Today it’s time to talk about how to leverage Twitter social networking for your business. This article is Part 3 in a monthly series I’m writing about effectively utilizing social networking for your business. For the previous installments, check out:

How to Leverage Social Networking for Your Business: Part 2 – Facebook

How to Leverage Social Networking for Your Business: Part 1

Since posting Part 1 of this series, where I mentioned that Twitter hasn’t released information about its user base, I’ve found references to indicate that Twitter has grown from 6 million users in February 2009 to over 28 million users in February 2010. This is an unprecedented growth rate, and Twitter is now a prime social networking tool you can use to reach millions of users with a relatively simple, inexpensive marketing campaign.

Why to Pursue Social Networking for Your Business Through Twitter

Twitter provides you an ready-made platform through which to interact with your readers and customers. Twitter is useful from a social networking standpoint in that you can do many of the same things as you can with Facebook, but due to the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, it’s more appropriate for discussion and interaction. Maintaining a Twitter account gives people a direct way to contact you immediately, instead of having to go to your website and type a lengthy email or go through other contact channels. Twitter also provides a great way for you to update followers and generate traffic to your website.

Grow Customers Virally Through Twitter

One of the biggest benefits of using Twitter is the opportunity to grow customers virally through Twitter. When you post updates to Twitter, your followers can click a simple button to ‘Re-Tweet’ your content. This means they can easily and quickly share your updates with all of their friends, and their friends – on and on. You can easily grow your customer base by dozens, hundreds or thousands of people with a few well-placed Tweets. In fact, if your Tweets get picked up by one of the many celebrities using Twitter, your content could reach over a million people.

Link Your Profile to Your Website

Twitter provides very basic ways of interacting with your readers. On your profile itself, you have your Twitter name, a picture, a link to your website and a 140-character biography. Use your profile to link to your website, because readers won’t be able to find out much about your business from your Twitter profile itself.

Choose a name consistent with your business. For example, in my Facebook article, I did a case study on a local business called Formaggio Kitchen; their Twitter username is Formaggio. Keep your Twitter username relatively short and easy to find. Every time users Re-Tweet your content, your name counts as part of your 140-character limit, so part of your content may get cut off if you have a long username or post at your 140-character limit.

Initiate Discussion

One of the best ways in which Twitter can serve your business is to use Twitter to initiate discussion. You can elicit feedback from your clients via Twitter, or even just chat and trade messages with your clients via Twitter. If you want to widen your metaphorical net, offer a really good promotion or introduce a controversial topic for discussion. This makes people more likely to re-Tweet your content and spread your Twitter ID – and therefore your business – to more friends. At the very least, you can use Twitter to get feedback about your business and services; and at best, you can use Twitter to discuss new potential offerings or item features so you can improve your product or services.

Share Information with Your Followers

Another way to get your name out via Twitter and get people following your posts is to share information with your potential clients via Twitter. Share early updates with your followers, with links to press releases or new product information. Or discuss special offerings, company downtime or anything that is relevant for your readers to know. By sharing valuable information, you’re more likely to induce people to follow you via Twitter, and are more likely to have those people visit your Website when they’re ready to use your services or buy your product. You can also use Twitter to share information about upcoming events and drive traffic to your site.

Manage the Perception of Your Company

Another valuable aspect of using Twitter for your social networking campaign is that it provides you with a ready-made tool to manage the perception of your company. For example, you could use Twitter to respond to customer concerns or feedback. Or you can simply portray a personable, friendly person via your Twitter account – adding an element of humanity to your business.

For example, Southwest Airlines reached out to actor Kevin Smith via Twitter a few weeks ago when he had an unfortunate incident on their flight. Southwest used Twitter to quickly respond to Smith’s concerns, and it gave them the ability to show clients “Look – we responded to this man’s concerns right away.” In that particular case, the Twitter contact didn’t resolve the issue, but it was one outreach tool that the company could utilize to manage perceptions of the company.

Use Special Offers to Gain Followers and Mentions

If you want to build followers on Twitter, you have to give them a reason to mention or re-Tweet your content. One effective way to quickly get the word out about your business is to use special offers to build followers and mentions. Some companies offer giveaways to people who re-Tweet or mention the company name in Twitter posts on a certain day, or during a certain time frame.

