So, along with getting healthy, drinking less, exercising more and vowing to do a number of other activities in 2012, think about making some of these changes to your Twitter account and activity:

Filter Who You Follow

You may be following a number of accounts that are no longer active. Following these accounts is a waste of time. Plus it’s generally seen to be better if you have a higher ratio of follower’s to those your follow. This helps to reduce the amount of wasteful people your follow.

You should also make sure that you’re following relevant accounts/people. Are they relevant to your industry? Do they add quality content to your news feed? Get rid of anyone who isn’t relevant or useful.

Create/Update Your Lists

Organise the people you follow into lists. This is an easy way of viewing the updates of key people. Create lists for your customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, industry leaders etc. You may want to make some of these private.

Quality vs Quantity

Now is the time to review what you’re tweeting. It’s not just a numbers game – more isn’t necessarily better. Make sure every single tweet is valuable to those following you and reflects well on your as a business.

Have you any other Twitter resolutions? Leave us a comment below!

We’ve talked about how to use Twitter for business before on the SMEketing online marketing blog, but we thought since we’ve started a new year, we should do a quick refresher post on how you can use it to help grow your business.

How To Use Twitter For Business, Top Tips:

• Make sure your account has been fully set up: Add a proper photo or logo and relevant information. Make sure your profile page is as informative as possible. This is the page that a lot of people will view before following you – so make sure you make a good impression!
• Take your time: Don’t immediately follow every person/account that follows you. Make sure you’re following the right people – people in your industry, competitors, customers, thought leaders. Who you follow says a lot about your online marketing strategy – make sure you’re giving the right message.
• Share valuable information: Sharing links to information which helps promote your product or services is great. But make sure that’s not all you tweet about. Try and make your Twitter feed well rounded – include industry information, customer/service updates, news and advice.
• Be consistent: Make sure you have time to manage your Twitter account. This means replying to any messages or @ replies, conversing on a one to one basis with other users, sharing other users information (retweeting). This must be done on a regular basis for it to have any positive effect. Done correctly and consistently, you’ll be able to create long lasting relationships and create an impression of thought leadership.
• Don’t be negative: As much as you might want to sometimes tell the world about some immoral methods of your competitors, or a poor quality delivery from a supplier, try to resist. What you tweet reflects on you, and it’s always good to take the high-ground. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public!
• Take advantage of the tools available: At SMEketing we love Hootsuite – you can use this to schedule tweets in advance, track any clicks of your shortened links and monitor all messages, @ replies and keywords you make want to track. Another tool we love is TweetDeck.
• Be patient: You’re unlikely to take any orders or make any sales on your first day using Twitter. So be patient and consistent, and you’ll find sooner or later it’s paying off. If your goal isn’t to make sales, you could track things like interaction, visits to your website from Twitter, RTs etc.

Remember, you can follow SMEketing on Twitter: @SMEketing.

If you want more information on how to use Twitter for business please get in touch with us, or visit our social media management information page.

So in no official order, below are the top ten most read blog posts of 2011:

Top Email Marketing Checks To Do Before You Hit Send

Email marketing is a very effective way to communicate with your current and prospect customers. It’s quick, inexpensive and can give you instant results. But it’s important that it’s done right. Make sure you make the most of each eblast by making the following email marketing checks: From Name Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will [...]

Read more »

Google+ For Business

If you’ve been in a coma recently, you might not have heard about Google’s new social media platform, Google+! Even though it’s been around now for a few weeks, there’s still some confusion over how to use it and what it could mean to you both personally and as a business. The service is Google’s [...]

Read more »

Building Your Email Marketing List : Research Results

A couple of months ago, MarketingSherpa released the results of a study they had undertaken, into the most effective methods of growing an email marketing list. The researchers asked more than 1100 marketers to indicate the effectiveness of various methods used within their organisation. This is what they found: Although these results are based on [...]

Read more »

Top Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid

Wikipedia describes black hat SEO as “SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service and is often considered unethical SEO.” The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines [...]

Read more »

Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO?

If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on. So it could be tempting to respond positively to an [...]

Read more »

Secrets of Successful Blogging

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Ever since then, people have been blogging for business and for [...]

Read more »

Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two

Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns: 6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those [...]

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MegaBus Robots.txt File Fail

I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. [...]

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Online Promotion: How to promote a new offer, product or service online

Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need [...]

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Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here: How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a [...]

Read more »

If you want to start 2012 with a bang, get in touch. We love helping businesses grow through using effective online marketing. So if you want more leads, more sales and more growth in 2012 drop us an email or complete our contact form.

Google+ Key Features

Circles: You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.

Sparks: Remember when your Grandpa used to cut articles out of the paper and send them to you? That was nice. That’s kind of what Sparks does: looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share. Grandpa would approve.

Hangouts: Bumping into friends while you’re out and about is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let buddies know you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until we perfect teleportation, it’s the next best thing.

(Taken from http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/)

The key differentiator of Google+ is the ability to segment your friends into different groups. Yes Facebook does already have a group facility, but Google+ really focuses on this as a core part of the platform. Their introduction into Circles video is below (FYI, we feel these videos are a little slow in terms of their tone and content. Normally Google do great videos, this unfortunately isn’t one of them!):

Google+ for Business

So what does Google+ mean for you and your business? Well Google have said that a range of business tools will come online later this year. Google’s product manager Christian Oestlien said:

“Right now we’re very much focused on optimising for the consumer experience, but we have a great team of engineers building a similarly optimised business experience for Google+. It’ll include things like rich analytics and the ability to connect that identity to other parts of Google that businesses might use on a daily basis like AdWords.”

