I’m going to start this post assuming you already know what Twitter is, why you would want to use it and the very basics of how to navigate around.  Despite the fact that many people use Twitter, not all are using it to their fullest potential.

1. Use Hashtags

You might be wondering what a hashtag is. They the odd looking words you see that start with #.  For example, if you were browsing Twitter the night of Whitney Houston’s death you might have seen #whitney floating around in a tweet or two.  The reason people include the hastags is basically to tag a tweet with the subject content. There’s really no rules when it comes to hashtags, no conventions to follow.   One important thing to keep in mind is that the hashtag is one word.  For example “#whitney houston” only results in a hashtag of #whitney (without her last name).

So why do these matter?  Let’s pretend you have a small pet boutique on Main Street and there is an upcoming parade. You can tweet about the sale for parade goers and tag the parade name to publicize the message to anyone searching about the parade.

2. Acknowledge Others

This may sound like a funny concept to apply to Twitter, but it’s very important.  Twitter is by definition a social media platform and therefor the “social” aspect of it needs to be at the forefront.  Did a customer deliver treats to your veterinary office?  Did your IT provider help save the day?  Tweet about these things.  If it’s possible, directly refer to the person or the company by using “@TwitterName” in the tweet.  They will be more likely to retweet or acknowledge your business. The additional bonus is that you will also be showing your character to future customers.

3. Use a Social Media Manager

Whether it’s TweetDeck, HootSuite or Soobees using a social media manager will simplify your social media life (after you get around the learning curve).  These tools will help make sure you don’t miss anything essential.  It’s also useful for making announcements at specific times.  For example, if you’re  a gourmet food truck you can use these tools to announce your location or daily specials.  Schedule them for the week and you won’t have to worry about forgetting.

4. Tweet Regularly

I know that everyone hears this often, but it truly is essential.  I’m not saying that you need to tweet multiple times a day.  You just need to be consistent.  Posting five times a day for a couple weeks and then disappearing for months will sink your reputation. You’ll lose followers.

Like all things, getting into a regular routine takes practice and a little bit of planning. Not sure how to get started? No problem – contact Synergetic Web Group about developing a custom social media plan specific to your business.

So your website now features a shiny new blog.  First off, the most important thing you need to remember is to use it.  And don’t just use it it to announce things you are interested in.  Publish content that will help your viewers or customers.

Once you’re updating it on a regular basis and you have a handful of posts up, the next thing to do is list it in blog directories.

Where you might ask? Use this friendly list.

• Technorati
• Blogorama ($1.99/yr)
• Blogs.com
• DMOZ – The Open Directory
• FeedPlex
• FeedMap – Local Blog Directory
• Loaded Web
• FuelMyBlog
• OnTopList

Once you submit your site to the directories above, don’t forget to keep posting.  Creating useful content and posting on a regular basis will do much more for SEO and gaining readers than any of the above sites will.

Small businesses are often at a disadvantage when it comes to legal issues. Hiring a lawyer can cost a pretty penny, but not hiring one can cost a fortune. However,  online legal resource can help you sort through some situations without a penny.

Small business owners can get information on choosing and forming the right legal structure for your business, legal tips on day-to-day business operations, an overview of employment law issues, and much more..

Here are some very helpful sites to visit:

• http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com
• http://www.legalzoom.com
• http://www.nfib.com/business-resources/legal-help/legal-tips
• http://nolo.com
• http://www.score.org/topics/legal-issues-includes-business-licenses

And some articles I have found interesting:

• Would You Fire Someone for Eating Leftovers?

• The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act: The Solution Or Just Getting In The Way?

• Google Takes Aim At Lawyers

If the sites above don’t help, try contacting your local SCORE chapter.  They boast a very interesting stat on their site – 91% of businesses that worked with SCORE in 2010 are still in business. Their experts can help you determine if you do need to hire a lawyer.

Here’s my favorite blog posts of the week:

1. Finding Customers around the World: Announcing SBA’s Export Video Contest – http://go.usa.gov/BSv

The SBA and Visa are sponsoring a contest for small business owners to produce a video “Where will my next customer come from?”.  Businesses can submit their export stories in 3 minute high def videos.  Winners will receive cash prizes.  I see this as a dual purpose – it could be a content submission, you tube piece, and a marketing video for your site. Videos must be uploaded by Sept. 3 so get started soon!

2. When Bad Things Happen To Productive People – http://t.co/V9RqOI5

This is an interesting post – more of tips really.  I found it particularly helpful right now when I’m looking towards a hectic week.  If you don’t follow 99% on Twitter, I would suggest adding them.  They have great insights from time to time.

