Twitter has become one of the most widely used social media tools today.  In fact, the number of active twitter users has reached over 200 million, and this number is continuously growing to date. This tool allows you to send short messages called tweets with 140 characters maximum, basically to answer the question, “What are you doing now? These tweets are broadcasted to the people who are connected to your profile, known as “followers”, who also have the capability of spreading your messages (“retweet”)

to their own followers. This makes twitter a very viral tool, and the major reason why businesses have become so engaged in using this tool. But how exactly can twitter help a business in promoting the products, advertising and increasing sales?

1. Build your profile

This is basic. Start with completing your profile information about you and your business, of what you do, your location, phone number, website, services you offer, etc. This allows the public to recognize your identity and to determine that your business truly exists and is authentic.

2. Make an impression by sharing your expertise

There are many ways to do this depending on the type of product(s) or service(s) you offer. Share “how to” tips related to your business and work-life balance. Highlight the features of your services or products and of how these benefits the majority. Providing examples can greatly help as well.

3. Expand your network reach

The Internet has provided you with so many resources to do this. Connect with friends from other social networking sites, from work, conferences and meetings. You can even connect to friends of people you already knew.

Make sure to spread one status update to all social media sites you own, while fully utilizing their features. With Facebook you can write more than 140 characters, so expound your original twitter message to convey your thoughts more effectively.

It also helps to participate on twitter chats with people related to the industry that your business belongs to, but take note that your main targets are potential customers. So listen twice as much as you talk as our mothers used to say.

Another way to expand your reach is collecting and suggesting referrals. Mention or recommend some of your twitter friends or followers to others as this will also compel them to do the same for you.

Offer help to your followers of known issues they may be experiencing whether that’s related to your industry, or just simple technical issues. Of course, you need to be equipped first so make sure to read and study first.

4. Offer free stuff

To keep the followers happy and loyal, offer some free items exclusively to your followers. Post discounts, coupons and package deals. Or offer free access to an application or software you offer. Your followers will eventually spread the good news to their friends and suggest to follow your business.  This encourages your followers to participate in your activities.

5. Utilize helpful resources and tools

Such tools that can increase your productivity through automation are very helpful. Examples are Hootsuite and social oomph where you can schedule future posts and do a lot more on your behalf. There are lots of other available tools you can find online. Just make sure to choose those with good user feedback. Again, study and do your research.

6. Get help from an expert

There are now virtual assistants or internet marketing companies specializing social media marketing tasks. This person or team will not only help you with productivity, but can also help you make the most out of twitter to engage current and new customers, generate sales and capture more leads for your business.

7. Follow twitter etiquette

This is not only because you don’t want your profile to be blocked by twitter, but simply because this helps establish a good impression to the public. Share information that is useful for prospective clients or employers to enhance your reputation. Stay polite, but don’t sound too serious either. Show some causality and humor too so they know they’re talking to a real person and not a bot, even if you’re using an automation system.

What it is?

It has the power to be different entities (similar to facebook fan pages), while profiles can only be individuals.  Whether you’re a local business, celebrity, product, brand, sport, industry and similar interest group.  Create and share.

What it isn’t?

It’s not allowed to mention you unless you’re connected.

What it is.

It is the + button.  Similar to the like button, it announces to your circles you’ve found something cool and they should check it out.

What it isn’t.

Google Business Pages doesn’t receive notifications.  No email.  No text.  No phone calls.  Perfect.

What it is.

Local Google+ Business Pages have fields to help people find your business location.  As search is becoming more localized and convenient thanks to our search giant, being locally recognized will continue to become a priority.

What it isn’t.

Google+ Business Pages can’t add people to circles unless the page is added or mentioned by the person.

What it is.

When your Google+ Business Page is created, the privacy setting is automatically set to public.  If your plan is to promote your venture, this is ideal.

What it isn’t.

Does not allow you to share extended circles.

What it is?

Google+ Business Pages auto unfollows if you unfollow the page.

What it isn’t.

Google+ Pages cannot + fellow pages or content.  You can only + content as an individual.

