Every profession and trade works best with specific tools. Chefs need a good set of knives and various kitchen gadgets. Accountants need accounting and bookkeeping software. Every profession or trade has a key set of tools, and working on the Web requires its own set of tools. People who want to advertise or market on the Web need to use the right tools for the job, just like everyone else.

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is a very popular online marketing tool. Email marketing works just like traditional mail marketing, except the product is delivered directly to your client’s email inbox. Email marketing can get unwieldy without the right tools. Use an email marketing program, such as Constant Contact, to manage your email marketing campaign. Tools like Constant Contact enable you to create custom, branded templates, create and manage email lists, and track your results to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Web Tracking Tools

In order to effectively judge the success of your online marketing campaigns, you need to utilize Web analytics tools that provide you with detailed results. Google Analytics is one option for measuring your website’s performance, and Google Analytics conveniently integrates with Google AdWords to evaluate the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns. You can also use third-party tracking tools, such as Mint.

SEO Tools

SEO tools run the gamut from HTML checkers to keyword search tools to spider simulators, and everything in between. For simple SEO, you can use keyword search tools yourself to generate high-converting keywords for your niche. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is a free tool that can help you select appropriate primary and alternate keywords. If you want a more comprehensive range of SEO tools, SEO Chat has a great selection of SEO tools to cover practically every SEO need. SEO Chat’s tools include SEO calculators, page rank checkers, ROI calculators, and a range of other tools to enable you to tweak every aspect of your site’s SEO.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a fairly new trend, but one that’s growing exponentially. Businesses can utilize existing social media platforms as a valuable advertising and marketing tool. I’m writing a series of articles on effectively utilizing social media marketing, which includes an overview of social media marketing as well as individual articles geared toward how to utilize specific platforms. You can utilize various aggregators and plugins to integrate your social media marketing with existing marketing campaigns and platforms.

Interactive Content Marketing

Interactive content is a way for you to communicate directly with your clients. Interactive content includes things like turning comments into content, as well as things like featuring multimedia content on your website. Video and audio are far more valuable than simple text content, and provide another reason for your readers to visit your website. In online marketing, qualified traffic is the key to conversion, so featuring interactive content on your website gets you one step closer to improving your business.

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.

In December, I wrote the first part in a series on how to leverage social networking for your business. If you have a good Web presence, then social networking can provide a great tool for you to drive traffic to your site and capitalize on increased readership. In Part 2 of this series, we’ll look at ways to utilize a specific social networking tool for your business: Facebook.

Why pursue social networking for your business through Facebook?

At first glance, Facebook may not seem well-suited for business promotion. The premise of Facebook is to provide a means for friends and acquaintances to connect, stay in touch and interact with one another. However, at last count, Facebook had more than 350 million active users. This is a huge potential audience for your company’s products or services, and some companies have been very successful at managing a Facebook presence to increase and maintain customers.

Grow customers virally through Facebook.

Once you’ve established your presence on Facebook, you can grow customers virally through this social networking tool. When you create a Page for your business, Facebook users can become ‘Fans.’ When a user becomes a ‘fan’ of your page, his friends can see on his profile that he has become a fan of your page, and can follow a link to check out your Page. Your ‘fans’ can also share links and other information that you publish to their friends, thus growing your audience – and potential customers – virally through Facebook.

Create a Page.

While you can interact with people on Facebook as yourself, the best way to promote your business on Facebook is to create a Page for it. You can only create a Page if you’re an authorized member of an organization or company, but a Page gives you a professional face for your organization on Facebook. Once you’ve created a Page, you can add other people as administrators to help you manage Page content. When you create a Page, it doesn’t link back to you as the creator, and people aren’t able to use a Page to find your personal information.

Page offers valuable tools.

When you start a Facebook Page, you give yourself valuable tools to interact with your audience. Other Facebook users can become ‘fans’ of your page, and then they can see status updates that you post in their News Feeds. They can also browse to your Wall and view information that you’ve posted, interact with other users via comments and interact with elements of your Page. Finally, as a Page administrator, you can target your audience – sending updates to a specific demographic based on age, location or sex. This provides an extremely valuable method for you to target your marketing efforts at a core demographic, and to develop targeted messages for various demographics. You can also install Facebook applications on your Page, as well as manage Events through your page.

