SEO / SEM Blog by Search Circus

Hootsuite is a great Twitter tool for easy social media marketing.

It’s no secret that Twitter is a great tool to use as part of your company’s social media marketing campaign. Its easy to use, a great way to get quick bite-size pieces of information to your customer base and tweets are now being indexed in Google. However, many businesses don’t have time to tweet multiple times a day, or simply put, they make a Twitter account and forget about it. Luckily, there are Twitter tools that let you schedule tweets. Instead of remembering to tweet every day, a business owner could simply take a small amount of time out of his or her Monday to write and schedule tweets for the whole week. This makes using Twitter much less time consuming but the business is still using the social network to its advantage. Here are 5 Twitter applications that allow users to schedule tweets provided by an article on SheGeeks.net.

Hootsuite: This Twitter tool allows users to manage multiple Twitter accounts if necessary and write and schedule Tweets as far into the future as desired. From the Hootsuite main page you can see your Twitter home feed as well as your personal sent tweets, pending tweets and track your analytics to see which tweets with links people are clicking on.

Twuffer: Twuffer allows Twitter uses to create a list of future tweets and schedule. Businesses use Twuffer to tweet announcements, reminders and let followers know about a new blog or podcast.

Future Tweets: This free service lets users schedule tweets so you can appear like you’re tweeting even if you are away from your phone or computer. It also lets you tweet backwards, which may not be useful for work, but looks really cool anyways.

TwAitter: This free services allows businesses to schedule future tweets as well as have your business blog or RSS feed automatically fed to Twitter.

CoTweet: Using this Web client, you can archive tweets, monitor keywords and trends, manage multiple Twitter accounts and schedule future tweets.

Using Twitter tools like these that allow you to schedule your tweets will help your business generate more of an online presence and activity on your Twitter account without using up all of your valuable time. However, don’t use tweet schedulers for spamming your followers with multiple tweets at once or the same tweets every day. Schedule your tweets throughout the day and don’t always make them advertisements. Use tweets to make announcements about new products or services, hold contests and giveaways, alert followers of new blog posts or videos and hold sales or distribute coupon codes. Ask a question and have your followers tweet you the answer or provide them with interesting and useful information. Spamming followers with advertisements 6 times a day will cause people to lose interest and un-follow you. Once you begin using one of these great Twitter tools in your social media marketing campaign, you will begin to see the positive impact regular Twitter use can make on your business.

Follow these tips for using a Facebook fan page for your business's social media marketing plan.

In a recent webinar presented by Dan Zarella entited “The Science of Facebook Marketing,” there were many key points presented that business owners must keep in mind when planning to use Facebook as part of their social media marketing plan. Zarella pointed out during the webinar that many people who discuss business-related terms on Facebook don’t get a lot of “fans” to join their fan page, and even more businesses make the mistake of making a Facebook group rather than a fan page. Here are the top 5 tips we thought were the most important from webinar.

Use Facebook to facilitate existing relationships. People go on Facebook to connect with people they actually know. As a business owner, do not make a Facebook profile and send friend requests to random people. Instead, make a Facebook fan page that would be appealing to your would-be customers and clients and they will come to you. If you have customers who are “regulars,” don’t “friend” them with your personal profile, use the fan page to connect with them. It’s more professional that way.

Exposure, awareness and motivation. These are the three steps that lead to fans or “likes” on your Facebook fan page. Exposure means someone needs to be exposed to your page. This can happen through one of their mutual friends liking your page or them getting a suggestion to like your page. Awareness means someone needs to be aware that you page exists, it goes hand in hand with exposure. In other words, you need to make your page interesting enough to bring attention to itself. That way it will bring awareness to potential fans that might enjoy your page. Motivation is the third step. This means once the potential fan is exposed to your page, they must have some kind of motivation to “like” your page. This means the page needs to have fun content, appealing fan members and good interaction. These things will lead to more fan page “likes.”

Stay away from business buzzwords. Facebook users aren’t interested in buzzwords, they are on Facebook to network with others and build social relationships. Some of the fan pages that have the least “likes” on Facebook include words like “consulting, productivity, leverage, client, marketing.” On another note, people love talking about food, so if you can somehow fit that into your page you could benefit from it.

Social proof. The rule of social proof goes like this, the more we see people doing something, the more we think it’s correct. This is just like the bandwagon propaganda technique. If a lot of a certain person’s friends on Facebook “like” your business fan page, it’s even more likely that that person will too. When your page has a lot of fans, it makes it look more appealing to others and will lead to even more “likes.”

Sharing. Articles with the word “video” in them are shared 30% more on Facebook than articles that don’t contain the word. Also articles with digits in them are shared more on Facebook. Facebook gets the most sharing action on the weekends and the most shareable words are “why, how, most, world.” So don’t neglect your fan page on the weekends and try to share articles that contain share-friendly words to attract positive attention and dialogue to your business fan page.

The Webinar ended with one last important piece of advice, which was “think mainstream.” On Facebook, things that appeal to the mainstream will get you far. Top 10 lists, funny videos, polls, interesting or entertaining articles will make your fan page a fun place for people to visit, which will make it more attractive to others and encourage more “likes.” Most importantly, remember Facebook has great potential as part of your business’s social media marketing campaign, as long as you keep it light and keep the business-y advertise-y stuff to a minimum or cleverly hide it with sales announcements and special Facebook promotions.