For example, one company held a drawing to give away a free Mac laptop to users who mentioned their business name anytime during a specific week. Users could mention the company once per day for a chance to enter the drawing that day. Hundreds of users mentioned the company every single day, which drove more people to research the company and enter the contest; and this company gained thousands of mentions during the course of that week.

Celebrity Twitter Users

Twitter is somewhat unusual in that it has introduced a way for ordinary people to interact with celebrities. Some celebrity Twitter users have over a million followers on Twitter. When a celebrity on Twitter mentions something, potentially over a million people could see that mention. Some celebrity Twitter users have been known to ‘break’ websites by sending too much traffic when they Tweet content. Wil Wheaton, for example, has over 1.5 million followers, and has repeatedly ‘broken’ websites when he has posted links to T-shirts or interesting items he’s found on the Web. Imagine getting 1.5 million people to your website. This is the power that celebrity Twitter users wield.

Conversely, that power can also turn to power to hurt your reputation. Kevin Smith, for example, had around 1.5 million followers when he Tweeted about a negative experience he had with Southwest Airlines. This turned into an ongoing saga that led to news articles and even TV show offers for Smith to talk about his negative experience. And all of this started because Kevin Smith sent out a barrage of negative Tweets about Southwest Airlines when he was in the middle of having a negative experience with them.

Twitter is a Powerful, Free Social Networking Tool

Bottom line: Twitter is a powerful social networking tool that you can use to generate traffic, build followers and manage perceptions of your company. And Twitter is a free tool. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a television ad, or even hundreds of dollars for a print media campaign; all you need is a few minutes each day to create and maintain a company presence on Twitter. Take advantage of this powerful, free social networking tool to market to today’s Twitter audience of roughly 28 million people.

Even the most well-designed website is useless if nobody sees it. To address this issue, a major focus of Web marketing is to bring people to your site. A reader asked me last week for tips on building followers for websites, so I thought I’d post here about some of the most common methods I use to drive traffic for myself and my clients. With the right strategies, you can use these techniques to grow your followers exponentially.

Add Dynamic Content Frequently

People have no reason to return to your website if you don’t add content periodically. Static websites provide information, but they don’t give a reader a reason to keep returning. Therefore, you might lose out on potential clients when readers have forgotten about your website weeks or months after viewing it. By adding dynamic content to your website frequently, you give readers a reason to come back. If readers come back, they’re more likely to think of your website, and utilize your product or services when they need it. Adding dynamic content regularly also enables you to broaden the keyword search terms by which people find your website, thereby expanding your potential audience.

Utilize Social Network Marketing

Social networking is the new buzzword, and it’s here to stay. Savvy companies are beginning to realize that they can leverage social media to spread word about their services or products, and to elicit responses and discussion from customers. This provides companies with an opportunity to reach consumers directly, and to respond to feedback, positive comments and negative criticism. Utilizing social networking enables you to grow your customer base organically through word of mouth and viral marketing with a minimum of effort, and simultaneously gives you an opportunity to influence how clients perceive your company.

Create Guest Blogging Opportunities

One valuable tool that can help you build followers for your website is guest blogging. Guest blogging has a few variations, but the most common technique for guest blogging is to invite someone to write an entry on your blog, and/or offer to write an entry for their blog. In this way, you reach out to the other blogger’s audience by showing them your content and a link to your website, and vice versa. If you trade guest blogging opportunities with a popular blogger, you can grow your audience by hundreds or thousands of people with one well-written post.

Exchange Links with Related Blogs

You can practice a similar strategy to grow your readership in conjunction with guest blogging, or independently: initiate a link exchange with related blogs. This is important: look for related blogs to trade links. By exchanging links with related blogs, you ensure that you have something to offer readers, and you gain a qualified audience that is interested in what you have to say. If you trade links with unrelated blogs, you won’t necessarily have anything to offer readers and your chances to increase conversion are low.

