As a small business owner or manager living in the digital age it is important to understand how customers see and access your business on the web. This is important not just for your website and blog (you do have a blog right?) but it is also important that you keep up to date on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter so that your business can achieve the maximum benefit (and the maximum number of sales or service conversions) that these sites have to offer.

First things first

Start Blogging this year

If your company or organization isn’t blogging on at least a monthly basis you are missing out on opportunities to keep your customers updated on what you’re doing, and how your services can benefit them. Blogs can be set up relatively easily and cheaply (we are able to set up WordPress blogs for your pre-existing website,  for as little as $150).  Blogs don’t necessarily just have to be about your business practices, customers want to see that your company’s brand fits them and their lifestyle, Good Work Life Coaching, one of our clients has done an excellent job explaining what their business does and offering helpful advice that shows customers that they are knowledgeable without requiring a customer to pay up front (something that they are often times unwilling to do). Blogging gets your foot in the door, it lets customers read about who you are what you do and how you can help them in a much more accessible way.

Tap In To Social Media

Facebook

So your company has been blogging since last year, you’re done right? Well, blogging is a great start but if your company doesn’t have a Facebook page and a twitter account then you are missing out on a lot of potential customers.  It is very simple to set up a page on Facebook that describes what your company does, where you are located and what your hours are. It’s also important that this page links to your home page and your company’s blog. It is helpful if your page has some content that is updated such as photos of your company’s new products, or notes about new services that your company is offering. It is important to not abandon this new page once you’ve created it, you need to update it regularly. Some of our customers have found this process of maintaining multiple pages with company information tedious, because of this we offer services that tie your blog to your Facebook page so that all you have to do is update your blog.

Twitter

Twitter allows your company to release short explanations of what you’re up to. They bill themselves as a “micro blogging” service, so if you’re already blogging creating content for twitter shouldn’t be too difficult. We recommend that you update Twitter more frequently than most people update their blogs, but we do offer a service that automatically pulls content from your blog into twitter so that, again, blogging is the only content creation you have to concern yourself with.

It’s a New Year tap into new opportunities

Many small business owners don’t blog or utilize social media either because they don’t understand the importance of it, or because they don’t understand where to begin. Social media and Blogging are some of the most powerful tools for your business, and have the potential to generate serious amounts of capital for your business. We hope that this post has convinced you how important these tools are for the modern business, and if you’re confused please contact us (adam@casanovawebdesign.com or 865.236.1605) we offer services that can either help you in your social media journey or in some cases we can manage it all for you.

Happy 2011!

Adam

So how did we accomplish this feat? Simple, we used an application called tweet spinner http://tweetspinner.com/70914771. With tweet spinner you can set up keyword following and user mimicking to target twitter users who would be interested in your blog or your organization. We don’t think that tweet spinner should be used as a way aid spammers, but rather as a tool to effectively tell people about what you do and how you could help them.

Now, like we said tweet spinner offers several helpful tools such as keyword following (which allows you to automatically follow users who tweet about a specific keyword) and user mimicking (which allows you to follow all the friends or followers of another twitter user). But, like we said you don’t want to spam people so what is the best way to use this tool?

1. Find twitter accounts that are already established that relate to your organization.

users we mimicked

Finding people to model yourself after should be part of your day to day life anyway. Who better to mimic than someone who is already where you want to be. We selected 4 twitter users who were in the same field that we were, who were already established, after a week almost 40% of users we followed followed us back, talk about reciprocity!

2. Keyword following

With keyword following you follow users who have tweeted about topics that relate to your organization (up to 40 at a time). As you can see some users were more interested in our blog than others, and you’ll have to play around with this. This information serves two purposes. First, and most obviously, it helps you target specific keywords, but it also tells you who your target market should be in other ventures, it helps to know what sort of people are interested in you.

Don’t Over-Do it!

Don’t go too crazy, twitter does have a follow limit of 2000 follows (unless you yourself have more than ~1800 followers in which case your follow limit is about 10% more than the number of followers you have). Also, you can’t follow more than 1000 people per day, so don’t try it. One final note, spammers are bad people don’t be one, twitter and karma will punish you.

We’re really liking twitter, especially now that we have so many people to talk to. Twitter isn’t completely about numbers, it is about the relationships that you can create with other people in your industry, but tweet spinner is an excellent tool to help you find people who are interested in the same things you are. Be kind to to twitter community and they’ll be kind to you.

Regards,

Adam Haney

Chief Developer

Casa Nova Designs

The tool is still a little off (it scrapes google pages using PHP’s curl library and sometimes it counts google’s internal links as search results). But, it is a good way to see about where your site is in the google keyword war.

You can find Google Rank Search at googleranksearch.casanovawebdesign.com

Regards,
Adam Haney
Chief Developer
Casa Nova Designs