Before jumping into using any online social tools for business, it’s imperative that you first create a Plan for how you will use each tool. Due to how easy it is to get started using so many of the free online tools out there today, some business owners jump right in with planning properly. Sometimes that works, but more times than not, it leaves business owners with more questions than answers. When you have a plan, you have a foundation, you have goals setup that you are working to accomplish, and you have time requirements in place for how long you’ll spend using each online tool. When constructing a building for your business, you create a solid foundation before you start designing the interior and putting products on the shelves. This same principle holds true when you do start to use online social tools for business.
For this post, I’d like to focus on Twitter, but the principles can be spread to other online social tools as well. Twitter for business is one of the best uses of your time, as Twitter helps you reach and connect with your target audience, share ideas and educational content, and drive traffic to your blog and/or website. With that said, sometimes business owners get so caught up in getting on Twitter and building a large QUANTITY of followers, that they forget to first setup a foundation that can support such a large following.
As I’m sure many of you know, when it comes to your home, foundation problems are the last thing you want to hear from a contractor. A strong foundation provides the stability for your home, and the same is true for your Twitter profile. You might be saying, well that sounds good in theory, but how do I build a “foundation” on an online platform like Twitter? Great question. When I say, build a foundation on Twitter, I mean, find your voice, determine what you want to tweet about, figure out what your goals for Twitter are, so that your future actions are a direct result of trying to accomplish those goals, build out your profile, add an image, and then, actually start tweeting. Notice I didn’t say, “start following people”. There’s a reason for that…
When it comes to following people on Twitter, there are a few key things that QUALITY followers look for in a Twitter profile before following someone. A few of those attributes are:
- Interesting and fully filled out Twitter Profiles – Use your profile to describe what business you’re in, what you will be tweeting about, and any other information that you think would be relevant to the type of followers you are trying to attract
- Profile picture – Here at Catalyst Marketers we like to put a face behind the name, so we Tweet from @RyanTaft and I have a picture of myself up there, instead of a company logo. Some people differ on this subject, but I like the effect a personal image has when it comes to attracting followers.
- A long list of quality tweets – people want to see what you’re tweeting about and who you are interacting with on Twitter.
- Number of followers you have versus the number of people you’re following
Your foundation on Twitter is your profile and your tweets. When you first start out on Twitter, most people search for others to follow and hope that some of those folks will start to follow them back. What they don’t realize is that when someone is checking out your profile after you’ve followed them, they are looking for the attributes listed above. Now, obviously you won’t fit the criteria of the last attribute because you are a new user, so you don’t have any followers. With that said, I think that the weight put on number of followers is much less than the weight put on a professional profile and your Twitter content or tweets.
Most of the time, people understand that you may be new to Twitter, so you don’t have a ton of followers, but if you also have a semi-filled out profile, with no profile picture (whether is a logo or personal image), AND hardly any tweets, then it’s likely that the majority will assume that you’re not an active Twitter user and move on without following you. NOW, if you’re just starting to use Twitter for business and you create a plan for what you’re hoping to achieve through Twitter, fill out your profile, upload an image, and start tweeting on a regular basis, then after 1 – 2 weeks, you’ll have 100+ tweets (hopefully), which is good for a new user. Now, as long as what your tweeting about appeals to your target followers (which is a post for another day), you’re more likely to attract those folks.
Once you’ve built out your profile and you’ve been tweeting for a few weeks, now it’s time to get out there and start searching for people to follow because you’ve successfully built your foundation. Follow industry leaders and follow your target customers. Follow anyone who makes sense for your business (keeping your goals in the back of your mind). When those folks see that you’re following them and they go to check out your profile, they are not going to see an empty lot, they are going to see a strong foundation and a commitment for building something great. You are more likely to attract those folks to follow you back because you took the time to tweet first, then follow.
TweetDeck is a social media browser. It allows users to manage their social media efforts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Myspace. If you’re using Twitter for business, you can use TweetDeck to manage your efforts. We use TweetDeck to manage 
Through TweetDeck, users can type or paste a full URL into the Twitter text input area and TweetDeck, through it’s integration with bit.ly (or other URL shorteners) will automatically turn your link into a short url. No more copying the URL that you want to share on Twitter, navigating to http://bit.ly in your web browser, pasting the URL into the URL input area, and then copying/pasting your short url into Twitter. Now, simply copy/paste your full URL into TweetDeck and everything is done for you.
