So you thought Twitter was just for fun, I have even funnier news for you: It can be used to boost your business. It does not matter if you are a small company, huge or medium one. It really does not matter what country you are at. Twitter works in spite of any circumstances whatsoever; if you apply certain techniques we will share with you here.

Many people are still thinking these Social Network sites are a waste of time and money. But from many Social Network experts’ point of view, you are actually investing money and time just by sitting in front of your PC and micro blogging every now and then.

If you are an employee, you can increase the productivity ratios of your company just by Tweeting. Just exactly as was confirmed by a research made by the University of Melbourne.

In the medium and longer run ROI can experience plausible increasing rates, and if it’s being used effectively in the shorter run. Social Network and more especially Twitter, for example are being used by famous brands. They use it either for promoting their corporate blog just like Kodak, to keep on track of their customer’s file feedback, Samsung or the North American fast food brand Popeye Chicken and Ford Motors.

They have placed a Twitter Follow me gadget on their front page. There are quite a lot of companies using Twitter in order to enrich their Organizational Culture, by sharing internal news with the employees. They have different Twitter accounts for different departments such as Customer Service, Value Chain Management, for example in the case of Ford, for their different sub-brands such as Mustang, Racing, trucks, etc.

Also to mention ATTnews use this system to keep updated their fans with recent news about their company, Jetblue Airlines use this wonderful system as an efficient option to support their customers and Comcast is using this tool to strengthen and add value to their customer relationship service.

One of the ways they are adding value is by placing a real photo in the profile rather than a cold logo. According to their opinion this is a good RRPP weapon. Twitter is also being used for companies’ product releases. For example Dell computers use this to show coupons or offers on many products and services and Starbucks coffee company is staying tune with their customers on the latest introductory offers related to their specialty coffee products around the world. A remarkable thing about Starbucks is that they are planning to install more sophisticated applications that will enable them to interact more with their customers, applications similar to phone to phone conversation. HRBlock, Whole Foods Markets, Corn Flakes, Southwest Airlines or Quaker Wheat etc, another list of companies could be endless.

Twitter creates sustainability within a real and efficient marketing plan and because of that, certain important steps to make it work should be pondered: *Invest quite a considerable time on building a strong profile, as in real life the first impression is highly important. Hire a good graphic designer if possible, or simply grab an eye catching Twitter background; there are a lot around the net.

Remember to respect your corporate image mood and feel. Any brand should have that and it will definitely differentiate you from the pack.

Make it constant in any other ways such as real personalized cards, pens, pins, etc.

*Start widening your network by adding worth following people, celebrities and government officials.

Posting useful information in a regular basis and sending a warm welcome to your new followers gives a good impression of you.

Start adding potential followers, those related to your business or who you might consider to be key contacts.

Remember to use your profile as an ongoing profile, which means starting to add feeds to your Twitter from your website rather than a static or boring link.

Twitter has a very good application named Twitterfeeds which updates your Twitter with any content or title you add to your site, providing fresh content to your Twitter as well.

* Twitter API’s to increase higher and more effective interactional levels among your followers from your Desktop, Twhirl, TweetDeck or Twitterrific etc.

* As always keep alive the social fire, by helping others and being useful to others. Joining to social organizations and professional associations or by attending conferences and other events is another good tactic.

Twitter has also a tool named Tweetup, where you can plan virtual meetups that would possible lead you to the real world.

Please do not discredit real social interactions, especially for sales closures.

* Be a proactive Twitter, that means do not just post or copy paste information from other sources or sites but post your own work from your own website. If you are working on a new research or project start sharing the information from your own website by sharing your expertise, it will help you to boost your personal brand.

Just remember not to boast about, arrogance is a big thumb down in this case. Instead try to flow and have a good time with your new Twitter friends. Retweeting (@RT) useful information from other users is in this case a good tactic.

By doing so you will give credit to those who deserves them and it will help you a lot as well. Once you have set up the previous mentioned Twitter fundamentals, you can use now the most important business Twitter research tools which are highly efficient.

Many companies are already including them in their market domination programs:

*Tweetdeck that was mentioned before and helps you in this case to organize and optimize your list, all this in front of your eyes, in your desktop.

*Tweetbeep is another wonderful tool which helps you to monitor your brand. It is compared to Google Alerts. By using this tool you will be able to monitor your industry and name and the best thing in this is all information needed is sent to your email or folder if you enable it. You can catalogue it and categorize it in real time by field and segmentations.

