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  1. 13 Apps for Combining Business & Social Media

    Now that you have set up accounts at a few (or several) social media profiles, you will want to use it to its full potential. Of course, maintaining a social media listing takes time, so learning how to get the most of your efforts is important. Fortunately, making your company’s social media profile profitable can be done through the effective use of tools and applications that can increase your business while decreasing the number of hours you spend on your Facebook, Twitter, Buzz or other social media profiles.

    7 Facebook Apps to Improve Your Business

    As one of the most recognized social media sites, Facebook has massive potential for increasing your number of customers. Recognizing that a number of applications have been designed to assist businesses in customer services and product promotion. Some of the most useful are:

    • Contests, promotions and polls are a great way to support your business and encourage interaction with your fans, just be sure to follow the Facebook guidelines for using contests.
    • SocialToo  allows users to update their profile pages and promote Twitter from their Facebook status update box.
    • SocialOomph provides update tools for Facebook, Twitter, and StatusNet.
    • Network Blog makes it easy to promote your blog on Facebook and connect with others.
    • JobMagic is a recruiting application that expands a recruiter’s range through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
    • Social Store Builder enables a store owner to sell and display product from their Facebook page.
    • IAnalyst– This new Facebook app allows you to integrate HTML into your page. It is especially helpful for small business owners.

    6 Twitter Management Tools

    Depending on your business, you may have opted to set up a Twitter account. However, as you are limited to 140 characters per tweet, you will want to make the most of your text and Twitter time. Here are some tools to enhance your Twitter business account:

    • HootSuite.com offers a free tool to help manage multiple social media accounts. You can personalize columns, view multiple feeds, and create messages then select what social media accounts to post to. You can even schedule when tweets go out and have custom searches for topics that interest you.HootSuite
    • CoTweet allows you to manage as many as 5 accounts with a single login; there are workflow management tools and the ability to take notes on Twitter for co-users to view.
    • EasyTweets is a low management tool for multiple Twitter accounts. It allows you to post and track RSS feeds in Google Analytics, set up continuous searches for brand mentions, and follow those users who mention your brand.
    • TweetDeck keeps track of multiple social media accounts. You can follow topics with saved searches, manage conversations and records, and share or watch video clips, YouTube and photos.
    • PeopleBrowser allows a visual browser based dashboard view of social activity and to create and manage groups by adding public/private tags.
    • Twitterfeed.com  takes RSS feeds from a blog and posts them as a Tweet linking them back to your site.  However, be careful not to overuse this automation tool as it can then be seen as spam and people may stop acknowledging it.

    With the growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter, you can expect to find more and more tools to take advantage of these services. With the speed at which social media platforms are being developed, having tools to help automate and simplify things are almost essential! Stay tuned in for the next post where we will be exploring more tools for social media research and also tips for building a social media network!

  2. Blogging on Blogging

    Well, I’m sitting in a workshop on blogging this morning. Although I’ve been blogging for years, I figured it’s always a good idea to keep learning and it never fails to surprise me how much there is to know, even on a topic that you consider yourself an expert in. I figured I’d take the opportunity to blog about it 🙂 The speaker for this event was Denise Tawwab and you can check out her website here: http://ncconnected.org

    The bad news – In the pre "Web 2.0" world, when customers or
    clients were disgruntled, they would typically call your support number
    and let you know…and perhaps, at worst, tell a few of their friends.
    But with the current online social media phenomena, if you make a
    client unhappy, they are only a few clicks away from telling the whole
    world about it. And posts on the internet never go away.

    The good news
    – Because of the accessibility, you can wield the power to promote your
    company in a very large arena with a very small budget. All it takes is
    your time.

    Types of Blogs:

    1. CEO Blog – this is when the owner of a company blogs, usually for promoting the business or industries related to the business
    2. Executive Blog – Just like #1, but involves a group of people
    3. Group Blog – When any group of people share a blog
    4. Company – supported Blog – When employees are encouraged to blog internally to the company
    5. Topical Blog – Blogging on a particular topic (duh!)
    6. Promotional Blog – Blogging for the purpose of promoting something
    7. Advocacy Blog – Blogging for the purpose of raising awareness about something

    Links:
    http://www.technorati.com
    http://blogsearch.google.com
    http://blogpulse.com
    http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com

    For 50 Power Tips for Blogging, view Denise’s blog here: http://denisetawwab.wordpress.com

  3. Taking Full Advantage of RSS

    I’ve been blogging for some time now, and one of the best aspects of blogs – being easily syndicated via RSS feeds, has one big downfall: about 80% of the people in the world have no idea what RSS Feeds are. Enter Feedburner, a great service, recently acquired by Google, that takes RSS feeds and makes them able to be subscribed to via email – a technology anyone can appreciate. We have used Feedburner for a long time now, and recently we found a service that seems to leave it in the dust…along with many of the other email services out there like Constant Contact and iContact which cater to more sophisticated email newsletters.

    MailChip is an online email marketing service not unlike Contant Contact or iContant, but offers the ability to send out newsletters pulled from RSS feeds, just like Feedburner. And the best part is the price. It’s about half of the price of Constant Contact and iContact and has just about all the great features, like very nicely-designed email templates and the ability to manually sign up subscribers to your list, which Feedburner (also free) lacks.

    MailChip has the ability to also track user actions via Google Analytics, which is…wonderful. Not to mention it’s very easy to use and is FREE for those out there with 100 subscribers or less. And if you have more than that, $10 a month is enough to get you rolling, which is less than most other enewsletter options out there. 

    So, we’re going to give MailChip a try and I have a feeling it’s going to become the RSS email syndication service of preference that we’ll be recommending to our clients from now on.

  4. Automatically Tweet Your News or Blog

    Twitter is a great tool. But it doesn’t replace blogging – although it can suppliment it. There is a great service out there called TwitterFeed that will take any RSS feed and send new posts to your Twitter account automatically. That is great because people who are interested in your Tweets are probably also interested in your blog and this way you can promote your blog with no extra effort. And don’t forget you can use RSS feeds to automatically send new posts from your news or blog to other blogs, Facebook, etc.

  5. News Module Now Posts to External Blogs!

    One of the painful parts of getting your company information out there on the web for better Google page rank is manually posting news and other information to the main blogs out there, such as Blogger and WordPress. Since Blogger has the feature to post items via email, we’ve added a new feature to the preferences section of our news module that sends out an email every time you post something new. So that means that if you are using our CMS and our updated "News" module, your Blogger account will update automatically with the new post. That means more exposure for you, with no extra work. As for WordPress and Facebook, they can subscribe to your news RSS feed (look in the widgets sidebar for WordPress), so those can get updated automatically too. Cool, eh?