Whether you love the concept of Twitter, or hate the idea of Twitter, if your business is not taking advantage of this opportunity, you are only hurting yourself.  Yes, Twitter may not be a marketing method right for every type of business, but at the very least you should explore the potential Twitter opportunity.

Twitter is a great resource for smaller or sole proprietorship businesses to get exposure on a world-wide level with a minimal investment (time).  While you may be timid to jump into Twitter pool with your business, don’t worry, everything will be ok…there are lifeguards nearby to help you out should you get in trouble.

Follow these steps and you will be well on your way to establishing your business brand on Twitter.

1. Complete your Twitter profile by filling out the various information it asks for.  It can help give a good overview to your followers of what you and your company is about.
2. Brand your profile with a custom Twitter background so that you stand out from the crowd.  Custom backgrounds are a great way to establish your brand among your followers.
3. If you are the sole proprietor or face of the company, you can add a more personal touch to your Twitter profile with a picture of you.  However, should you want to use your company logo that is ok as well since it helps establish your brand.
4. Add your Twitter link to your business cards.  This can serve as a great offline conversation starter with potential clients and customers.
5. Find other Twitter users who are interested in your niche or products.  To do this, simply head on over to the good old twitter search.
6. Be efficient with your daily Twitter use.  Although it may be difficult, try to not to spend the entire workday on Twitter.  It can distract you from more important business matters.  Try designating an allocated amount of time, or a certain time each day where you login to Twitter.
7. Share beneficial and relevant information with your followers.  Whether it is industry related news, or information about a new service your company offers; sharing great content is king.  Please note, that you don’t need to tweet about what you had for lunch today.
8. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy (or girl).  Just because it is a “business” related Twitter account does not mean that you can only talk about business related topics.  If possible, try to mix in a bit of info about you so that your followers can learn a bit more about you.  Who knows, you may find out you have more in common with your followers than just business.
9. Do your best to reply to anyone who replies to your tweets or posts an @yourname.  While this may not always be possible, it can definitely strengthen the relationship between you and your followers.
10. Thank users who retweet one of your tweets.  Be sure to retweet others when possible.
11. Create surveys or ask questions to your followers about your products and services.  This can be both good and bad, so be ready for honest responses.
12. Follow the leaders in your industry.  If there is not a defined Twitter leader for your niche, now is the time to step up and grab it for yourself.
13. Provide free insight and help on Twitter.  The vast majority of Twitter users do not appreciate being hounded to buy your product or services.  However, should you be known to help out others, chances are your goodwill can result in future business.
14. Track your Twitter referrals to your website.  Google Analytics is one great free source to analyze and track your website traffic.  Aside from tracking the traffic from Twitter, Google Analytics can provide you with some very useful info about your site.
15. Invite your employees to create an account and take part in Twitter.  This can not only help ease the workload for yourself, it can also help increase your brand and company awareness on Twitter.
16. Monitor your brand.  There are a few ways to do this so you can keep on top of what others are saying about your business.  One of the easiest is to use Twitter Search and type in your business name.  Then simply grab the RSS link for the results and paste it into your favorite RSS reader.  You can then be aware of what is being said about your name on Twitter.

While we could continue to add more to the list, these 16 should help get your small business established on Twitter in no time.  Are there any tips you use that you can recommend?

Wendy White founded website builder Moonfruit in 1999. After a brief sabbatical (to have a baby!), White returned as marketing director for the firm and embarked on a social networking campaign to boost user rates and sales. Twitter proved one of the most lucrative and useful mediums for the internet firm. Here’s why.

“This year has been extraordinary,” says Moonfruit director Wendy White. ‘I was really worried coming into this year: recession, the credit crunch. But the impact of recession has been surprising. People have increasingly turned to social media to have a voice online. It’s been the rise of personal publishing. This is great for us, as a website builder, as we have seen 70 per cent growth.”

