Here are five companies and their strategies for handling social media marketing:

AT&T

Overall, AT&T knows exactly how to run social media marketing. Their blog posts relay updates about their products, and they respond to their customers’ ideas and concerns (positive or negative) promptly. They also have a Spanish blog for their non-English speaking customers. They have some videos of new products on Youtube and a video contest. On one website, they have pictures and short mentions of big celebrity events linking back to an entertainment portion of the AT&T website called U-verse. This is a company that models an excellent social media marketing strategy.

Best Buy

The CMO, Barry Judge, seems to manage most of their social media marketing. Most recent was a holiday charity. These always offer valuable improvements in business ethics and reputation. One thing I was really impressed with was his quick response to a controversial issue that was in the blog, which mentioned an alternative faith’s seasonal holiday. He updates his consumers and answers their questions quickly. With 15,800 followers on Twitter, this massive giant isn’t doing too badly.

Coca-Cola

While Coca-Cola has a blog, the majority of their customer communication comes from micro-blogging. Their Twitter account has around 154,000 followers. Excellent customer appreciation is when the company literally tells the customer that they love them back for loving their product. Aspiring bigwigs could learn something from this classic company. Coca-Cola also has a large facebook fan page campaign, that has been very successful, not to mention the extensive branding across the world. Coca-Cola is one of the oldest soft drinks in the world with a long and rich history.

Dell

With a blog that has millions of page views per month, Dell is doing something right.  They have implemented ‘Ideastorm’ to allow customers to talk directly with them about concerns or complaints. With this direct way of bringing customer dissatisfaction out into the limelight, Dell is compelled to respond because of how direct the medium of communication is. This is something that companies should consider doing as it builds trust between the company and customers. Dell is a company that tries to solve its problems and doesn’t hide from its customers’ dissatisfaction. That’s something as a consumer that I’ve come to respect.

Wal-Mart

The nice thing about Wal-Mart’s blog is that it’s well organized and has a friendly appeal to it. If a customer were to comment with a question or a concern, the organizers of this Wal-Mart blog would respond to the concern in their next blog post. They also have twitter and RSS feeds.

The strategies implemented by these companies have one major thing in common: showing appreciation for the customer through direct mediums of communication. Company strategies for social media marketing are always evolving, whether they are for big or small companies. On the web, people can gain equal footing with bigwig companies and share in the competition. However, before this happens, companies will need to think like bigwigs before they can hope to succeed in social media marketing.

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Tweet Deck is the most famous Twitter third party application. Tweet Deck calls itself “a simple and fast way to experience Twitter.”  It allows you to tweet from your phone. Tweet Deck allows you to integrate many of your other social networking sites at one place. The web is so complex and we do so many things that we do not have the time everyday to see what is happening everywhere. Tweet Deck solves that problem by integrating all your social sites at one browser. You will get to see in a snapshot, which sites are updated and where the action is. Moreover, Tweet Deck organizes the tweets in directory formats which allow you to add to your list, the tweeters who share the same interest as you, much faster! Apart from that, Tweet Deck shows you the most popular tweet lists as well.

Group Tweet is another third party application of Twitter which is very useful. You may have many different interest and ay want to run your campaign or post issues based on certain topics. Maintain group on Twitter and use activate that group on Group Tweet to send messages to relevant groups. This way, the tweet will only be viewed by the people on that particular group list. Group Tweet helps businesses, classrooms, friends of different interest groups or projects to send private messages to one another without tweeting to the entire list of followers.

Digsby is as revolutionary as Twitter itself. Tweet Deck allows the integration of social networking sites. Digsby takes it one step further and allows you to integrate your email and chat accounts as well; Hotmail, Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more applications are brought together by Digsby on one single platform!

Tweetpic and Bubble Tweet, allows Twitter users to share pictures and videos respectively. Twitter was supposed to be a simple 140 character text social micro blogging site! Tweetpic and Bubble Tweet have brought Twitter to another level and attracted many more users to tweet with integrating pictures and videos in the tweet!