I trust this is the just the beginning of Google+ pages has to offer.  As Google+ improves, I will expand more on this blog.  Talk to you soon.

Make Over My Yard is a full service landscaping company that had a need for an improved website design that displayed their portfolio of completed projects.  We provided a custom designed wordpress theme and integrated on wordpress content management system built with PhP, MySql and HTML5.

I’ve built a list of the top 5 advertising trends small businesses can use immediately to increase customer relationships.  I say relationships and not sales, because the relationship is much more valuable than the transaction.  Relationships are long term, sales (though are great and feel wonderful) are short term.

Whats new?

1. Location Based Online Marketing

The digital marketing opportunity is allowing your advertising campaigns to run in specific zip codes, radius, and or cities and states that make sense.  Even if your a company in Charlotte, NC and want to target folks in Houston, Texas only.  The capabilities to do so are  at our finger tips with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click (PPC) and Behavioral Based Marketing initiatives.  Pick your location and start engaging.

2. Deals

Your customers are still shopping for the best deal in town.  Are you it?  As our economy goes through correction, consumers have become smarter about finding the best bang for our bucks.

Providing unbelievable deals during this time builds great relationships.  This doesn’t necessarily mean slashing your prices.  The key is to increase the value you’re providing to a targeted niche customer base that can and will appreciate the additional service and value offering.

Cutting prices works for the short term, but increasing your service value is long term.  Providing rewards to customers that engage with you via mobile or other creative interactions increases your reach and can be very valuable.

3. Mobile Marketing

If businesses are seeking creative ways to reach the new consumer.  If you don’t have a mobile strategy in the works, you will lose the new consumers.  As I’m traveling on our Charlotte Area Transportation System (CATS) more than 50% of the passengers are mobily engaged on some level.  Whether phones, ipods, ipads and such, we are controlling the flow of information we receive.

Better understanding of our customers allows us to better engage with our customers.  Helping your customers connect with you with mobile interactions to enhance your relationships will be imperative this year and beyond.  All traditional advertising (such as billboards, TV, Radio, etc) can combine a creative call for action.  Such as qr code promotions, couponing via text messages and video/photo submissions improves connectivity.

4. Social Reviews

Someone’s talking about you online.  How are they talking about you.  Consumer based reviews and feedback will continue to grow as a very powerful source for your next customer to confirm doing business with you.  Encouraging public testimonials and ratings of your service will be the difference between new sale or lost and new relationship or lost relationship.

5. Social Customer Relationship Management

The understanding and organization of your customer data with Customer Relationship Management tools will be essential in the new era.  Not only sales and pipeline management, but entering information discovered via Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIN can help you customize new advertising initiatives.  The social online listening, monitoring and understanding your customers prior to engagement helps in better relationship building and management.

Falling victim to believing that everyone is your customer can be a huge mistake.  Do not fall victim to this belief.  Aiming too broad for your target market can lead to wasted time and efforts.  Small business success in Google Internet Marketing will strive from confirming a narrow market of customers by which your business can focus marketing plans and strategies.

The Google Keyword Tool helps you find your target market.

Understanding your business offering in relation to how your potential customers search patterns for your service or product and what competitors are paying for regular internet advertising for these keywords and phrases.

Once you identify the pay-per-click going rate for bids and see the bids are coming in substantially high, to be optimized organically for the same terms tells you that much more effort will be required to get you to page one.

Aiming too high with broad keyword terms are good at driving increased visits to your website that don’t convert.  Understanding this fact, small businesses can maximize the pay per click information to clarify if you’ve identified a profitable market.

The Google Keyword Tool helps small businesses view how many searches are done for keywords and the expenditures used for keywords to reach page one.  Once you open up the Google Keyword Tool, type a couple of variations of search terms based on the niche market identified then research the synonym button.  Once completed, you can sort by advertising position, cost per click or search volume.