To take full advantage of the opportunities created by the popularity of social networks, White joined Twitter and launched a full-scale campaign to gain followers and create brand awareness for Moonfruit. The campaign asked Twitter users to come up with ways to celebrate Moonfruit’s tenth birthday and gave away a MacPro to the most creative entry every day for ten days.

Twitter users simply tweeted their entry to @moontweet to enter.

“People thought it was funny,” says White. “We got pictures, animations, songs. The viral carried us to unprecedented heights. We got thousands of entries and had to extend the promotion, giving away iPod Touches for the most talented entries.”

The campaign resulted in over 30,000 followers for White and Moonfruit, part of €13m-turnover Gandi Group. And some unforgettable artwork for the firm to use and publicise. But Twitter has done more than just create brand awareness for Moonfruit. It also brought about a partnership with fellow small business MOO. “I follow @thenextwomen on Twitter,” says White. “That got me on to Bindi Karia from Microsoft BizSpark. I mentioned my idea to link up with a company that has a similar customer base but a very different product. I’d used MOO to print cards when I did my degree at Central St Martin’s to publicise my projects and mentioned them as an example.”

It turned out that Karia knew the MOO founder, Richard Moross, very well. She set up a breakfast meeting with the two entrepreneurs and a partnership was born. “Richard was looking to do more online and we were looking for products our customers would like,” says White. “Both our company cultures are quite quirky and humourous so it was an instant fit.”

The partnership has already been a runaway success. “We offered a free pack of 50 MOO business cards to 200 of our premium customers,” says White. “We only launched the offer on Monday and within a day all the packs had gone.” Pretty soon 10,000 Moonfruit customers will be able to order MOO’s 50 business cards for free, paying only for postage. In return, Moonfruit is giving MOO’s customers a 20 per cent discount on all its premium web packages.

“We expect to see significant revenue generated from the partnership,” says White.

And that’s not all. “We recently did a beta release of new interface,” says the Moonfruit founder. “Our customers were helping us on Twitter. It was like live snagging. It was the first time we’ve experienced that on a release.”

Twitter has also helped Moonfruit to break the coveted US market. “Since our Twitter campaign, we’ve seen 100 per cent increase in US traffic,” says White. “You usually have to throw a lot of cash at US market to even get a look in. We went in the backdoor.”

But using Twitter to drum up sales, customers and brand awareness has its downsides. “It’s very time intensive,” says White. “Twitter is a 24-hour network. The US wakes up when the UK goes to sleep. When we launched our campaign, someone senior had to be constantly on call to make decisions. And now we have 26,000 followers, we need to keep talking to them. That’ll involve a real investment.”

Was Facebook right or wrong to cave to the army of irate users who decried its Twitter-like redesign? Last week, Dare Obasanjo attracted a lot of attention by arguing that Facebook’s redesign reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose.

The expectations around how user relationships were created on Twitter are totally different from how they were on Facebook. On Twitter, users explicitly decide as part of following someone that they want all of the person’s tweets in their stream. In fact, this is the only feature of the relationship on Twitter. On Facebook, you have relationships with people that attempt to mirror your real life so you have your boss, coworkers, school friends and acquaintances all trying to be part of your social graph because FB is really a kind of “rolodex” in the sky. …

Somewhere along the line, it seems the folks at Facebook didn’t internalize this fundamental difference in the social context that differentiates user to user relationships on Twitter versus Facebook. This to me is a big mistake.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, stirring the pot as always, blasted Facebook for not sticking to its guns.

Facebook has always pushed the envelope with users, and those users always hate it (the original News Feed was hated, now people are up in arms to keep it from changing). In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign. …

Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.

Interestingly, both Obasanjo and Arrington consider themselves partisans of “disruptive innovation,” and disruptive innovations are invariably resisted by consumers. Yet Obasanjo was convinced that the best kind of disruptive innovation is founded on a superior understanding of what it is consumers really want and need, rather than devotion to fashion. One concern that Obasanjo hints at, and that Tim O’Reilly referenced in a series of Tweets. First,

FB redesign also shows the danger of paying too much attention to competition, instead of thinking more deeply what you are about. It’s hard

And then:

Further thought: FB following the path of Yahoo! Trying to be Google, Y! redefined itself from leader in own market to also-ran in Google’s

And of course Arrington’s conclusion suggests that he thinks something similar is on the horizon, i.e., that Facebook, which only recently surpassed MySpace in number of users, will soon find itself eclipsed.