When it comes to establishing related blogs, look for blogs whose readers might be interested in your product or services, but aren’t directly competing. For example, if you have a personal injury law firm, you might want to exchange links with a motorcycle website. Motorcyclists might need your services, and you can provide them with important information about motorcycle injury statistics and how to deal with a motorcycle injury case. You wouldn’t want to exchange links with another personal injury attorney, because there is little value in reaching out to your competitor’s audience via your competitor’s page. (It’s much more useful to reach out to your competitor’s audience in other ways, where you can subtly establish why readers should choose you over competitors.)

Post to Article Directories

Finally, if you want to reach out to a wider audience and build followers for your website, consider reaching out to an audience via a large, well-established website. Article directories are a great way to reach potential clients who wouldn’t find you otherwise. When you post to an article directory, you gain the additional leverage of their weighty SEO. You can then post a resource box with a link back to your website, which is especially effective if you create a call to action in your article.

At the very least, posting to article directories gives you a chance to establish your expertise. At best, someone who is interested in your products or services can learn about what you have to offer and reach out to you directly through your website.

When you’re self-employed, doing your taxes becomes a hassle and a chore. We self-employed individuals aren’t like the rest of the world, filing taxes as early as possible so we can get refunds. Most self-employed individuals don’t get refunds at all, and owing taxes is a real possibility if you’ve had a successful year or if you’ve simply planned poorly. To help out my fellow self-employed brethren, I’ve compiled a list of handy DIY tax tips for the self-employed that I’ve gathered myself and through accountants in the past several years.

Keep a Spreadsheet of Your Expenses

The most important thing I do to keep track of my self-employed tax liability is to keep a monthly spreadsheet of expenses. At the very least, you should track all of your business expenses. I actually track all of my expenses, business and personal, so I can track where every penny went and make sure I’ve got everything properly allocated. I create one spreadsheet for each month, and save them all together in a workbook that covers that tax year. I enter expenses into various categories, depending on the expense, such as “Marketing,” “Unreimbursed Expenses” and other relevant categories. Then I total up my monthly expenses on the same line of each spreadsheet (for example, this year I used a SUM formula in line 50 of each Excel spreadsheet to aggregate my monthly expenses in each category).

At the end of the year, I put together a “Year End Summary” spreadsheet that pulls data from all of the individual month spreadsheets. For example, on my year end summary, I use this Excel formula to pull data from all of my monthly spreadsheets:

“=SUM(January!A50)+(February!A50)+(March!A50)+(April!A50)+(May!A50)+(June!A50)+(July!A50)+
(August!A50)+(September!A50)+(October!A50)+(November!A50)+(December!A50)”

Just a simple SUM formula is all you need for most of your expenses, and then you have a nice aggregate page of all of your annual expenses.

I’ve found that the easiest approach is to sit down for a few minutes every month and enter all of your month’s expenses. That way you’re not stuck sitting at your computer for hours at tax time just creating a summary of your expenses. Doing a few minutes every month is much more manageable, and makes tax time much less of a chore.

Use the Appropriate Tool for the Job

Make sure you use the appropriate tool to handle your taxes. Personally, I’ve used tax preparation services (H&R Block) and tax preparation software (Turbo Tax and Tax Cut) in the past 10 years. I’ve found that Turbo Tax Home and Business is the ideal tool for me; affordable, and covers everything I need to do in a level of detail that works for me. I prefer tax prep software because then I have the leisure to compile the appropriate data at my own pace, instead of setting up an appointment with a tax prep professional only to discover that I’m missing important paperwork or relevant data. If your finances are more complex, you might be better served by working with an accountant or CPA to prepare your taxes to ensure you meet your liabilities.

It’s Your Responsibility to Report Your Income: 1099 Hunting

Some of the self-employed individuals I know erroneously believe that if they don’t get a 1099, they don’t have to report the income. Unfortunately, that’s not true, and an IRS audit could come back and haunt them for operating under this erroneous belief.

Any client who pays you more than $500 through the course of the year is required to issue you a 1099 reporting your income. Smaller clients might not be so good at keeping track, and you may have to contact them to ensure they issue your 1099. If you track your income on an ongoing basis, you’ll know if you’re missing 1099s and can easily contact the outstanding clients. Although clients have an obligation to issue you a 1099, it’s your responsibility to ensure you report all of your earnings, so you may find yourself hounding clients to get your 1099.