Once you confirm that you have many keywords priced at 25 cents and under in the top positions, this is a good sign that you can become very relevant in the search.   Noticing that there are many keywords in lower positions on the first page tells you that you have an awesome opportunity to lead the market.  Positioning your company as a solution to problems is vital to your success.  Your searchers are looking for a solution.  Identifying a means to meet that need drives your success in your Google Advertising Campaign.

As you conduct keyword research, seeing the same websites dominating is very common.  These competitors understand the market search patterns and the competitors.  They spend time and resources into leading the industry online while positioning themselves as the solution to customer problems via answers to keyword searches.

Understanding your competitors is also key to learn how they are appearing at the top of searches.  Using various tools like Yahoo Site Explorer, Alexa, and Open Site Explorer.  Once you understand what your competitors are doing, identify how you can increase your relevance and authority to lead your Google Advertising and Google Internet Marketing based on this bench mark.

Once you understand your business in comparison to your competition clarify how you fit in market to help your customers.  What are the current gaps that you can help with?  What can you do better than your competitors?  Are these paying customers?

Meeting the needs of your prospects honestly and ethically will help position your company as the market leader for your Google Internet Marketing campaign.

Your first brand recognition these days is your website.  It’s your first opportunity to communicate who you are.  Can visitors move around your site easily?  Does it stimulate curiosity to want to learn more?  Can visitors understand what you do?  If you aren’t providing these key elements, you stand the chance of your visitor leaving your website and moving on to your competition.

Be Clear

Potential customers online are quick shoppers.  Your website only has the first 10 seconds to intrigue current and potential customers to want to learn more.  It’s vital that we clearly communicate who you are, what you do and what makes you special.  Not only on your home page, but within all your web pages.  As visitors are entering your website from different pages each page must clearly state what you do and how you can help them.  Simple yet creative visual graphic design, video, and photos can improve your website presentation.

Ease to Use

Before design and programming, wireframing and mapping is important.  From the beginning, it’s not a bad idea to have a current customer involved in the brainstorm or sending a survey out to your best customers to identify key elements of your website that they look for and keeps them coming back.

Getting content developers, information architects and your technical team involved in the initial phase is key to make sure the ease of use is kept in mind.  All these folks help in idea creation as well as initial phase testing ease of use before formally designing and code work take place.  Website Flow, navigation and functionality needs to be discussed at this point.

• Navigation
• Fast loading pages (keep your images and files light)
• Shareable (make it easy for your visitors to tell people about your site)

Searchable

The ability for visitors to find you is essentially in growing your business while you sleep.  Not optimizing your site for easy indexing for search engines kills your opportunity for growth online.  Providing a sitemap, title tags, headings and site descriptions helps the search engines understand who you are and how you can help them help their searcher.

Including an additional budget for an SEO Company or Advisor to analyze your site for search-ability and set-up helps your business positioning online.  Achieving page one rankings is the goal here.  Identify a key search term or phrase that your customers use to find you and get your business to page one.  Consistently improving your search rankings helps customers find you with little to no effort.

Business Purpose

Small business websites need to communicate emotion or purpose that connects with customers.  Use real images of company people, places and locations helps connect your company with prospects.  High use of stock photos seen on multiple sites discourages this as your prospects and customers are getting savvier now with removing the cloak of the “act of big business”.  Being real has its authentic feeling that resonates well with people online.  This is something that template websites have a hard time communicating.

With your website design being at core of your brand moving forward, doing it right the first time with a clear purpose and emotional connection is essential to building the business brand.   Stimulating a positive experience by being yourself speaks volumes of your company and yourself.  Don’t be afraid.  Your business has a higher level purpose.  Let us know about it.

Mobile

With the increase use of smart phones, there is an increasing community of folks accessing websites via mobile devices.  Are you there yet?  Having a mobile version of your site is something that use to be a “nice to have” to show how cool and innovative your company was.  Now-a-days, it’s a “must have” to remain relevant and engaged with your current customers and prospects.

Creating a mobile web strategy makes it easier and more convenient for your customers to find and engage with you.  Looking at how your website displays on different browsers, mobile, desktop and WAP will be essential to your usability and accessibility.  The more convenient your site is for customers, the more they tend to visit your website.