A few months ago, I talked to a Facebook insider who was struck by how uncompetitive the social networking landscape seemed. Rather than panic about the emergence of new competitors, my interlocutor found the lack of real innovation depressing. We’ve seen iterative improvements, but the Facebook News Feed was arguably the last real breakthrough in this space. If we do see a real disruptive innovator take on Facebook in a serious way, what might it look like? I imagine a more open, noncommercial alternative that serves as a kludge of other products and services. But that wouldn’t represent a breakthrough. Some have suggested that Facebook is too dry and database-like, and that a true Facebook-killer would enable a greater range of self-expression. I’ve always found Facebook’s tight aesthetic discipline to be at the heart of its charm, but who knows?

The chatter over Facebook’s redesign also raises interesting questions about the place of democracy in this kind of consumer technology. There is a great deal of enthusiasm over the notion of open-source design that incorporates power users. But my sense is that this wave is salient only to true niche products, where you have customers who are highly informed, highly engaged, and deeply invested, figuratively and literally. In short, the customers I’m talking about are affluent nerds. But Facebook reaches a much broader slice of the population, and its users really do feel ownership of the product. The rebellion over Facebook Beacon, spearheaded by members of MoveOn.org in an early civil-society campaign by a group that had been associated exclusively with political activism, suggested that many of us think of Facebook as a kind of public utility. Indeed, I often wonder if that is the next logical, if not desirable, step — if not the nationalization of Facebook, perhaps the emergence of a public version that we’ll all join to access critical information and resources.

This probably sounds absurd, and it is. But I also find the idea of a national ID card absurd, and the idea is far more popular than it should be.

Though a written business plan is not required when applying for a merchant cash advance from MRI (because there are no restrictions on how our advances can be used), other types of lenders, particularly banks, will require small business owners to submit a business plan when applying for a business loan.

A business plan is not something that is reserved for startups.  It can be used in all stages of business ownership, especially when planning to embark on a new endeavor, such as expansion, renovation, advertising, etc.

Every business plan will vary, as no two businesses are identical.  Nevertheless, there are certain components that every business plan should have.  “…generally a plan will include components such as descriptions of the company, product or service, market, forecasts, management team, and financial analysis,” writes small business expert, Tim Berry.

Use the following basic outline, developed by the Small Business Administration, to get started on your business plan, then adjust as needed.

Executive Summary:  Provides a concise overview of your company along with company history.

Market Analysis:  Illustrates your knowledge of the industry your business is in.

Company Description:  Describes your business, as well as the factors that you think will help make it successful.

Organization & Management:  Includes explanation of your company’s structure, along with profiles and qualifications of owners/management/board of directors.

Marketing & Sales Strategies:   Defines your marketing strategy.

Service or Product Line:  Describes the product(s) and/or service(s) that your company offers, with emphasis on the benefits to current and potential customers.

Funding Request:  Requests specific amount of funding that you will need for your business, how the funds will be used, etc.

Financials:  Shows how you’ve specifically allocated funds.

Appendix:  This should not  be included in your business plan.  However, it should be available to certain lenders, creditors, etc. who will need access to the information in your appendix.

The appendix should include:

• Credit history (personal & business)
• Resumes of key managers
• Product pictures
• Letters of reference
• Details of market studies
• Relevant magazine articles or book references
• Licenses, permits, or patents
• Legal documents
• Copies of leases
• Building permits
• Contracts
• List of business consultants, including attorney and accountant

It is evolving in response to the demand for a coherent way to support information creation and sharing, team communication and coordination, and communities and informal social interaction. Buyers are looking for flexible environments where participants can find and interact with one another, and create, organize and share information. The promise is one of improved “connectedness” as well as the capture and dissemination of informal knowledge by capitalizing on community involvement.

