Twitter Training - Getting started with Twitter Twitter is just another example of the light speed at which communications are catapulting forward, and corporate America (as well as home business online marketers) should do our best to keep up. Social Radar, a research group reporting on activity and trends in social media, ranked Twitter number one in June 2009. Close on their heels were iPhone, Google and Facebook. Yes my friends, there were more “tweets” (140 character exchanges on Twitter) than there were searches on Google.
Let’s start with the basics. What is Twitter? Twitter is a text only platform that launches discussion and banter with a basic question, “What are you doing?” The answers must be 140 characters or less and are sent via the web, mobile texting, instant message and or a variety of applications.
Because Twitter combines elements from many applications in the digital world, many say it was the logical extension of what had developed electronically thus far. For example, Twitter uses some of the elements of instant messaging (IM), some of chat rooms, some of blogs, and of course, it is actually a member of the entire social networking family of sites. It’s like a chat room in that it is an open forum, like instant messaging in that tweets are bite-sized core thoughts, like a blog in that it allows for moment to moment updates with people of your choosing, like a website in that profiles can (and should) convey a specific “feel” and or character, and definitely a social networking site enabling fun or passionate communication either continually, or in whatever timeframe fits each user.
But what is it really? Depends on who you ask. To some, Twitter is a fun escape from the doldrums of the job, home life or commute; to some it is a way to feel close to friends, family and associates (divided by schedules or geography); to some it’s an instant communication and information dissemination device; and most importantly to home business professionals like you, Twitter is the one of the most powerful, real time marketing system now in play.
<Click READ MORE to read more> (more…)
by Marsha Maung
I have been receiving SMS messages from this beauty center that I go to this month and it’s amazing that they keep doing that. You know why? It must be costing them a bomb to just send out these messages through the conventional text messaging system. They could be saving themselves tons of money every month if only they knew more about things like
Sigh….
Online social networking is the new word of mouth marketing, albeit, in the electronic format. It is like you giving your friends a call and telling them about the amazing beauty treatment that you just got or you could be telling them about this amazing promotion going on…all free of charge, except for the amount that you are paying for your internet services.
But we all have internet services nowadays anyway, so the extra cost is basically ZERO.
The cost comes in the form of the number of seconds it will take you to type out your message on the online social networking website and then clicking the submit button. That is it.
In fact, online social networking is so incredibly powerful and cheap that more and more companies are beginning to hop onto it for the sake of their businesses. The downside to that is that not many of the businesses know how to optimize the full potential of such online social networking sites. What they are doing is keep telling their friends to visit them, telling them about a promotion…using the old method of pushing products and services instead of pulling.
A balanced method of using the push and the pull marketing on online social networking sites is the only way to do it. People are
Boring.
Online SOCIAL networking is a social site. You need to socialize and make friends. That way, you win fans, you win friends, you win business. There’s nothing, like they always say, like doing business with someone you like and know.
I used to use Facebook a lot to network and connect with others…some are writers like me, some are mothers like me, some are total lunatics who are into vampire bites and throwing slamdunks at people for no apparent reason. But I think I’ve outgrown Facebook. Furthermore, in my personal opinion, facebook is all about helping the advertisers and Facebook itself promote itself. It’s using a spiral marketing tactic that, personally, I find rather offensive and annoying.
And it really does nothing for business folks like us unless we join one of the millions of communities on Facebook, jammed with people. The likelihood of our words read or voice heard is literally close to nil.
But unfortunately, that’s where everyone else is so, I’m still using my Facebook but I have face-ing it out. I’ve just discovered another one, though. We all know what Buzzle is, right? If you don’t, visit it now. I just found out that they have a sister-arm reached out recently called MyBuzzle. I testdrove it around today and found it rather interesting. I don’t know how effective it is for business people like you and me but honestly speaking, I am willing to try anything that could replace Facebook. Darn tired of all those emails and annoying alerts, adverts and reminders, people messaging me from all corners of the earth and friends asking me to feed their pets/furnish their apartments/bite their friends/give them beer/give them hug….etc.
Networking, for me, has taken a more serious tone, so…..
MyBuzzle appears to be still new so, I am not sure how effective it’s going to be for now. But if all the people who are bored of Facebook join MyBuzzle, it should work out handsomely when they migrate, don’t you think?