3.  How to Share Company Financials With Your Employees – http://ow.ly/5WrII

How transparent should small business owners be with company finances? Learn what to share and, most importantly, what not to share.

4. 10 Money-Saving iPhone Apps for Business Travel – http://mashable.com/2011/08/07/iphone-ipad-apps-business-travel/

Small businesses don’t have the large corporate spending accounts that some travelers do.  Often, the money spent travelling is money directly out of our own pockets.  Don’t spend any more than you have to by using these helpful apps.  Don’t forget to rate them to help others too.

Many small businesses are hesitant to take their business online.  They may be worried about how easy it might be to sell online, about the maintenance an ecommerce store requires or about not having a web programmer on staff.

For most companies, I recommend using BigCommerce for their store! Why? It’s so easy.  BigCommerce is a hosted ecommerce solution.  What does that mean? They provide the servers, the system and everything needed to get the store up.  All the functions you could ever want are built in.  Here’s a few of the best features:

• Complete template customization – any design
• SEO friendly product links, category pages, news, etc.
• Browse and buy on all mobile devices.
• Sell on Facebook and sell on eBay
• Physical or Download products
• Bulk import or export thousands of products
• No transaction fees – no hidden costs
• Free trial – no credit card required

When would I not suggest using BigCommerce? Not very often to be honest.  The only clients I have suggested a different solution is when they only are selling 5 items or less.

If you want an easy, straightforward online store BigCommerce is the way to go.  You will want some help to get started.  Although they have lots of templates, you’ll probably want a professional designer to create a custom store for you.  Contact Synergetic Web Group today if you are looking for help with BigCommerce.

FYI – Submit your URL to a quality web directory. We are listed in the Resources Directory

Earlier today I was reading an old issue of BtoB and came across their social media marketing awards.  I only skimmed the article because they were huge companies like Microsoft, Cybase, EMC, etc.  While I’m sure I could learn something from these tech giants, I tend to focus my energy on how small companies with limited budgets and staff utilize social media.

Instead, a little column called “Ask the Expert” caught my eye.  The first couple questions were horrible, but the last asked about social media excellence.  I wasn’t surprised when I saw Cisco appear since they did win awards earlier in this issue. My eye was instantly drawn to the URL http://socialmedia.cisco.com.  It went on to say how this was single page portal to all of their feeds from blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.

A bit intrigued, I decided to go ahead and visit the site. I was instantly impressed by the simplicity of the site.   It was a great, user friendly way to display social media.   The way the feeds were displayed before asking you to like, follow, etc made it feel like you could make more of an informed decision.

http://socialmedia.cisco.com

I’m a pretty geeky person and avid lover of social media, which left me wondering why I’ve never seen this approach to incorporating social media.  It’s definitely something I hope to see more of in the future.  Kudos, Cisco, for opening my eyes to a new and very effective way to incorporate social media.

In case you haven’t heard about it, Dropbox is an online service that allows you to synchronize files across multiple computers.  It was founded in 2007  and launched publicly in 2008.  This is single handedly the best free service that has enhanced my productivity on a daily basis.

Why is it great?

It allows you to easily access your files from your home computer, laptop and office computer without having to do anything.  No more emailing myself files home to work on in the evening, or adding files to my jump drive to access while I’m on the plane.  Not at your computer? No problem – you can also access your files online.

How does it work?

Sign up for an account at www.dropbox.com.  It’s easy an d free for the basic level that provides you 2 GB of storage.  You could opt for 50 GB of storage for $9.99 a month.   After you sign up, just download the installer.  A small little program installs on your computer.  You’ll set up a dropbox folder during the installation process. This is where your files will be stored.  The software runs down in the system tray but don’t worry, it isn’t a memory hog.  You install this on all your computers and even your Max and mobile devices.  Any file you put in that folder will instantly be copied to the folders on the other computers.

Sounds Great – What could I possibly hate?

There are just a few flaws that drive me crazy.  The biggest flaw is that you can only use one dropbox account on your computer.  This doesn’t sound like it would be a problem.  However, I use a dropbox account for my business but I also work with a non-profit that uses their own dropbox account.  I can get to their files, but not as easily. I have to log in online.  It would be great if Dropbox would just let me assign two different folders on my computer for the two different accounts.

The other flaw is that sometimes it just hangs.   The other day I went home for lunch but kept working on a project from my home computer.  I saved the file before I rode my bike back to the office. However, Dropbox didn’t upload the file.  This happens every so often – you just need to reboot your computer.  It’s just annoying when you have to ride your bike home,  and restart your computer to access your files.