Nikos Drakos, Anthony Bradley, Jeffrey Mann (Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00162146, 0ct. 2008)

Most of us have jumped on the social media bandwagon and use different aspects of it in our daily lives. One of the great things about social media is that it has a different use for everyone. You may use it as a break from your work, to connect with old friends, and to meet new people. And if you are in business for yourself, networking and finding new business is always a peripheral use of social media, even if you don’t focus on that exclusively.

Blogs, Twitter and Facebook are three elements of social media where you can tailor your approach to find new clients and other business opportunities.

Business Blogs

A blog can be a valuable marketing tool for your business. If you have good information to share on your blog that is of interest to clients, colleagues and prospects, then it’s a no-brainer.

Here are some tips to make your blog a successful way to generate new interest in your business:

• Offer high-quality free information that is valuable to others
• Post consistently and stick to a set schedule
• Be willing to share a little of your personal side
• Have a point of view and don’t be afraid to share it
• Be patient and give it time
• Keep keywords in mind, but don’t overemphasize them
• Take time to review and edit your posts before publishing

Because blogging is an ongoing activity with long-term benefits, none of these tips will individually grab a handful of new clients for you. But if you make a commitment to your blog and follow it through, you may be surprised what develops.

Twitter

Twitter can be an effective way to find clients if you focus on maintaining a professional profile and use your account consistently. You may even be able to find new business opportunities by being passive. That’s right, it’s entirely possible that new clients will come to you.

To find potential business opportunities on Twitter, try:

• Finding relevant people to follow using services such as Twellow
• Searching for targeted keywords through the search function
• Being willing to jump in and help others when appropriate
• Engaging in both business and non-business conversations

One of the most important things you can do in order to maximize Twitter as a marketing tool is to be honest, genuine and respectful with each tweet.

Facebook

Facebook can be another way to establish credibility and expertise in your industry and gradually send new business your way. By creating your profile and making your business the focus, you can develop a following that boosts your prospects.

To use Facebook effectively for business, consider:

• Posting links to your business blog posts on your profile
• Accepting friend requests from acquaintances and reaching out to connect to those you don’t know well
• Creating a business fan page for added promotion
• Exploring advertising through Facebook
• Keeping your profile professional, but add in some personality

Facebook simply gives you yet another way to reach your prospects. With these elements of social media combined with your web site and other online sources, you can easily build momentum that eventually leads to new business.

Business blogging is nothing short of a marketing revolution. It’s a fundamental move from centralised one-way communications (aka conventional marketing and advertising) to an interactive forum in which people are able to share information to help them make informed buying decisions

Unlike any other medium, blogging allows you to communicate in real time with any number of like-minded people.
It enables you to develop ongoing relationships with your prospects and customers that will be at the expense of your complacently non-blogging competitors.

Another great liberating aspect of blogging is that anyone can do it. You can publish your blog now and be instantly and globally findable at the click of a mouse.

So if your company is thinking about launching a company blog?

Here are some basics we’ve compiled at eMarket2 to help our clients establish a business blog strategy before taking the leap:

If you want to get a Blog going, but not sure how to go about it, drop me a email if you want to know more about our Blogging campaign management service

Business Blog Creative Brief template

1. Audiences: Whom do you plan to reach and influence with your blog?

• Customers
• Prospects
• Employees
• Mainstream Media (print, broadcast)
• Social Media (bloggers, forum participants, etc.)
• Suppliers/Vendors
• Other

2. Objectives: What do you intend to achieve with your blog?

• Augment Web site traffic.
• Boost brand awareness and visibility.
• Build inbound links.
• Change, enhance or revitalize brand image.
• Educate and inform audiences.
• Enhance/establish positioning as an innovator and industry leader.
• Generate sales leads.
• Other

3. Content Outline: What relevant, timely topics do you plan to publish?

• Company news
• Industry trends
• White papers
• Case Histories/Success Stories
• Tools & resources
• Other

4. Content Creation

• Who is going to create all of this content?
• Who is going to pay for all of this content?