Share information.

One way in which you can communicate with your audience via Facebook is to share information with your fans. You can let them know about new products, specific events or share news related to your business. Some of the best business Pages are fun blends of news updates and interactive communities. Sharing information enables you to alert people to new products or services, as well as being in the public eye when a potential customer needs the services or products you offer.

Offer promotions.

Another very successful way to interact with your fans is to offer promotions via Facebook. Some companies hold prize drawings for people who become ‘fans’ as a way to get more people to sign up for a Page. In this way, if the buzz is good, you can gain hundreds or thousands of new ‘fans’ for the price of a few $50 gift cards or promotional merchandise. Then you have a captive audience to share updates and promote your services.

You can also host promotions that feature special deals for your Facebook fans to get them to take action with your company. For example, some companies host promotions periodically where Facebook fans get 10 to 20 percent off of an item for a weekend, or 20% off of an order with a special promotional code. This entices fans to visit your business or website and take action – buying products from you. This can be a great way to drastically boost your business, as well as spread viral buzz about your company.

Host events.

Finally, when you have a Page on Facebook, you can host events for your customers. This is a great option if you have a physical location and products to promote. If you create a Page on Facebook, you can host private “fans-only” events – extended hour events where only Facebook fans are admitted, and receive a discount or promotional materials for attending the event. If your business provides services, you can also host Events – free clinics or informational sessions for your services. Don’t underestimate events as a valuable way to promote your business.

Case Studies.

Don’t just take my word for it that Facebook provides valuable social networking tools for businesses. Personally, I have a Facebook profile and am a ‘fan’ of several businesses. These businesses include both services and products, and both physical and online-only businesses. Here are a few businesses that have utilized Facebook as a valuable way to promote their business and grow their customer base:

Zipcar.

Zipcar is a car-sharing company with vehicles available in several major cities around the United States. Zipcar has a Facebook page, which to date has over 28,000 fans. Zipcar uses its Facebook page to share information and reminders about policies, host promotions and create a buzzing community of fans.

Land’s End.

Land’s End is another company that has a Facebook Page and is successfully utilizing Facebook to reach potential customers. To date, Land’s End has over 253,000 fans. They regularly host promotions that involve giveaways to new fans, as well as use the Page to update fans about upcoming sales at the Land’s End website. Land’s End also hosts events which typically include promotions – all of which successfully generate buzz about products and increases sales.

Newegg.

Newegg is a website that sells primarily computers, computer components and computer accessories at reasonable prices, but they also sell other electronics. Newegg is a website only – no physical store locations to promote. However, Newegg has nearly 240,000 Facebook fans, and they employ a similar strategy to Land’s End on their Facebook page. Newegg uses its Facebook page to host promotions and share information about products with fans, but it’s also a fairly active fan community with people discussing computers and electronic products.

Formaggio’s Kitchen.

Finally, there’s Formaggio’s Kitchen: a physical store specializing in cheese and high-end food products. While Formaggio’s Kitchen does have a website storefront, it’s also a physical location, and much of its Facebook Page is dedicated to promoting the physical storefront. Formaggio’s Kitchen uses its Page to share information about products and post Events that it hosts at its storefront to sell and promote products.

You can leverage social networking for your business through Facebook.

These success stories prove that you can successfully leverage social networking to promote your business through Facebook. Thousands of businesses, both online only and with physical storefronts, utilize Facebook to reach a targeted audience and build a potential customer base. Even better – this is a relatively low-cost marketing tool: all you need is some time, or to hire someone to manage your business Facebook Page. Facebook provides an easy way to reach a potential audience of 350 million for the cost of a small time investment.

I’m good at my job. Many specialty providers are good at their jobs, be it Web design or programming or marketing. It’s typically why we get into the job in the first place. One thing that I notice among clients, though, is a tendency to hire an expert, and then attempt to do the job themselves. At best, this is a waste of time and money; at worse, it can actually be detrimental to your purpose.

Why people hire experts.

