So from this you can see that Twitter is becoming a major marketing tool for many companies to help grow to a new audience. Many companies use twitter to promote services or products, whether this is via direct messaging or constantly tweeting links to their website. This method can be seen as spam, and the only thing you are likely to achieve is your followers to un-follow you.

You need to build trust amongst your followers, you need to interact with them, build relationships with your followers, provided them with useful information and tips, help people by retweeting their tweets, this will help to build a community of business helping each other.

So before you jump in, it is wise to sit down and produce a Twitter marketing strategy plan. I will be posting an article regarding this shortly so keep a look out for it. Once you have your plan you need to keep to it, and take into account the following 3 areas of how best to use Twitter for your business.

Networking

Twitter is a social networking site, so be social and see what other businesses are out there; that you wouldn’t normally be able to communicate with. Twitter is all about networking with other like minded people who want to be part of a community to help each other. It is also a great tool to find companies in your industry and see what content they link to. It may be wise to retweet as it could be useful for your followers.

You have to remember you are trying to build trust in your followers, so by helping your followers and not expecting anything back will be more rewarding, and you will build a loyal followers base, who in turn will hopefully return the favour.

Marketing

Twitter is a direct messaging marketing tool, which can reach people locally or millions worldwide. So the platform should be used in your marketing strategy to promote your company, and should be mentioned on all company stationary and online signatures.

The basis for your twitter marketing is to increase your twitter followers this can be done by using some specific tools such as Twellow and Tweepi, to follow people in your business sector.

Use twitter to promote special offers or deals, if your company blogs make sure you tweet each new blog, and make sure you have social media buttons on your content so visitors can also share your content.

If you promote events make sure you use twitter to spread the word, and also use a # tag to help promote your event during the day. If you use other social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn use the Twitter apps that are available to integrate your social media output.

So to conclude you need to constantly promote your content and make sure your content is sharable for your followers to pass on to their followers, but the main thing to remember is the content has to be useful to your followers.

Customer Service

Nowadays more and more brands are starting to use twitter for customer service. Companies are able to listen to want customers are saying about your brand and have the ability to respond in a quick and direct manner to help the customer resolve an issue they maybe having. So it is a great way to engage with your customers and also turn any unhappy customers into a happy customer who will promote your brand.

It is always good to watch conversation and can give a good indication of your brands reputation online in social media; this method is passive, so good customer service has to be active. So to get started you will need to make your Twitter presence known by displaying it on all your marketing material and have it visible on your website. Invite users to follow you and state you are here to engage with them via social media if they have any problems with your brand.

If you do use Social media for your customer service it is also to take into account the staff members that will be representing your brand, it’s not good to let your latest job placement or intern replying to your users. You need a dedicated team that has been trained for the role as these will be the people speaking for your brand.

Few weeks ago Google announced the new series of Google Webmaster Help Videos and requested from SEOs and Webmasters to post their questions. One of the questions that was posted was regarding Google uses Social Media data within its ranking algorithm?

And here is what Matt Cutts had to say on the matter.

Here’s a glance at the report:
Explicit search, June 2011 (doesn’t include image/contextual/Google Instant)

• Google: 65.5% (essentially unchanged from May)
• Yahoo: 15.9% (essentially unchanged)
• Bing: 14.4% (up from 14.1% in May)

Bing’s 14.4% is an all-time high share of explicit search for the search engine. Jointly, Bing/Yahoo is now at 30.2% market share, up from 30% in both April and May.

Bing has gained from both Ask and AOL, which are at record lows of 2.9% and 1.4%, respectively.

Core search, June 2011

• Google: 64.5% (up from 63.3% in May)
• Yahoo: 17.5% (down from 19.6% in May)
• Bing: 14.1% (up from 13.1% in May)

In June, there were 16.7 billion explicit searches, up 8% over June 2010. The core search figure is also up to 18.7 billion, a 14% gain over June 2010.

We have been expecting the Panda 2.2 update based on news from the SMX Advanced conference that was held in Seattle on the 7th-8th June. While presenting, Matt Cutts told SMX attendees that the Panda 2.2 update has been approved, but hasn’t been rolled out yet, but it will be happening very soon.

We believe the update hit sometime late last week around the 17th, which Google manually pushed out the Panda 2.2 update.

The Panda 2.2 update will target a common webmaster complaint related to the original Panda/Farmer update: sites that scrape and re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content.

“A change has been approved that should help with that issue,” Cutts said.

He also reiterated some previous Panda-related information:

• Google will continue to tweak and update the Panda algorithm.
• There’s no exact date yet for when Panda will launch fully beyond English-language searches.

Webmaster are able to add the Google +1 button onto their sites, Google have create a code generator that will allow webmasters to customise the buttons appearance to suit the website it is being added to, it also comes available in 40 languages, however the recommendation will only appear on English based search results.

Social is becoming one of the main players within internet marketing techniques to help increase websites presence within search engine results. Google +1 button is to compete with other social media, such as Fackbook’s ‘Like’ button. Google +1 button has the potential to affect your website ranking within Google search engine results, which will have a bearing on the increase of click through rates, with more people clicking on highly recommended websites. This new social button is set to affect search traffic in a big way, it now up to internet user to embrace Google +1 button which could see the start of Social Search taking off.

So to take advantage of this new tool, you will have to be sign-in to your Facebook account whilst searching within Bing, which shows users what sites and services their friends have used and recommended within the search results.

Google did a similar move to incorporate social media into their search result by displaying Facebook and Twitter feeds. However this move by Bing goes one step further by displaying comments from Facebook users underneath the search results.

Microsoft clearly wants to use the vast amount of data amassed by Facebook, which now has around 600 million users worldwide, by using social media to give a more personal review from friends and family known as the "Friend Effect" into its search engine results.

If you would like to find out more about Social Media and how it can help your business grow please contact Neil at neil@cloudbluewebdesign.co.uk.

If you would like to discuss more about how to improve your website listing within search engines listing please get in touch with me at neil@cloudbluewebdesign.co.uk.