Constant blog content creation is a big pain point across the marketing organisation. unless you have a willing writer in the company or get you employees to chip in. The writing of SEO optimised content for blogs, can be very labor intensive. It takes time and resources, which aren’t in excess in most companies even in a good economy Drop me a email if you want to know more about our Blogging content creation service

5. Frequency: How often do you plan to post?

• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Other

6. Comment Policy: Will the corporation allow, block and/or screen comments?

7. Controversial Issues: What is the policy for addressing controversial issues?

8. Links: What sites, blogs and forums will the corporate blog link to?

9. Promotion: How will the blog be promoted?

10. Budget /Production

• In-house, marketing team
• Outsource to marketing/PR agency
• What’s the annual budget you will allocate towards the blog,

How can eMarket2 help you with your blogging strategy?

We’ll offer advice copy writing and technical expertise to help you launch your company blog in keeping with your existing brand as a separate or integrated blog and provide a self service or full service Blog content management system (CMS).

Write your own blog content, or allow eMarket2 to manage your blog on your behalf. Our experienced copywriters will provide original and relevant SEO content that will get your blog read by the maximum number of people. We are also offer copywriting and a complete linking, SEO and PPC service to ensure that your website and blog receives optimal exposure.

• Drive demand
• Nurture relationships
• Get more customers

As a result of video sharing websites such as YouTube, the popularity of hosting videos on the internet has really gone right through the roof in recent years. More and more people online are preferring the idea of watching a short video in place of reading a great deal of text when it comes to visiting websites and business blogs.

So if you have a business blog or a blog that you are trying to earn money from, why not consider adding video blogs? Video blogging is a great way to share information with your visitors over video instead of text or any other medium. Video blogging is also known as vlogging or vblogging.

Video blogging is capable of conveying a great deal more information much more quickly as well as in a manner that is much more entertaining than simply reading text on a page. Research has been showing for some time now that people have a much easier time of absorbing and retaining information when there are both visual and audio components that are engaged, and this is the case when it comes to video blogs.

This is especially going to be true on the internet, because most people on the internet skim rather than reading through the entire post, and they may as a result end up missing some of the most important points that you are trying to sell. If you offer your visitors a short video of 2 to 3 minutes instead, and you highlight only the most important information, then this might be significantly more effective in getting a visitor to take the right action.

Video blogging is capable of providing feeling, emotion and a visual aspect that simple words are incapable of conveying. Consider this: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video blog is worth quite a bit more. People love entertainment, and video blogging can provide them with this level of entertainment. You can give them both entertainment and information at the same time, ensuring that they soak up the information you are trying to offer them.

If you are looking for a new way to share information on your blog while bringing more people to your blog in the process, then video blogging is an option that is well worth your consideration. Getting started in video blogging is easy and does not take a lot of skill or equipment, but it can have a very large impact on your blogging ability. You can mix up your blog with video blogging, text blogging and image blogging in order to keep the attention of readers from all over the world.

Traditional business practice was based on the principle of developing a great product or service and then finding customers to buy it. Then came the marketing and promotion so as many people knew about your product or service through advertising, promotion, stores, etc. The same kind of principles have applied to online business. The internet and marketing strategies like Google become vehicles to put your wares in front of potential customers. Now Facebook is being seen as a business marketing strategy. With more than 80 million active users, it’s the sixth most trafficked web site in the world, and the second most popular social media site globally, just behind MySpace’s 100 million plus users.

Ean Jackson, a university professor and angel investor, and president of Analytics Marketing, believes that the Facebook profile is changing from the younger social communicators to older people and businesses who are anxious to use Facebook to generate business.

So what can Facebook offer business? Mostly an opportunity to directly communicate with a pre-selected target audience and using tools like banners, applications, quizzes, photos, discussion groups, social ads.  Facebook has become very effective in promoting events, product launches, special promotions and news announcements. And there are now more than 20,000 Facebook applications, with more than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs.