The last flaw isn’t technical, but concerns the paid accounts.  I love free accounts and I think the 2GB of storage is very generous.  However, with a new company on a budget I have choose to not pay for an account yet. I plan to, especially when my dropbox is full and I’m having to rearrange files (of course this only happens when I don’t have time).  My beef with the paid accounts is that the first level is $9.99 for 50 GB of storage.   50 GB is huge to me!   It would be great if there was a lower level account, something like $4.99 for 10 GB.

Overall, Dropbox has been a life saver.   Not having to worry about sending myself files so that I can work from home or on the go makes a daily impact on my time management.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, I’d suggest going to www.dropbox.com today.

When email marketing first started growing in popularity in the late 90′s marketers had to use special software on their desktop computers. The software would handle sending the messages through your ISP by generating emails one at a time at a rate that the mail servers wouldn’t block.  It could take a couple hours to send an email to a few hundred people.

Near the end of the decade, email providers such as Constant Contact and iContact emerged. These companies provided a way to send out your messages through their servers guaranteeing deliverability.  They also forced the enforcement of the CAN-SPAM Act, which was nice but also sometimes inconvenient.

These services have been the backbone of email marketing for many years now. They do require a subscription based off your contact list size.  I’ve worked with clients paying anywhere from $15 to $150 a month.

I had been a fan of iContact over Constant Contact because of their discount to non-profits, great support system and easy to use interface.  It wasn’t until one of my clients was facing some huge monthly bills because of their email frequency that I started looking for alternatives.

Now I will admit that there has been some great competition for a while now… but I was very comfortable with iContact.  I knew the system so well I could even walk people through sending messages and adding contacts without looking at a computer. I also had great support including some nice discussions with iContact sales reps at the Web 2.0 Expo.

I had to find some alternatives for this client so I started looking around a bit and immediately found MadMimi and MailChimp.  They both looked ok since their pricing model includes an unlimited number of messages.  MadMimi is a great alternative but it just didn’t impress me like MailChimp did.

I created a free account with MailChimp to check out their services before setting any clients up there. Immediately I was impressed with their Forever Free Plan. I’ve never seen any company offer such a great free deal.

I’m not going to go into a long details about every feature, but here’s what I like:

• Great prices for unlimited amount of emails
• Social Media integration
• Ability to build your own templates
• Rock solid coding
• Non-profit discounts

So this is just another reminder that even when you have long standing relationships with one provider, always check out others — there may be better deals and more services waiting for you.

In modern websites that use content publishing systems, URLs have become quite long.  Long URLs are hard to pass along. In emails, they can make line breaks where you don’t want them.  Links look horribly long on webpages and in social media, they are just too long to fit within the allowed number of characters.

Thankfully there are a number of free services that help with this. URL shorteners basically use a HTTP redirect to the desired page. The idea of shortening URLs dates back to 2001, with the TinyURL as the first service launched in 2002.  Twitter even used TinyURL initially, although it has switched to bit.ly

Easy, free, no login URL shorteners:

 TinyURL   (http://www.tinyurl.com)

 bit.ly  (http://www.bit.ly)

 URL shortners with more features, but require login:

 Cligs (http://www.cli.gs)

 budurl (http://budurl.com)

Now that you have a twitter account and are ready to start using it, you might want to know what not to do.  Use these guidelines as things to avoid — consider it Twitter-etiquette.

1. DO NOT use your twitter feed as a chat room — especially for conversations that are exclusive. Just because twitter gives you the ability to use the @username feature to direct a comment at a person, this shouldn’t be used constantly.

 2. DO NOT constantly use your twitter stream as a method of self promotion.  Twitter isn’t a tool to just boost your egos and your followers will not enjoy it.

 3. DO NOT follow a user just to get him/her to follow you and then unfollow immediately after they do. 

 4. DO NOT use a twitter account to send spam messages by direct messages.

 5. DO NOT use a twitter account only to stream blog posts. Twitter is personal and success is dependent upon human connections.

 6. DO NOT use unrelated hashtags to gain exposure for unrelated tweets. This isn’t a very ethical way to gain exposure.

 7. DO NOT mass follow everyone you can find in hopes to inflate your number of followers — especially if you’re just going to distribute a press release about your growth.

 8. DO NOT use twitter to repeat personal or confidential correspondence when you’re angry with a company or individual.

 9. DO NOT ask friends to retweet your tweets continually.

 10. DO NOT skip the step of setting up your profile with personal information.