Reasons You Must Use Twitter for Your Business

Twitter is a fast growing social media tool that can help business owners in a number of ways. Here are some reasons you must use Twitter to it’s fullest potential for your business whether it’s 100% online business or not.

1. Gaining Twitter followers is akin to gaining newsletter subscribers or RSS subscribers. You already know how important that is. If you don’t, just stop by our training section so you can sign up for some elearning courses about those topics.

Having many Twitter followers increases your reach.

2. Twitter allows you to get messages across instantly to whomever is following you and interested in your messages. Tweet daily about your business services or products, or something going on at your company that you want to share with others. It’s the perfect way to keep in touch with fans of your business and give them tidbits they wouldn’t see on a webpage, in the news or elsewhere. You can also have spur of the minute sales or contests and have instant feedback.

3. Twitter keeps you up to date with topics that are fast changing. Search Twitter for any topic and instantly find people that are talking about it. There are 30 million people on Twitter at the present – and that number is growing very quickly. You can find real-time information using Twitter search – something that’s scaring Google and other traditional search engines into jumping on the bandwagon too!

4. Search for your company name, your name, your product name, anything related to your business and find out what others are saying about the topic. Quell negative talk by offering to help people with issues they are unhappy about. Twitter has become a great place to have customer service problems addressed quickly and before they grow.

5. Make online friends with others that are interested in topics that you want to keep up to date with. Follow them – and put those you’re following into groups using a program that helps you manage Twitter friends, “TweetDeck.com”. Create groups for each niche area you want to keep up with.

Twitter is one of the first of it’s kind – there will be more of these types of applications coming out in the future – keep up with them, they can only get better as new features are introduced that help business owners in getting things done (GTD).

Starting a Business? Switch Your Browser to FireFox!

New business entrepreneurs are starting a lot of projects. It’s a time of learning as you transition from unincorporated to incorporated business and maybe you’re looking at getting a website online to market your new business’ goods and services.

I’m going to suggest that you also make another change. Change your browser from IE, Chrome, Opera, or whatever you’re using to FireFox today. The effect this one change has on your business – the time you spend online will be well worth the cost.

The cost? This incredible browser is totally free.

It was about 2 years ago when I was trying to do something using Internet Explorer on a major website, well, actually it was Google Analytics… and I just couldn’t get IE 6 to work. I tried everything Google help recommended. When I wrote them the last time I got a reply that got me a little peeved at first. The support at Google said, something like, “if you switch to FireFox you probably won’t have any trouble. Most people that are using FireFox can do everything they need to in Google Analytics.”

I fired off an angry response. How dare they suggest I change my whole browser so it will work with their system – that obviously isn’t playing nice with IE for a reason – to get people away from IE.

I was also in the midst of starting a new business and I remember how upset I was that I couldn’t do what I needed to in Google – it wasn’t just Google, but there a couple major sites I was having issues with – Godaddy was one. All my online business hosting accounts were at Godaddy and they had been for years and years. I had to get the issue resolved… I started looking at FireFox – just to see how could it be possible than the standard in internet browsing, IE?

I read a lot about FireFox that day. I even installed Firefox 2.something. Right away I noticed, it was MUCH faster than IE. I don’t know what IE is doing, but even to go back or forward it was taking far too much time. With FF it was instant. I was already blown away. I’m on a slow connection much of the time as I use EDGE GPRS service from my cell phone connected to my notebook, it was compounded by the fact that IE was so slow.

The next thing I wanted to try were the “add ons” or “plugins” that were available for FF. These are programs written by developers – anywhere in the world, that work with FireFox’s browser. They can do that because FireFox is open-source software and anyone can see the entire code. Programmers easily create really useful programs to help people accomplish things.

Here’s a short list of some of my favorite and free plugins I’m using right now:

Live PageRank. This tells me what PR Google has given the website or page of the site that I’m on. Very helpful for SEO/Web development purposes. Probably helpful to you too if you’re trying to gain trust/rank in Google.

PDF Download. This automatically launches when you click on a PDF file to ask what you want to do with it – launch it, save it, etc. This is really helpful because, if you’re like me you’ve unwittingly clicked on a PDF file link that took a LONG time to open – and maybe even locked your browser up. An excellent plugin.

