Peter Grandstaff

Web Marketing for Your Small Business

Four Words that Make or Break a Facebook Strategy

There have been millions of words written about how to use Facebook to promote a business, cause or collection of funny cat pictures. What I’ve found is that you should really just focus on four words. Study all the words you like, but they won’t do you any good if you haven’t mastered these four.

Do
it
every
day.

Not only is that the most important lesson for benefiting from social media, it seems to be the hardest for people to master.

I’m not saying you should post to your Facebook page every day, or just once a day. Post as often as it makes sense. What you should do every day is log in and spend some brain power on it:
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Twitter Tutorial Two: 7 Important Twitter Features Explained

Twitter asks, What's happening?

Twitter’s weird.  It’s a bit hard to wrap your head around it.  My best advice is to worry about that later.  Whatever Twitter is and whatever it does, it’s evolving.  So, don’t worry about understanding it before you use it.  Through using it you’ll come to understand it, and maybe you’ll even figure out new ways to put it to use.

That said, there are some things that are helpful to know.

What is a Tweet?

Let’s get this out of the way:

A tweet is a piece of text no longer than 140 characters. Spaces and punctuation count. Think of it as a blog entry, a bitesized blog entry.

For reference, that definition is 140 characters long.

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Twitter Tutorial 1: How to Tweet Well

So, you’ve heard me rant about Twitter.  Some of you even went out and set up accounts, good work!  So now what?  What do you actually do with Twitter once you’re on there?  Why does it matter?

A Twitter Logoimage credit

How To Tweet Well

Well, Twitter became even more important this month.  Deals were announced with both Google and Microsoft to include Twitter posts — tweets — in search results.  So, before long, when someone searches for your company they might also see what people are saying about you on Twitter.  In my book, everything in search engine results matters big time, period.  Twitter also matters because it gives you another outlet to stay connected with your clients, donors, peers, etc. as well as to attract new ones.

Tweeting seems really simple.  Twitter seems really simple in general, at first.  It is a simple concept: write little messages no longer than 140 characters.  In theory each tweet should answer the question: What are you doing?  Dead simple.  But, actually doing this well gets complicated.  You’ll need to balance the amount you want to communicate with the amount of room you have, and still write something readable.  You’ll also need to stand out — catch people’s eyes.  You’ll want to elicit a response from the reader as well, e.g. click your link, reply to you, or just empathize with you.  Finally, you have to provide actual value in your tweets.  A few examples should help. [Read more…]