Making Estimated Tax Payments = Good

Estimated tax payments are a common bugaboo for many self-employed individuals. The IRS requires that you make estimated tax payments if you make over a certain dollar amount, and you can be penalized if you fail to make estimated tax payments, or if your estimated tax payments aren’t high enough. Practically speaking, this also presents a problem for you at tax time because you could find yourself owing thousands of dollars if you haven’t made enough estimated tax payments.

This is another case where it’s extremely helpful to track your income and expenses in a nice summary spreadsheet on an ongoing basis. You can check your monthly income and expenses, and make more accurate estimated tax payments every quarter. Remember: making accurate payments up front prevents you from falling behind and owing more than you can afford.

Investigate Every Possible Deduction

The world of a self-employed individual is a world of deductions. Depending on your income, expenses and operating specifics, you may be eligible to claim deductions for a portion of your rent, your mortgage payment or your utilities. You might be able to file deductions for office supplies, uniforms or a myriad of other work-related expenses. If you elect to prepare your own taxes without the aid of a professional or tax prep software, make sure you do the legwork to search out every possible deduction you might be eligible to apply. This is one case where using tax prep software or a professional really pays for itself, because these tools help you get every possible deduction and can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The Web is the marketing space of today. TV ads are becoming a thing of the past. Print media is even more outdated, as sad as it is to see print go away. The Web is where you need to focus your marketing efforts, and one very simple thing you can do is to manage your online presence to boost your public image.

What is an Online Presence?

Your online presence is basically a term that refers to everything on the Web related to your business. Your online presence does include your business website, but it also covers customer reviews, your presence on popular social media sites and anything else you can use to interact with your customers. The Web is an invaluable tool because it lets you actually see the things your customers are saying about your business. You don’t have to guess at what they think – if they love you – or hate you – you can find out on the Web. If you proactively manage your online presence, you can influence customer perception of your company by:

1. Responding proactively to customer concerns;
2. Conveying important information to your customers via the Web;
3. Finding out what your customers have to say about you;
4. Ensuring that information about your business is relevant and up-to-date;
5. Correcting misconceptions about your company or business.

How to Effectively Manage Your Online Presence

You can manage your online presence in a number of ways. One useful aspect of managing your online presence is to present a consistent, branded image. However, potentially more important is your ability to monitor and respond to what customers have to say about your business.

Managing Your Online Image

First and foremost, decide what image you want to present your customers and manage that image. Make sure your branding is consistent throughout your website, and anyplace else your business is represented on the Web. You may want to consider joining popular social networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn and anything else that’s relevant to your business. Joining these websites gives you a face, and gives you the ability to more proactively manage your online image.

Responding to Customer Feedback

One of the most useful features of managing your online presence is the ability to track and respond to customer feedback. Set up a free Google Alert or other keyword tracking tool to find out when your customers refer to your business on the Web. Track what your customers have to say, and reach out to customers who have had a negative experience. You may be able to change their opinions in the way you handle their feedback, or you may at least provide a positive presence to onlookers who see that you’re attempting to address negative feedback.

You can also set up a service that tracks inbound linking. In this way, you can see when people create inbound links to your business, and check out the context of those links. If people are linking to your business and saying “Don’t work with these guys,” you might want to reach out to those people to try to resolve the issues. On the other hand, if people are linking to your website saying “These guys are great!” – you know you’re doing something right, and you can turn that into more customers and a higher conversion rate.

Conversely, you can reach out to other people who have negative feedback about your competitors. If you set up Alerts to track when your competitor’s names are mentioned, you can reach out to people who have left negative comments about your competitors and invite them to try your services or products, instead. Don’t drag your competitors through the mud – simply offer an invitation to see what you have to offer, and consider adding how it addresses their specific needs.

Avoid Mudslinging Online

One unsavory aspect of the Web is how easy it is to get into mudslinging contests. If a competitor is leaving negative comments about you somewhere, resist the temptation to drag your competitor through the mud, too. Simply inform your customers that a competitor has left those comments. Alternately, don’t drag your competitors through the mud, either.