There are many more third party Twitter applications on the web. Via trial and error, you will be able to find some applications that you can use to integrate with your Twitter account get more mileage on your Internet marketing activities.

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Easy and Simple:

One of the main reasons why Twitter is extremely common among all age groups is the ease and flexibility is provides to the user. Every age group is able to access the twitter interface with an extreme ease and simplicity. From microblogging to photo sharing, the easy to use interface allows everyone to share their life with their friends and colleagues. Other social networking websites are much more complicated and hard to learn. But twitter is extremely simple and does not contain any hidden buttons or features that require one to ask from some other.

Twitter does not appear very fancy and stylish in its main page. This is the reason why it is extremely fast and accepted among a number of people. Twitter has an easy to understand interface with simple and easy buttons to use. At the same time, Twitter also offers features to savvy people. Searches and trends can also be found on twitter as well.

Applications:

There are a number of desktop as well as mobile applications hosted by twitter. It makes it extremely flexible and useable from any part of the world. A long list of applications can be learnt from their own website. There are applications for each and every age group. People can find different application for their requirements and their own specified type of fun.

Dozens of applications hosted by third party are placed on the twitter website. This is because of the fact that twitter has launched its API. It allows almost every third party like Zynga to have their applications on several social networking websites. The applications are about anything and you can play a wide variety of games using these applications.

A community place:

This is the main reason why every social networking website flourish and become extremely common and well known. A better community place allows your friends, family and colleagues to join their hands, have fun and gossip at one place.

In addition to these features and advantages, twitter offers a worldwide acceptance encompassing each and every walk of your life.

Summary:

Twitter is a very common and well known social networking website allowing you to meet with millions of people around the world, share photos, share your ideas and creativity. It is proved as a hub for the people of all of the continents. In addition to learning activities, twitter also provides you a lot of business and marketing opportunities. (@BrandonSheley)

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Twitter is such a large social networking service that it gets more than 15,000 tweets per minutes. There are a number of facts and figures that are related with the twitter. Few of these facts are given below while other can be searched and experienced over twitter itself.

1)  62% of the twitter users belong to United States of America. This shows the popularity of social networking services in America and the interaction between friends.

2)  The largest cities in the world which use the Twitter social networking service also belong to United States of America. New York City is among the cities which mostly use the twitter service. After New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and San Francisco hosts the largest number of twitter users.

3)  Brazil is ranked as 5^th in the overall traffic ranking of Twitter. It is a strange fact because Brazil is not an English speaking country while English is the mostly used language in the twitter networks.

4)  The number of women on twitter is much more than the total number of men. Though there is a huge contribution of teen age and youngsters, but in even adults, women exceed men.

5)  Twitter is mostly used to tweet texts which can contain any type of information. No matter what you are sharing you will definitely see a link to “Tweet” on a number of related websites. Facebook, Myspace and other social networking websites also hosts twitter.

6)  Mostly, people below age 25 are using twitter. A number of applications and tools are used to post and tweet messages. Other tools are also in use to manage those tweets.

7)  73% of the total users of twitter joined twitter in the first five months of the year 2009. This shows the immense popularity and fast growth of the twitter in such a less time.

8)  15% of the twitter users posts more than one update every day. Though the percentage is comparatively less but 15% of total twitter users make it in millions.

9)  There are also a great number of people who have never posted a tweet. About 20% of the total registered users have never posted a tweet.

10) It is a very strange fact that the 75% of the overall activity of twitter is hosted by less than 5% of the users of twitter. That’s truly strange.

11) Most of the Apple iPhone users who use twitter belong to United States of America. This shows the high usage of twitter from USA.

These are very few facts which are associated with this social networking service of Twitter. There are a number of other hidden facts about twitter which you can learn in a number of forums and blogs.

Summary:

Twitter hold millions of users every day tweeting almost each and every walk of life. There are a number of facts and figures associated with Twitter. The most important figure is that most of the people who use twitter belong to United States of America. After USA, Canada is hosts a lot number of twitter users.

Do you think the United States will always have the majority of Twitter users?

Don’t forget to Follow me on Twitter.