Another thing that’s great about TweetDeck is that you can use it on your mobile phone. Downloading TweetDeck for your mobile phone is free and really easy. TweetDeck is still evolving and definitely has its limitations. With that said, it’s one of the better Twitter management tools out there. Like other online social tools, TweetDeck will continue to evolve as user needs change. Definitely consider using TweetDeck to make communicating with customers and prospects on Twitter more manageable. 
During your 
Knowing that you’re all setup to accomplish your goals of having a full crowd of loyal customers, local residents, and local media attend the Fashion Show, as well as, a plan in place for selling $2,000 worth of clothes to those folks during the Fashion Show, you can now move your efforts to setting up your store for the Fashion Show. A few things to consider when staging your clothing store for a Fashion Show:
Now, I know some of you may say, “well, I’ve been using Twitter for Customer Service already”. If so, that’s great. You rock! With that said, you still may find some value in this post, so stay with me. 
What if FourSquare offered code for online businesses to serve up on their e-commerce website. The code would display a “Check-In on FourSquare” button on every page of the e-commerce site – think ReTweet button for Twitter. Now, whenever a consumer lands on a page within a website that she wants to share with her network, she can simply Check-In at the Website by clicking the FourSquare Check-In button. The code, like the ReTweet code for Twitter, would be open to large e-tailers like Amazon all the way to small blogs and e-commerce sites. 
Once you’ve created a Google Places Profile for your small business, you can then begin using your profile as a way to drive traffic to your blog. First, navigate to your Google Places listing, click “Owner-verified listing” to get to your profile. Once you’re on your Google Places profile, on the right-hand side, there is a text box for you to “post to your place page”. The post to your place page area is the area that you can use to promote a new blog post. 
When promoting your blog on Google Places, simply copy/paste the article title into the text box and then copy/paste the article link into the text box. One nice thing about Posting content to your Google Places Page is that Google Places allows you to input 160 characters — 20 more than Twitter. The extra 20 characters allows you to add the article link in full. By not using a URL shortener, you are adding to your inbound links, which is the single biggest factor in ranking you higher in search. 
Each and every time you produce a new blog post, a new video, or audio program, there may be some followers who find the content so off-target that they actually stop following your business online. The other day I was on Twitter and clicked on a link that was tweeted by one of my followers. The link brought me to his blog and I read the post. The post was riddled with assumptions, had spelling and grammar mistakes, and was simply uninformative. Just like that, I stopped following this individual on Twitter. If I had been subscribed to his blog, I would have unsubscribed. 
Being able to pull off an event like hosting your own local boutique fashion show is a big feat for all business owners, both large and small. With that said, a few years ago, it was almost impossible to host your own successful Fashion Show as a small business. The main reason being costs. Tools for pulling off a fashion show have been around for a while, but those tools were just so much more expensive than tools today. Free online social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google Local, and many others can help clothing boutique owners create a ton of buzz around their local Fashion Show. You can host a contest to give away free tickets to the community. You can offer discounts to live attendees on anything they purchase that night. Really, the opportunities are limitless if you get creative. 
As a business owner, you are probably starting to see the power of FourSquare for business. The more people you get to “check-in” at your local business, the better. Basically those customers who check-in at your local business on FourSquare, just helped you market your business. The cost to you, $0.
In the early days of this blog, we would take time to promote each post on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and Mr. Wong. Now, we bypass those social bookmarking sites in order to spend more time promoting our content on sites like Facebook, Twitter, BizSugar and LinkedIn. 
This image was taken directly from the Catalyst Marketers Google Analytics Traffic Sources report. As you can see, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and BizSugar are all in the top 10 traffic sources for Catalyst Marketers. With that said, it’s important to not only focus on quantity of visitors driven from a particular source, but also quality of visit. As you will also see on this report is that StumbleUpon still appears in the top 10 traffic sources for us. What you don’t see is that the quality of those visitors is very low. How do we determine quality of visit?