Analytics

Identifying your visitor numbers prior to your redesign is a great place to start for measurement.  Documenting all your current user numbers and identifying where the majority and minority of visitors are coming from and how they find you.  Based on these numbers we can set our goals, identify trends, establish baselines and measure our success.    Identifying the different pages, content and functions of your site and how we choose to track to reach your company goals.  Most companies tend to look for conversions as a success measure.

Measuring weekly to monthly is the standard.  Measuring how people are using your site is good to know as you can improve the design experience based on this knowledge.

With the increasing numbers of customers searching for businesses online, Google has found that most searches are growing toward locally based products and services.

What does this mean for you?  While I’m a big fan of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Pay Per Click (PPC) as strong marketing technology, one of the most strategically smart moves is Google Places.

Google released Google Places in 2009 to replace the Google Local Business Center.  Places helps to organize every place in the world with or without a website online for easy indexing and finding by new customers.

Google provides this free service for anyone or business that seeks to get their relevant information online quickly and painless.  Though anyone can set it up the consistency and maintenance to generate paying customers left with professional marketers can streamline your lead generation.

Account Set-Up

Creating a Google Places account is 3 step:

1. Create a profile.  If you’ve created a facebook account you can do this.  Provide all information required (i.e Basic contact info, Photos and Videos).
2. Google requires verification to make sure you’re human and are a real business or place.  They provide this via phone or postcard.
3. Once the above is completed, just wait for your listing to appear on Google.

Google will check your background and references from any other websites or social networks to learn about who you are and what you do prior to listing.  When creating your account, it’s vital to fill out all information.  The more details the better the opportunity for customers to find you as well as the more content provided the dominant your listing will be displayed.

Search Ranking

I can’t stress enough, how consistency and regular engagement with your place helps with your rankings.  There a several ways to implement relevancy and build loyal followers.

• Ask your customers and fans for reviews of your product and services.
• Informative, humorous and customer related videos.
• Adding pictures of your place and business activities.
• Making sure all your content is tagged with search friendly keywords.
• Encouraging QR Codes increases engagement with your customers

When describing your company, be real.  Honesty goes a long way online.  People want to genuinely trust you so avoiding the standard statements like ‘Family Owned and Operated’, ‘Best Customer Service’, and ‘Been in business since 1900’ helps people read you as a real company.  Be specific when describing what makes you special helps drive your rankings.

Pictures

I’m sure you’ve heard over and over again how much ‘Content Is King’.  Google has provided an added value resource that businesses can upload pictures of their location with Google Business Photos, where you customers can see a 360-degree look at the interior of your business, a home, store, or restaurant.

With millions of visitors using Google Maps regularly, how can your business take advantage of this?  Registering your business content (descriptions, pictures, videos, hours, specials) helps showcase your business to local visitors using GPS or other mapping technology.

Google allows you to sign up for a photo shoot by Google photographers and these pictures would display as part of your profile with a 360 degree view.

Mistakes

When beginning your listing and search optimization, it’s really tempting to go overboard.

Businesses see the infinite possibilities and try selling everything they have and more.  Let’s avoid this common mistake by not stuffing your content with keywords or listing in too many categories that just happen to have huge traffic numbers.  Narrow your scope and be clear about who you are and what you do.  You can’t be all things to all people.

People may forget that even though it’s online a phone number is vital for customers.  Your new customers feels a bit of comfort when they see a local number.  Businesses have been known to forget displaying a direct contact number.  This small item has been known to lead to loss sales.  Don’t make this vital mistake.  Your customer may or may not call.  We just like to see the option.

Google Places is based on a phone number.  Local numbers being readable by Google is important without being embedded in pictures or videos.  Businesses that only display phone numbers through images or video miss the opportunity for Google to search the reference phone number.

Google has become a default part of all our lives.  As the growing numbers of visitors use this tool to answer many questions, Google Places helps your business become search ready and convenient for your next customer.