Or maybe not…

With over 145 million registered users, this 4 year old social network cannot be ignored. I agree that Twitter isn’t right for every business. But the truth is: it’s good for most.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

When clients ask me how to use Twitter, this is the first thing I say. “Listen.”  Twitter is the ultimate “word of mouth”.

You know the saying “If a customer is happy, he tells a friend but if he’s unhappy, he tells 10.” Try 10,000. He may only have 400 friends, but his post about your lousy service or you product that didn’t deliver? That post gets re-tweeted by his friends, and their friends, and their friends. But imagine if you saw that tweet the moment it hit the Twitterverse? Imagine that you respond instantly via Twitter and everyone sees you “make it right”. Now the “buzz” on Twitter is about how great you are, how responsive. If you listen to your customers on Twitter, you can more effectively manage your Brand and your reputation. How cool is that?

That’s just ONE way you can use Twitter to improve your business. If you’re interested in more, give me a shout. Let’s talk about what Twitter can do for you.

build brand awareness…engage your customer…join the conversation

…utilize the power of community…create buzz…

You have no doubt heard these terms and are aware of or have visited sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But how do you, the small business owner, utilize Social Media to improve your bottom line?

I’d have to write a book or two to cover that one! In the meantime, here’s one tangible way you can use social media to connect with your customer and increase traffic to your business. “Push Pull Marketing, Twitter-Style”.

A “push” promotional strategy usually makes use of a company’s sales force and trade promotion activities to create consumer demand for a product.

A “pull” selling strategy is one that usually requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up consumer demand for a product.

The beauty of social media marketing is there is little or no monetary cost for most of your campaigns. Time is your primary investment. Take the time to learn how to utilize social media (such as reading this post); then take action. Yes, there is a learning curve, but once you start using Twitter, you realize how easy it is!

1. Sign up for an account at Twitter. Be sure to use the real name of your business and the town and state you are located in. You want people to find you easily in a search. Fill out your profile and post a picture. You must post a picture if you don’t want to look like a creeper.

2. Next, search your e-mail address book for people you know who are already using Twitter.  Then use one or more of these great third party tools to find potential customers to follow as well as list your business. TwitterLocal, Twellow,TwitterPacks, Just Tweet It, WeFollow, Who Should I Follow

3. Push, Twitter-style by scheduling a promotional tweet through EasyTweets. This is “push marketing. You are “pushing” your message out through Twitter, making people aware of a particular offer, such as “free wine with dinner tonight, just mention Twitter!”

4. Pull, Twitter-style by utilizing engagement tweets! This takes a little more time, but is just as important as push marketing.  Look for people who need help with an issue, or have had an issue with your company and you need to resolve it. Engagement is the soul of social media marketing (SMM). You help someone with their issue, you share your expertise, you reach out and empower someone and suddenly you are sought after. Helping people and showing genuine concern creates loyalty. How do you find people to help? Read your tweets each day, people you follow may tweet something that you can assist with. You can also use the search box on your Twitter homepage, type in a subject you believe you have expertise in – such as #webdesign and read the tweets on that subject.

Basic Twitter Help ~

WHEN sharing a link, use a service like TinyURL to shorten your link, allowing you more space to write your message.
WHEN addressing someone on Twitter or mentioning them in a tweet always use this format: @personsusername (@joesmith).
WHEN you read a tweet you like, share the love! Pass it on by retweeting: RT @joesmith (then copy and paste his post here).
WHEN posting on a subject you want people to know you mentioned, use a hashtag: #websitedesign or #livestrong. Then others who are interested in this subject will see your tweet grouped with all tweets regarding the same subject.

So, now you have one way to “join the conversation” right now. There are so many ways to use Twitter and numerous “shortcuts” and useful applications. A great place to find info on “all things Twitter” is mashable.com, supplying a plethera of social media information.

So, go create some buzz about your biz.  Your customers are waiting!

Unscientific observation:  most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.

Twitter is popular because it is easy.  It is easy to setup, easy to copy-paste links into, and easy to write 140 character bits.  But, having your own blog remains the strongest platform if you’re serious about sharing ideas and having a continued dialog with the world.  Blogging is the antithesis of easy, however it is far more rewarding.

I’m not saying Twitter isn’t a useful and interesting service, because it certainly is.  But it does not negate the real opportunity that is actually made more useful by the popularity of microblogging:  having your own blog.

Are you just using Twitter but not blogging?  You’re missing out.  Here’s why you should make a blog your home base and consider Twitter an outpost:

1.  Blogging demonstrates true commitment and passion to your industry that you really can’t fake long-term.  Most won’t be able to sustain it over long periods of time with frequency, but those who do so are rewarded in spades and stand out from the crowd.

2.  Old articles are valuable and still read years later, given infinite life by the engines.  Old Tweets live in archive purgatory where a majority will never be seen again.