ScribeFire. An easy to use editor that helps you compose blog posts and articles for your business website with a minimum of effort. I use it instead of the WordPress editor because it adds functions I don’t have at WP. I’m using it to compose this article for Dean Harrington at StartUSABusiness.com.

Simple Timer. A small timer application that resides in the bottom of my browser window so I can set it to remind me of something I MUST do.

Speed Dial. You know how when you open a new tab in your current browser you probably aren’t looking at anything much to start with? Speed Dial is an incredibly useful program that gives you 10, 20, 60 screenshots of business/personal websites you usually go to so you can just click one and go. No need to type in a URL – just click. There are MANY options, and once you install it and get it working you’ll wonder how you lived without it. You can group your links/screenshots in different tabs too. I have over 100 sites on-hand instantly with Speed Dial. Awesome program.

FireShot. A screencapture program that captures the entire webpage – not just what you can see. If your page is 60,000 words long or 30 photos of content… it takes a picture of the entire page. It auto-starts a photo editor (you choose which one, I have it opening Photoshop) so you can edit or save it for looking at later. I’ve used this program an average of 1x per day over the last 2 years – priceless. (Free of course).

FireFTP. If you’re using CuteFTP or some other pay for FTP program you might want to check out this outstanding little in-browser FTP program. First – it’s free. Secondly, it’s powerful and doesn’t crash. What else could you ask for? It’s amazing. I’ve used this program about 10 times per day over the last 2 years and had ZERO problems with it. Send this guy some Paypal $ if you’re satisfied with the program. He just saved you $30-40.

Those are just a few of my favorite add-ons I have in my FireFox browser. I have another 20+ that help me get things done for my business every single day.

I’ve changed many things over the past 12 years as I launched myself full-time into online business, web dev, internet marketing… changing my browser from IE to FireFox has been one of my TOP productivity changes I’ve ever made. Seriously, it’s that good and will have a very favorable affect on time you spend using the computer.

Switch today and let us know how it’s going!

Don’t Understand Twitter? Get TweetDeck

Twitter is a bit hard to figure out at first. Maybe after a whole day of looking at it. Twitter is a tool that can help your new business gain credence, popularity, traffic, leads and sales. It’s worth getting to know what Twitter is all about – but, in it’s raw form at Twitter.com you might be having some trouble figuring out what in the world it’s good for.

Thank god for TweetDeck. Tweetdeck is an application separate from Twitter, but it enables you to use Twitter in a way that makes a lot of sense – and in a way that facilitates learning and getting things done.

Join Twitter. Then download Tweetdeck software and come back here.

Read this and then go back and figure TweetDeck out with the new information you learned.

When Tweetdeck pops open it doesn’t automatically give you a place to write your messages. You see columns and some settings buttons but it’s still rather unintuitive for new business owners like yourself. It is for everyone – go figure.

Click the bubble that looks like a cartoon character is speaking in the upper left hand corner of your TD screen. BING! A chat box appears. You’ll need to do this each time you open the application for some reason. I haven’t found a way to automate it yet – if you do, please let me know.

You can type your message in the box and hit send. If you have no followers your message will go nowhere! Better get some followers first. Go to http://search.twitter.com. Search on topics maybe relevant to your business products and see what people are saying. Follow some of those that you want to keep up with. Eventually some people will start following you. Don’t ask them to – just follow a lot of people and you’ll get followed back. It helps to create a profile at Twitter.com that explains who you are, what you do, and a link to your website or some other profile. People want to know who they’re following.

Once you have that accomplished you can tweet (write a message) and send it to your followers.

Now, notice on the top left the icon for “search”. Try it. Tweetdeck adds a column to your desktop and you can now monitor your search on an almost real-time basis. There is some delay in when you view – up to 10 minutes I think it is. You can set the time delay in “settings” on the top right side – a link.

Notice that when you search on a topic you can see what people are saying about the topic? You can jump into the conversation with them too if you choose – they need not be following you. Be careful to not be offensive or you might get the boot from Twitter.com as people can report aggressive tendencies.

Can you see how this tool might be amazing for your new business? Here is a new set of people that have probably never heard of you or your products and you’re able to speak directly with them about it if you want. After a couple short chats you might ask if they want to receive a free ebook about your products in exchange for joining your email list…. lead generation, you know? The possibilities are not endless, but there are many reasons why new business owners will want to get up to speed with Twitter and TweetDeck as soon as possible. Some companies are running their entire business from Twitter already.

Get to work!