*Tweellow as we mentioned in previous articles, is like a Twitter Yellow pages or a huge Twitter data base. It is a digital directory, which has all what you want for a global and holistic order either locally, regionally, worldly or statistically.

This tool can be used together with Twellowhood and allows you to do your business research in a geographical basis; unfortunately for now it only includes Canada and United States.

Twellow is highly used for job hunting and this tool is being used by renowned head hunters. Of course it can be used by job seekers as well.

*Nearby Tweets is a very useful application, this helps you to search for tweets based on desired keywords or location. Although it is quite new (launched on January 2009), it promises to be the boom of all applications.

By using Nearby Tweets, your local or geographical research can also be filtered by locating other’s interests by enriching your search and adding value to your work. It is a real time application and you do not have to be nobody’s friend to follow market trends, it is like you are watching through the window of your 10th floor apartment what is happening at a crowded street of New York.

*TweetTree is another Twitter user research tool. Only the difference from other research tools and search tools is that it displays similar results from other Twitter’s posts even from other social network sites such as YouTube, Twitpic, Flicker, etc.

*Blip.FM is like having a Twitter profile but with a CD player included, where you can choose your music and start swaying to and fro your Twitts away.

*TwinFluence and TwinCounter helps you to monitor either your whole trajectory or influence level or simply just analyzing your Twitter strength level among other Twitters, same as other statistic with charts and graphs.

These tools can help you structuring a solid personal or brand SWOT. Twitter’s algorithm is also changing and mutating into more search engines friendly crawling system, changing traditional marketing and business paradigms into the twitter business strategy and twitter marketing ones.

That means in the mean time it will compete with Google as a search engine system. Because of this, certain mathematical parameters should be applied here in this case and for those into search engine marketing works, however this is the topic of another article which will come soon.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Henry_Alzamora

As a newbie starting out in your online business you are often besieged with lots of fear such as the fear of failing or losing your investment. You also wondered if you will ever make money and if you will succeed in your new business.

Well it’s strange that a lot of people spend more energy thinking of useless ideas instead of using this same energy on their new business. Many others too procrastinate too much. They think too much instead of actually doing the work that they know they need to get done. Here are a few quick tips to help you settle down in your business so that you actually start doing some real work for your business.

Find A Good Mentor
Finding a good mentor who is both an experienced Internet Marketer and someone who is making money in his online business, can really help you tremendously. There are some marketers who do either do personal or group coaching provided that you join one of his affiliate programs. Such a mentor can help you reduce your learning process and you also avoid making the same mistakes others did before you.

Do This Before You Write Your First Article
As a newbie one of the first things you should be focusing on is creating fresh content on your website after you set it up. However before you start to do that, you must learn the basic onsite search engine optimization, or SEO. Essentially there are two types of SEO – onsite and offiste.

Onsite focuses on what you can optimize on your website content like keywords, tags, headers, while offsite SEO refers to link building with other websites. Spend some time to learn some basic SEO onsite techniques and apply what you learned on your website. Learning, knowing and finally applying SEO on your business sums up one of the many processes you will have to do in order to succeed in your online business.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=P_Lee

I’ve watched people work a hundred hours a week and never make more than a handful dollars on the Internet. I’ve also watched people develop Internet marketing skills and cut their weekly work schedule down to no more than a few hours a week.
In this article let’s talk about four things you need to make money working on the Internet and be successful without putting in too many hours.

1. You need a computer or access to one. Many people have a money making opportunity sitting somewhere in their home. It’s also interesting to note how many people make money without a computer of their own.
They simply access one at your local library and spend a couple hours a day working online. The point here is do not use what you do or do not have as an excuse because there are people making money working on the Internet in various ways with nothing more than a computer.

2. You need internet access and high speed hook up if possible. Time is money when you work online and it’s worth investing in high speed Internet if it’s available in your area. You’ll be amazed at how much more effective you are and how much time you can save every day as you breeze through from one page to the next.

3. You need at least one skill. It does take a least one skill to make money working on the Internet.
Of course it depends on the method you’re going to use to make money, but developing traffic generation skills will make you more money than anything else you learn.
Once you figure out how to get traffic to your website you are really only limited by the number of websites you want to build. As a matter of fact you do not even need your own website if you can get traffic because you can market other people’s websites such as an affiliate marketer and make a killing online.

4. You need to get to work. It is kind of sad to watch people talk about making money online and yet never putting in much of an effort to do it.
If you have a little bit of money to invest you can outsource things which will save you a lot of time. You can also purchase Internet traffic which makes it faster for you to begin making sales. However you will need to consistently work at least a little bit to get the money coming in.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=C._Mark_Babcock