At SMEketing we’re not yet sure how Google+ will incorporate itself into businesses, but we’re thinking that the use of Circles to segment contacts could be a very useful feature, as could the ability to create ‘Hangouts’ (aka conference calls) with specific Circles. The fact that it looks like Google+ might make it easier for business to communicate with their customers could be a key benefit. For many B2B organisations, Facebook has never really took off as a communication and engagement platform, so Google+ could be the filler to fill this gap.

It’ll be very interesting to see what happens with Google+. Certainly it has more media coverage and initial take up than their previous soirees into social media, but whether or not people will start moving from Facebook to Google+ is something we will have to wait a little longer to find out.

If you’re not on Google+ yet, send us an email to info@SMEketing.com and a member of the team will ping you over an invite.

If you’re an established Twitter user, you may have been using the new interface for a a while. As soon as you log on, you’ll see the radical difference! But what are our favourite new features here are SMEketing?

The “What’s Happening” Field
This field is more subtle than it was in old Twitter. It’s only when you click on it that it expands to a larger box to type your tweet, and the ‘Tweet’ button reveals itself. This is means that there’s more space for you to actually read your Twitter stream. Twitter isn’t always about ‘tweeting’, sometimes you just want to read what other people are talking about and sharing, and this new design makes that easier.

Real Names Are Shown Next To Usernames
In old Twitter, if someone mentioned you and you wanted to write back and say ‘Thanks Joe, helpful advice’, but Joe’s username was something obscure like @MarketingHelpUK, you’d have to load their profile to view what their real name was before you could create your personalised tweet. However now, in the Twitter stream, you’ll see tweets from users, but with their real names (or at least the name they’ve associated with their Twitter profile) right next to it too.

New Tweet Box
If you’re halfway down your Twitter stream and don’t want to go right to the top of the screen to post a tweet, you can click on the little pen/pad icon, and the below tweet box will pop up.

Integrated Videos and Images
One of the best features about new Twitter is the fact that they’ve teamed up with a wide range of popular companies, allowing them to present images and videos on Twitter directly. This means if someone posts a link to a YouTube video, you can watch that video in Twitter without having to leave. In the same way, if someone links to an image (or even an entire image Set) within Flickr, you can view that image in Twitter.

Larger Profile Icons
Only slighly, but if you’re using text on your icon, this can help make it just a little bit clearer

Who To Follow
It’s important to continually follow new Twitter users – it helps to grow your own following and enables you to keep up to date and engaged with the latest users. The expanded ‘Who To Follow’ area on the right hand side, makes it even easier to follow a few relevant twitter users on regular basis.

The new layout means that the two narrow columns we were used to has now grown into two large, wide columns. Twitter is now making more use of the area on the right hand side – displaying feed snippets, videos and images. But this means that there’s now less space for your custom backgroud. You may recall a while ago a SMEketing blog post The Importance of Custom Twitter Backgrounds. Customising this key area is a vital part of growing and establishing yourself on Twitter. However, with less background space now on show, you may find that you’ll need to tweak this background. Users with small, widescreen monitors may find that there’s very little space available either side of the twitter feed at all.

You may want to review your custom background. If you need any help amending this (or creating one in the first place), let us know – email us on info@SMEketing.com or call 023 8083 7271.

S0 – what do you think of #newtwitter? What’s your favourite new feature? Leave us a comment or send us a tweet – @SMEketing!

Social Media Revolution

Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

• Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

JESS3 – The State of The Internet

JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010

• 1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
• 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
• 81% of Emails were Spam
• 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
• 27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
• Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
• 4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
• 182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)

• Promotion
• Market research
• Networking
• Lead generation
• Education

So if we’re focusing on the first point of ‘Promotion’, we need to look at one of the key differentiators between you and your competitors – your Twittter background. When people are deciding who they want to follow, they only really have a few things they can use to help them decide – the content of your tweets, your bio and contact details and your wallpaper. If you’re using one of the generic Twitter backgrounds, you’re missing out on a trick! Your background is free advertising space, so use it well.

One of the best ways of using this space is to customise it using an image editor (such as Photoshop). Depending on your business and industry, you could create a radical, jazzy Twitter background, or maybe one with a more corporate, professional feel.

So what key information should you add to your Twitter background?

• Synopsis (of your company, your role in the company, your interests – just who you are)
• Company logo
• Contact details

Email

Telephone

Website

Any other social media sites that are relevant – Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn etc

Other extras you could include are:

• Photo of yourself
• Interesting details – such as your interests, passions
• Contact address
• Special offers (you could update these on a regular basis)

Once you’ve got the content you want, you then have to decide on the style of background. Do you want it be be vibrant and colourful, match your corporate colours, be one plain block of colour… the options are really endless.

If you’d like us to create a customised Twitter background for your Twitter account, get in touch today on info@SMEketing.com. With prices starting from £40, there’s bound to be an affordable option for you and your business.

Have you already got a customised Twitter background that you love? Let us know in the comments by leaving your @ Twitter details, and remember to follow SMEketing on @SMEketing.