Small Business Blog

The other day, a Twitter glitch caused everyone’s follower and following counts to drop to zero. This sparked a flood of panicked tweets (here’s an opportunity to coin a new term, how about twysteria?); at least one of those anxious comments compared the incident to a national disaster.

I note the fame of Twitter only to make the point that the microblogging platform has solidified its place in modern communication practices. And that means that people are probably using it to talk about your business, your industry or your products/services. If you’re not convinced of that last point, go to Twitter’s home page, type in a general term for your industry or product category into the search box and hit enter.

See?

Now the results you get from running that search may not be particularly helpful to you. Chances are, they are mostly comprised of your competitors in the act of promoting themselves. If you scrolled through the results pages, you might eventually find someone asking for a solution to the problem that your product or service solves. That would be the ideal marketing opportunity, wouldn’t it–to present yourself to a target customer at the very moment she needs your help? It doesn’t get any better than that.

The problem is, it’s going to take you way too long to find that tweet. So here’s a better alternative, known as the “anyone know” search. I first read about the “anyone know” search here, at searchengineland.com. The implementation of an “anyone know” search is pretty simple; just type in “anyone know” along with your product name into Twitter’s search box. Note that when you search, “anyone know” should be in quotation marks, but the name of your product or service should not be. For example, I typed in “anyone know” copywriter and immediately saw several tweets from people who were looking for copywriters. These are legitimate prospects for me, and all I have to do is sign in and hit reply to make contact.

Try it out for yourself and let me know what you find.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly attracted to Web marketing and, in particular, social media marketing. The appeal of online media is their low respective costs. When you own and operate a small, brick-and-mortar business, you face the marketing dilemma constantly: affordable options often lack scale. But the options with sizeable reach aren’t affordable and may be touching consumers who aren’t even viable targets. On top of that, successful ad campaigns these days often take repetition to make an impact. And repetition is expensive.

As an entrepreneur, you may weigh the costs of running print ads in your local newspaper and decide you’d rather take your chances with Twitter and Facebook–options which are free as long you have the available manpower. This decision may make sense from a financial perspective, but don’t make it lightly. Shifting all of your ad dollars to one medium is a mistake, unless you know for certain that that medium can reach all of your existing and target customers. Here’s some food for thought: in 2009, a poll on CNN.com indicated that 94 percent of CNN’s audience wasn’t using Twitter.

Now I know what you’re thinking…if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know I’m a proponent of Twitter. But I’m not a proponent of putting all your eggs in the Twitter basket, the Facebook basket, or any other ad basket. Even if it may seem like all the world’s gone a-Twitter, there’s still a place for print, for cable, for radio. And actually, one of the most effective ways to use repetition in your advertising is by reaching the same customers through different media.

Of course, these days, you have to be creative with the dollars you direct towards traditional media. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Direct Mail: Find a vendor that does postcard printing and mailing. Print up some loyalty postcards to encourage repeat purchases and send them out. Consider putting a time limit on the card, such as, “make X number of purchases within X number of weeks” or something like that. Use what you know about your customers to set the number and time limit. For example, if you know that your typical customer makes three purchases from you every eight weeks, offer a discount or reward to those who make four purchases within eight weeks. (continue reading…)

We set up a Twitter account ages ago and then neglected it for months. Although we have been managing a few other accounts for different purposes, we never put the time behind building our own follower base. About two weeks ago, with a paltry 60 followers, we launched an experiment with one objective: get to 1000 followers without spending more than a few minutes a day. We passed that milestone earlier this week.

We reached the goal by using various free and paid Twitter tools. Here’s the run down of the tactics we used:

• Socialoomph.com. We created a free Socialoomph account and starting using the Auto-follow and automated welcome message feature. Auto-follow checks your follower base periodically and automatically follows anyone who’s already following you. The welcome feature, as the name implies, sends out a welcome message to new followers.
• Twellow.com. We listed our account for free at Twellow.com. A quick Google search will point you to many other Twitter directories.
• Tweepsearch.com. We used Tweepsearch.com to search profiles for various keywords pertaining to our business. Tweepsearch allows you to run broad searches, and then narrow your results down by searching within a certain user’s follower base. Once you hone down your list of results to a manageable number, a “Follow All” option appears. This task is implemented by TweepML.org, and it empowers you to follow dozens of users at once.
• Hootsuite.com. Hootsuite.com has an efficiently laid out interface that lets you view all of the activity on your account pretty quickly. You can also manage more than one account, without having to log in and out of Twitter. We used Hootsuite to tweet (of course), but also to track mentions and retweets, and to respond to others’ tweets.
• Mentions. Promoting your existing followers attracts new followers. Mention your followers and retweet your followers’ most interesting posts. Join the conversation and you’ll make new friends.
• Hummingbird 2. Hummingbird was the only paid Twitter tool we used. The software is $97, which isn’t cheap, but we found it to be a huge time-saver. Hummingbird monitors conversations for your specified keywords and automatically follows users who meet stated criteria. If you reach the 2000-marker, where you are capped on following more people, Hummingbird automatically unfollows those who aren’t following you back, one at a time. Once you set it up and turn it on, Hummingbird can run in the background.

If you’re not ready to spend the money on Hummingbird, you could duplicate the functionality on your own. Set aside 30 minutes a day to search keywords and reach out to new users.

Keep in mind that the above list references only a tiny slice of the tools and strategies available for promoting your profile on Twitter. Also remember that mass following and unfollowing can get you banned, so don’t get reckless in your actions.

The above actions helped us get to 1000 followers in a relatively short period of time. The next challenge is to get to 2000…and that may take a little longer. We’ve hit the 2000 limit on the number of people we can follow. So we’ll keep you posted.

What are your favorite Twitter tools?

*Post disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Hummingbird. All opinions are mine.*

A report by Econsultancy and Online Marketing Summit attempts to understand how companies are quantifying the value of social media. Admittedly, we did not buy the report, but we did read the 24-page “free sample.” Two statistics jump out:

• 61 percent of companies have tinkered with social media, without jumping in, full board, to a social media strategy
• 13 percent of companies are not doing anything at all

Do these numbers imply that the social media landscape is less competitive than, say, your local phone book or local search results? To answer that question, we’d have to know similar usage data on those other forms of media. One thing’s for sure, the popularity of social media is growing. Facebook traffic, for example, is exploding to the point where this site is the second most popular on the Web. And this means social media is poised to get more competitive over time.

Understanding this, do you think there’s a closing window of opportunity for your small business to secure a position in social media before Twitter, Facebook and others become bogged down with endless clutter, the way search engine results are currently? Could be. Remember when businesses first started launching Web sites? Those who got in early swooped up the domain names and ushered in fundamental changes to entire industries (travel and banking sectors come to mind). It was a lot easier to establish first-page ranking when you weren’t competing with the whole world, right? Those who came on to the Web scene later in the game have struggled to build and maintain visibility under generic key phrases. Could the same thing happen with social media (or has it already)? (continue reading…)

How To Post Automatic Updates to LinkedIn From Your Joomla Site

Small business owners and entrepreneurs often don’t have the time to delve into establishing themselves in the social media realm. Some have ignored Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn altogether, while others have lonely profile pages that are starved for content and followers. Are you feeling that dilemma? If you are, and you have a Joomla-based Web site, we have a solution. (continue reading…)