3.  Remember, you’re essentially contributing to someone else’s network on Twitter – certainly there are returns, but make no mistake they profit from your attention.  I know you might not have a problem with that because you gain something too, but it’s good to be conscious of that fact.

4.  A compelling link in a blog entry will be clicked; links in Twitter are noise that in aggregate make up signal, but the reality is links in your stream aren’t the same as a post with a compelling link.

5.  Secret everyone knows:  most of Twitter is just linking to blogs and content on the open web.  Being the end product people are actually interested in and focus their attention on is where your ideas will be studied carefully, not in the cacophony of Twitter.

6.  You own your work in a self-hosted blog and are in total control over how it is presented.

7.  Twitter is in a sense social sticky notes, or the SMS of the Internet (however you want to consider it).  It’s snack-sized content.  Are you or your business interesting enough to provide the full course?  It’s telling who engages deeper vs. those who simply choose to engage 140 characters at a time.

8.  Cumulative results over time from blogging, each post incrementally adds value to your site as a whole.  Not necessarily true on Twitter.

9.  Full analytics with a blog.

10.  Multiple touch points to readership and interaction (email, RSS, on-site, etc.).

11.  Plugins let you add pretty much anything you want, can even integrate microblogging within your blog itself.

12.  Flexibility with layout.

13.  140 characters is often more than necessary – but also it is often less than necessary.

14.  Everyone on Twitter is looking for the next big thing or most interesting piece of content to link to.  Wouldn’t you rather be the big thing than merely another person pointing at it?

15.  These are all just tools to share content and ideas, no more, no less.  You need a cohesive strategy for all of them to drive conversions in one spot.  A blog is the perfect place for that if you want focused attention and to build an interested community.  What if any one network you don’t control falls out of favor or changes the rules?  At the end of the day, self-hosted blog owners control the vertical and the horizontal, whereas on Twitter or any external network you’re at the whim of someone else.

16.  I don’t even know why some people consider for a second that Twitter and FriendFeed will kill blogging, these ideas are pure linkbait and show a lack of understanding of the motivation of people on the open web.

17.  Careful of how much time you devote to Twitter instead of contributing to your own channel.  Spend the most time nurturing that – time spent in Twitter comes at the opportunity cost of fresh content to your blog.  You can use Twitter and other micro networks to draw subscribers and interest, but the premier value is in working on your own material in a unique space.

18.  RSS is alive and well – Steve Gillmor and the TC gang know how to write a great piece of linkbait, but that’s pretty much all it is.  Remember, they are in the business of generating buzz, links and pageviews through opinion pieces that ruffle the feathers of tech bloggers, and they’re good at it.  It’s entertainment value but I wouldn’t put too much stake in anything one person or site says, always look at the situation and landscape objectively.

19.  You are in control of when your blog goes into maintenance mode – not so with Twitter or really any free service.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Twitter.  I’ve even taken the time to draft insights from using it as I think it’s a great service, however the biggest opportunity is still to develop a successful self-hosted blog.  This advice isn’t new – but I just got the feeling this week that it needs to be restated.  I know it’s not as “sexy” anymore but it is still far more valuable and should not be discounted merely because the early adopters have shiny new object syndrome.

Adam Singer is the author of ‘The Future Buzz’ and is “extremely passionate about computers, technology and anything new that connects us and allows for better communication in our world.”

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally.

Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics. I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.

The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).

Let’s break them down by section:

Google search stats:

1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) – approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index (source)

2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily (source)

$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (source)

24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)

68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year (source: keyword tool)

$39.96 – the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source: keyword tool)

1,430,000 – the number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”

136,000 – the number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”

Wikipedia stats

2,695,205 – the number of articles in English on Wikipedia

684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year

75,000 – the number of active contributors to Wikipedia

10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages

260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia (source)

YouTube stats

70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube (March 2008)

200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)

100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)

112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)

2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video

412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)

26.57 – average age of uploader

13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006

$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day
(sources here, here and here)

Blogosphere stats

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% – percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 – number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

source

Twitter stats

1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)

3,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2008) (from TechCrunch)

165,414 – number of followers of the most popular Twitter user (@BarackObama) – but he’s not active

86,078 – number of followers of the most active “non-celebrity” Twitter user (@kevinrose)

63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)

Facebook stats

200,000,000 – number of active users

100,000,000 – number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day

170 – number of countries/territories that use Facebook

35 – number of different languages used on Facebook

2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily

100 – number of friends the average user has

700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly

52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook

140 – number of new applications added per day
source

Digg stats

236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)

56% – percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users

124,340 – number of stories MrBabyMan, the number one user, has Dugg (see updated number here)

612 – number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg (see all 41 pages of them here)

36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received (see story here)