Professional battles should stay behind the scenes, unless competitors are intentionally damaging your reputation, so keep your beef with your competitors out of the spotlight unless you’re directly responding to customer concerns. Think about how you feel when politicians engage in mudslinging tactics. It’s never popular, and it can result in losing a vote – so don’t do that to your business.

Case Studies: Successfully Managing Your Online Presence

I recently placed an order online for a hard-to-find product. I found a really good deal at a specific business, so I placed the order with that business, thinking I’d save money. I received an order confirmation, but days went by without receiving a shipment confirmation. I looked at the business policies listed on the website and saw that I should have gotten a shipment confirmation, and then gave the business an extra day or two after that just to be nice. Eventually, I called the business to ask about the status of my order.

When I spoke with someone at the business, he put me on hold while he checked my order. He came back a few minutes later saying he was having computer problems, and that he would have to call me back in 10 or 15 minutes. He never called me back. Instead, I got a call the next day from a completely different individual, who left me a message saying that my item was out of stock and that they had canceled my order. This person said that he had sent me an email confirmation stating that my order was canceled, but I never got one.

I did some research on the Web, and found many other people complaining of poor shipping practices, erroneous billing and other shopping-related problems with this company. I considered myself lucky that they hadn’t billed me, and moved on to order a similar item somewhere else.

The replacement item that I ordered from a different company yielded a completely different experience. I got four emails that afternoon – an email confirming my order had been placed, an email confirming that my order was being processed, an email with a copy of my invoice, and an email with shipment information. In addition, a representative of that company found a blog post I had written about the experience, and even left me a comment on my blog informing me that the product was in stock, and thanking me for the order.

I received the order quickly, and was thrilled by the customer service experience I got with the second company. I wrote another blog, adding my voice to the many other happy customers.

Now, when people go searching for those companies on the Web, they’ll see all of the customer comments. The first company has a slew of customer comments about poor shipping and billing practices, and frequent out-of-stock items. The second company has a host of positive comments about the order process and customer service.

If you were a customer, which company would you rather patronize?

Using email newsletters to reach your clients is a valuable tool. Whether you’re communicating to internal clients or external clients, newsletters give you an opportunity to explore new initiatives, discuss important issues or reach out and engage your audience. I write newsletters for both corporate and consumer-driven clients, and today I’m going to tell you about why and how newsletters can be an important tool in your online marketing repertoire.

Using Newsletters to Communicate with Internal Customers

Six Sigma, one of the most successful business management programs out there and utilized by many Fortune 500 clients, talks about both internal and external customers. In order to run a successful business, you must evaluate the needs of all of your customers, and develop processes to manage both internal and external customers. One of the keys to successfully managing your internal customers is communication. This is where a newsletter can be vital for handling your relationships with internal customers.

Many companies utilize the corporate newsletter to communicate with employees, or between divisions. However, the news in a corporate newsletter is often out-of-date and interesting only to the people who are featured. Many corporations have a hard time connecting with employees on a one-on-one basis, and creating relevant content. This is where an experienced writer can come in and help. By creating engaging content, you can solicit reactions from employees and get feedback about new programs and initiatives. An experienced writer can also help you find the right way to present an idea to minimize fuss and maximize constructive conversation.

Using Newsletters to Communicate with External Customers

Finding new channels to reach your external customers is a major part of your marketing focus. Not only must you find exciting ways to tempt your clients, but you must also find ways to interact with them. Newsletters are one valuable feature you can use to communicate with your potential and existing clients.

The key to creating engaging, effective newspapers is to provide valuable content. Don’t just write a sales pitch to your clients. Outline a problem or challenge that your clients might face. Then, tell them how your product or service solves that problem. Alternately, you can simply provide valuable content to your clients that keeps you in the forefront of their minds and simultaneously establishes you as an expert in your field. That way, when your external client does need your product or services, you’ll be at the front of their minds.

The Effectiveness of Using Email Newsletters to Reach Your Clients

Three things make print newsletters an ineffective medium to reach your clients: it’s cost-prohibitive, it’s not timely, and people don’t read as much print media as they used to read. Email newsletters cut down on all of those factors, and make it easy for clients to browse your content.