There are so many different things under the sun that it’s impossible for people to be experts in everything. As a professional writer, I consider myself an expert in certain types of writing. I’m also extremely savvy when it comes to SEO, and search-engine writing, because it’s a part of my niche and SEO is an increasing focus for many of my clients. I also do some Web design; I created my website and blog, and have done Web design for a few of my long-time clients. This makes me ideally positioned to handle SEO-related tasks and articles, because I understand it from a content side, a search-engine side and a Web design side.

However, I’m not an expert Web designer. When I run into problems with Web design, I ask my more-knowledgeable Web design friends (like a Web programmer I know, or a marketing graphic designer who happens to be a friend of mine) rather than trying to learn everything there is to know about the subject. Why? Because I could spend weeks reading programming books, learning Web programming languages and troubleshooting and debugging a website – or I could spend 10 minutes asking an expert.

People hire experts to save time and money.

People sometimes hire experts to do tasks that they simply don’t want to do. However, more often, people hire experts to save time and money doing something they could conceivably do on their own, with enough knowledge. It’s a good idea to learn enough about a subject to converse intelligently with your provider, and understand whether or not your provider is doing a good job. It’s inefficient to try to learn enough to do complex tasks on your own; your time is typically better spent doing more productive things.

Think of it this way: if you’ve got a plumbing problem, you’d hire a plumber to come in and fix it. In theory, you could spend time learning about how plumbing works, the specifics relative to your configuration and all the knowledge you’d need in order to fix the issue yourself. Then you’d have to buy the tools you need, and the parts you need. In all, you’d probably be looking at an investment of hours or days, and hundreds or thousands of dollars in tools and parts, in order to fix an issue that it would take a plumber 10 minutes to repair. You also wouldn’t have the practice doing it, so even if you could make the repair yourself, there’s no guarantee that you’d do it correctly or well.

How ‘doing it yourself’ can hurt your cause.

At best, handling ‘expert’ tasks on your own can cost you a lot of time and money. At worse, you can actually hurt your cause. Would you hire a plumber to come in and make a repair, and then poke holes in the pipes and try to seal them yourself afterward? Of course not. So why would you hire an expert in another field, and then make changes or add new problems after they’ve completed your task?

How to best utilize your experts.

If you’ve hired an expert to do something for you, let the expert do it. Experts become experts because they learn about their topics through the course of completing tasks. Experts know what works, and what doesn’t work. If you’re working with a genuine expert, they can provide something better-suited to the task than anything you can create, even if you ‘read up’ and learn about a topic. Yes, your solution might work; but why waste the time and money undoing the work your expert did, and implementing something that can actually hurt your end product?

Bottom line: when you hire experts, use them. Don’t say “Oh, I know you’re an expert, but I want to do this myself” or “I hired you for your expertise, but I want you to do this other thing, even though you say it won’t accomplish what I’m trying to do.”

If you want someone to complete the task your way, hire a college kid or an intern and save yourself some cash. If you want an expert who can design the best solution or product for your task, hire an expert – and use them.

I spent some time talking with one of my contacts back in August about utilizing social networking to promote your business. She was new to the social networking niche, and had no idea how to bring the power of social networking to bear on growing her business. We had a conference call about this topic last week, and I realized that many business owners or self-employed individuals are under-utilizing social networking as a valuable business tool. There aren’t enough resources to show people unfamiliar with social networking how to leverage this tool to grow their businesses.

Part One of this series is going to focus on a general overview, and give you an idea how to get started. Future additions to the series will focus more on specific aspects of utilizing social networking for your business, so keep an eye peeled for the next part in the series.

What is social networking, anyway?

For the purposes of this article, social networking is a description for applications or platforms where people can connect with one another and share their thoughts, likes and dislikes or specific, targeted data. Many types of social networking websites exist, some of the most popular of which are:

Facebook - a social networking platform designed for friends and family to connect and share updates, photos, videos, links and other personal interaction. One of the most popular social networking platforms, with more than 350 million active users. Decent business opportunities and good potential for small businesses or persons of note.

