you should blog often, some people blog daily some blog once a week- it depends on content and business practices), but find resources and have information at hand, so you can share/ update ( on Facebook or Twitter) every few days to keep your accounts active and build a community and engagement online.

Don't forget to read updates on your timeline on Twitter and Facebook and comment and respond to people as wel l- this will make you sound like an interested person and depending on what you say or answer, you may find yourself building a very interesting community of followers.

Take 15 minutes a day to find and put aside content, links, blog posts, pictures, that you can use when you have a bit of downtime- save all of it in a folder on your desktops or on a dropbox free app (download on computer, link to your smartphone) and use that saved content to share, comment upon, and use ( for an inspirational blog post perhaps or a marketing idea)

http://www.momeomagazine.com/business-101-feeding-the-content-monster-10-ways-to-stay-active-in-social-media-without-rewriting-the-yellow-pages/ - thanks to Iggy Pintado on Twitter - who shared this, this morning:

Feeding the Content Monster - 10 Ways to Stay Active in Social Media by @AndreaVahl - http://ow.ly/5Pcft RT @CarlaYoung

Social Media is an active part of marketing, it will only work and benefit by your doing, by your engagement and incentive to drive the accounts.
Set aside time each day and if you need help with planning and using techniques wisely, please just contact me.