The International Internet Marketing Association (IIMA) held an event on Facebook for Business last May, with another one coming up next October, and have published a guide on how to use Facebook for business. Some of the tips from the guide include the following:

•    Use Facebook for a soft-sell, not a hard sell
•    Connect Facebook with your blog or contests
•    Offer something of value and expect nothing in return
•    Use Facebook to develop your brand
•    Make your Facebook the focus of the human side of your business

The ultimate business strategy for Facebook may be to creatively and skillfully developing a community of fans and followers who will act as viral agents to both promote and support your business.

Ray Williams is co-founder of Success IQ University, a company with offices in Vancouver and Phoenix, Arizona, offering executive and leadership training programs. he can be reached at rwilliams@successiqu.com

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Aaron Lindberg is a freelance photographer based in Kansas City. Aaron started his career shooting at newspapers, eventually switching gears and working at an advertising agency for a few years. Aaron shoots editorial, fashion, commercial, portraits, and other assignments for a wide range of clients. His work can be found at aaronlindberg.com as well as his blog at photokidblog.com. Follow Aaron on Twitter. in Business of Photography on September 14th, 2009

Having spent the past several months on Twitter tweeting and reading the tweets of the people I follow, I’ve gradually evolved a strategy for using this service to market my photography business without being too obvious about it.

I call it “The Mullet Strategy” — business in the front, party in the back.

Don’t Sound Like a Salesman

The Mullet Strategy is basically to balance your professional and personal tweets in a way that is authentic and engages your followers. You don’t want to sound like a salesman — or worse, a spambot.

The front of the mullet is all business — tweeting links to interesting photography-related articles, retweeting professional words of wisdom, and sharing information about the projects you’re working on.

The back of the mullet lets your hair hang down a bit. Go beyond purely business tweets to let your personality shine through. Post a family picture or two. Be a real person. This helps create a relationship with potential clients before they ever pick up the phone to call you.

But don’t get carried away — or you’ll end up in the TMI zone. The party stays in the back, remember?

Can you imagine calling a potential client — someone you’ve never met — on the phone and proclaiming, “I went to the hair-band concert last night and got wasted“?

Probably not.

Strike a Balance

You’re better off with tweets that establish intimacy with a professional tone, such as, “Just booked a fashion photo shoot for next week!” or “Grabbing coffee with a potential client this morning.”

In looking through my Twitter timeline, here are a few of my own recent tweets:

• “Off to the gym then headshots this afternoon. Client CDs going out today as well.”
• “Halfway into second day of teaching at the University of Kansas. Really enjoy being back in the Art & Design Building at my alma mater.”
• “Up early today, full day photo shoot for talent agency here in Kansas City. Jam-packed day from 8-6, each hour someone new is rolling in.”

I’m communicating my real feelings, activities and priorities, but I’m doing so in a way that shares my credentials and successes with prospective clients at the same time.

Brand Yourself

In addition to striking the right balance in your tweets, here are three other tips for making the most of Twitter:

1. Avoid sending out too many posts with “I” and “me” in them. Sure, you want to promote your business — but Twitter is a community. Make friends, share ideas, pass along helpful information. Retweets are a great way to spread interesting photography news — and to build relationships with other tweeters.

2. Post your photos. I like to tweet iPhone photos and video that I shoot throughout the day. It’s a great way to showcase my talents while also letting people know what I’m doing that day. I use Yfrog; Twitpic is also popular.

3. Brand yourself with your bio, background and avatar. Make sure to post a complete bio — as complete as 140 characters will allow — so photographers and prospects will know who you are and how to reach you. Customize your background with original photos or your business logo. And create a unique avatar that will help you to stand out from others. For example, having a camera in the avatar has become a bit clichéd among photographers — so try to come up with something different.

Twitter is an ongoing conversation with thousands of people talking all at once. The best way to stand out in the crowd — and build your photography business in the process — is to show off both your professionalism and your personality in your tweets.