The only cost you have with email newsletters is the time spent writing the newsletters (or the cost of hiring the writer) and a potential cost if you use a paid broadcast email tool. It drastically reduces the cost versus printing paper copies of a newsletter and the cost of postage to mail them – a cost savings which make email newsletters an even more attractive medium through which to reach your clients.

Using email newsletters to contact your clients also enables you to present more timely content. You can plan a newsletter for a specific holiday or time of year, or you can jot off a quick email newsletter if an important piece of news or industry development occurs. You won’t be sending out updates weeks or months after they happen, as is often the case with print newsletters.

Finally, sending out email newsletters makes it easier for customers to ‘get’ and review your content. Many people simply throw paper mail away these days if it’s not a bill, a check or a hand-written letter from a friend. Right off the bat, you miss out on your opportunity to reach those customers. Email, on the other hand, is something that most people check every day, and spend a few minutes reviewing every morning or evening. With an email newsletter, you’ve got a real chance of getting in front of your customers – if only for a few seconds – and that gives you an opportunity to capture their attention and convince them to read your newsletter.

Don’t let this valuable marketing tool slip through your fingers. It’s inexpensive, and highly effective – especially compared to paper media. Email newsletters give you an opportunity to stay in regular touch with your customers – both internal and external – and initiate valuable communications. This translates directly to improved relations and higher conversions, at a very affordable cost. Using email newsletters, you can effectively target your audience and deliver a high-quality message, and the affordable rate paired with the increased conversion ratio means that email newsletters provide an excellent Return on Investment, or ROI, for your marketing dollars.

Invariably, style guides disagree on some grammar specifics. I wrote a post last year about using commas in a series. In researching that post, I discovered that both common usages are correct – depending on the style guide you consult. Bottom line: grammar isn’t a hard and fast rule. Consult the appropriate style guide for your usage, and when in doubt, consider your target audience.

Deciding Which Style Guide to Use

Deciding which style guide to use can pose challenges. Obviously, if a publication or client requires a specific style guide, use the specified style guide – even if it’s an in-house style guide that doesn’t agree with ‘correct’ grammar rules. If the publication or recipient doesn’t specify the style guide, think about how the writing is being used.

If you’re writing for a newspaper or consumer magazine, the AP Stylebook is probably the appropriate reference. The AP Stylebook is also widely used for Web writing.

If you’re doing business writing, on the other hand, you’ll probably be better served by The Chicago Manual of Style.

For scholarly writing, you might want Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style or The Publication Manual of The American Psychological Association (APA Style, not to be confused with AP Style). You may also want to use The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers or the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing for appropriate MLA Style.

Using ‘Correct’ Grammar vs. Common Parlance

When you’re doing formal writing, you should definitely use correct grammar. If you’re writing for a corporation, or drafting professional documents, you’re typically representing a company and should utilize correct grammatical rules and word usage. However, if you’re writing for a more informal audience – on a blog, for example, or for a less formal target demographic – you might want to consider intentionally throwing some of the grammar rules out.

For example, if you’re talking to a more informal audience, and you want to build a rapport, you might want to ignore grammar rules like “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” and throw one right out there on the end. In fact, I know a lawyer who intentionally prefers to use more common ‘incorrect’ punctuation and word usage so his clients view him as more accessible, instead of using a correct but stiff writing style that fails to connect with the readers.

The goal of all writing is to connect with your reader on some level, so consider who you want to reach when you’re writing a piece. Ask yourself what tone and style would be best received by your audience, and utilize that style. And yes – if it means bending some grammar rules, bend some grammar rules. The world will keep on spinning, and you might get a new customer out of it.

Proofread, Proofread, Proofread

Finally, to make sure you’ve got it right, proofread, proofread, proofread. Read your copy as you’re writing it to ensure you’re using proper grammar and putting punctuation in the appropriate places. When you’ve finished a piece, re-read it for any errors and correct any awkward word usage. For important pieces, close the document and walk away from it for a while, and then come back later and review one final time for correctness. The triple-check should be enough to ensure you’re sending a beautiful, correct piece of writing out into the world, to the best of your ability.