MySpace - another social networking platform similar to Facebook, but with fewer users and less functionality. As Facebook gains popularity, MySpace has been losing users; it currently has 271 million registered users, but that number doesn’t reflect active users. This social networking platform doesn’t offer as much potential for business users, but it is popular with music bands and musicians.

Twitter – a social networking service where people share updates in 140-character “Tweets.” Twitter is growing in popularity, and although Twitter does not release data on the exact number of users, a Web activity analysis in February indicated more than 6 million unique visitors. A Nielsen report in March ranked Twitter as the fastest growing “Member Community” on the Web. Many businesses leverage twitter effectively to keep users updated and offer special deals and offers.

Digg - Digg is a social news website where users can ‘rank’ news stories, articles and websites. The website counts the number of ‘Diggs’ and items with more digs get a higher rank in popularity searches. Digg also recommends items based on the items you Digg. Websites that get a lot of digs get a lot of traffic, and that typically translates to revenue. While this isn’t traditional social networking, Digg is a huge boon for traffic and can bring a lot of revenue to businesses.

Yelp - Compared to the other social networking sites that I mention here, Yelp is relatively small potatoes. Current user data is unavailable, but a news article earlier this year suggested Yelp had around 1.5 million users. However, Yelp is a review website, with focus specifically on restaurants and shopping (although you can post reviews about virtually any commercial service). I mention Yelp because user reviews can be powerful positive (or negative) statements about your business, and a savvy business owner leverages this opportunity instead of ignoring or discounting it.

How social networking benefits your business.

The benefits of social networking vary depending on how you use it and how your business is positioned. Typically, social networking opportunities can bring you page views that translate to potential clients. If your business is positioned correctly, you can take advantage of this increased traffic to capture higher conversion rates. If your business isn’t positioned correctly, or you don’t make good use of social networking opportunities, you’ll miss a lot of potential business.

So social networking serves one primary function: to get you traffic.

It’s up to you to position yourself to benefit from that traffic, and make good use of the opportunities presented by increased traffic.

Prepare your website for social networking.

First and foremost, you won’t get much benefit from social networking unless you have something to show people. Even if you have the best product or service in the world, you can’t convince people of that online unless you show them something. You need an informative, dynamic website to capture your readers’ attention. You need more than a one-page website with company contact information and a basic mission statement.

Look for an article in the next few weeks about how to create an engaging website. I have a lot of experience with this topic, and my article will feature helpful tips and common mistakes to avoid, as well as pointers on how to make sure you’re ideally positioned to capture your audience.

Begin using social networking services.

Once your website is ready and you’re confident that you’re ready to interact with your readers, begin utilizing social networking services. The next several articles in this series will talk about specific ways to utilize various social networking platforms for your business. In general, though; provide information, be transparent to your readers and don’t spam your followers.

Provide information. Use your social networking opportunities to tell readers about your products or services, or to advertise special opportunities. Sales are a great jumping-off point for launching a social networking campaign, but you can use social networking in many ways to promote your business.

Be transparent to your readers. Some companies and businesses simply use social networking to communicate with readers. A Web host, for example, might use social networking to communicate down-time, server issues or planned maintenance. While readers don’t want to hear about bad news, most appreciate hearing it from the source instead of being left in the dark to guess at what’s happening. You can also use it to talk about positive features or upcoming plans, but transparency promotes a sense of personal involvement with your readers. This is a very good thing.

Finally, don’t spam your followers. If your readers get endless promotional messages about products, services or sales, they might stop following you. You want to keep readers engaged. Give them good information, but don’t drive them away with excessive posting, or posting that has little value. This is a fine line to balance, and a seasoned social networking consultant can be extremely helpful in taking the right approach.

Next time.

In the next part in this series, I’ll begin looking at the ways you can utilize specific social networking platforms to promote your business. Look for the next part in the series on Thursday, December 17. [EDIT]Obviously, the next part in the series did not appear on Thursday, December 17. My apologies – I picked up a couple of extra projects that required my immediate attention and I got pulled away from my blog for a while. I’m currently working on drafting Part 2, and expect to have it live in January.[/EDIT]

In the meantime, if you have any questions or anything to add, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to drop me an email or comment the post and I’d be happy to open a discussion.