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Twitter is a great tool. There are millions of people who are tweeting this very moment and the phenomenon is not going to end anytime soon. The idea of tweeting “What are you doing right now” has caught on so well that we see even President Barack Obama on Twitter! Twitter is here to stay, at least for a while till something much simpler than Twitter comes on the net.

As such, should you get on the bandwagon and tweet your Internet marketing collateral online? Twitter is a great business platform and it helps the consumers as much as it helps the businesses. However, just like any other thing, Twitter has its good points and bad points. Using Twitter for business purposes, hence, has its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Twitter

Your Internet marketing can be done free of cost if you use Twitter wisely. Your target market is out there for you to seek and understand. Understand from their tweets, their passion and interests. Do your research on your target market by following the tweets of your target market for better understanding. Identify the strategies used by your competitors by following their tweets as well.

Twitter allows you to network efficiently and with large groups of people. Twitter and its third party applications allow you to segregate and interact with your target markets effectively. You can direct your Internet marketing campaigns at relevant groups efficiently by using Twitter

Twitter allows you to communicate directly with your target market instantly. Normally, the process of communication takes time. For example, if you have a Website, the communication would be via polls, which are not personal or though contact forms which are time consuming and impersonal as well. With twitter, you can expect instant communication with your target market. You may have just posted a tweet, but a reply from your target market could come in an instant as well. Twitter helps you to gather real time intelligence from your very own target market as well as obtain valuable feedback. The speed of communication is just fantastic with Twitter. Moreover, your near approach helps to builds lasting relationship as you will come across as a company that cares for its consumers instead of just hard selling.

Disadvantages of Twitter

Twitter is the number one site for spammers. You will have to filter and weed out spammers from your lists from time to time, if you want to have a good gauge of your target market. Otherwise, the followers total will be an inflated number which will not help in your Internet marketing campaigns. Filtering spam tweets is a lot of hard work. Other means of Internet marketing may seem feasible in the long run.

Twitter is addictive. It is very easy to get distracted as you join in the conversations or receive tweets outside your business interests. You will have to strike a balance with getting friendly with your followers and meeting your Internet marketing objectives

In conclusion, how you want to use Twitter is up to you. Like any other means of communication, Twitter has its own advantages and disadvantages. Advantages far outweigh disadvantages. Hence, use Twitter for your Internet marketing needs and ensure that Twitter is used sparingly. Your tweets can be classified as spam as well, if you are just posting tweets with inks and not connecting with your followers.

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The Tools of the Trade

First off we need a few Twitter accounts. They are easy to make, take less than 30 seconds and you’ll have your very own Twitter account. You might want to start with one, but if you get all the tools that I’ll talk about, it’s a good idea to make a few and build them all at once. You might be asking yourself what username I should use. If you have a site of flying kites, and “square red kites” is one of your busiest sections @square_red_kites might be a good username to get. I would suggest checking out the google adword keyword tool and see if you can refine your username a little more. Maybe “red square kites” gets more searches. This just takes some playing around with, I wouldn’t suggest something real spammy like @free_free_kites, you can always change the name later but I would try to get it right the first time.

This is the tool I use to auto-follow users on Twitter, it allows me to follow users by a search phrase or follow users who follow others, or who they follow. I could also upload a text file if I had a list of users I wanted to follow. I’m sure there are many tools like it, a quick search of google for “twitter adder” will show quite a few. I paid $10-$20 for this program 10 months ago. It was a right place at the right time deal for me, getting it when it was in early beta stages. I see a purchase link for $50; I would look around if you are considering getting a program like this.

Next thing we’ll need is a Twitter client, I’ve been using Seesmic lately but started off with Tweetdeck. I really liked the look of Tweetdeck, you can make columns and searches to see “live search” updates of anything you want. I would use it to see if; anyone was talking about me or my business, and to see if anyone had questions I could answer such as “vBulletin” questions. I’ve been using Seesmic lately because of the ease of managing multiple Twitter accounts in one small easy to navigate screen. I suggest checking both of them out, as well as the numerous other Twitter clients available for your computer or phone.

Twitter has following limits, so sometimes you need to unfollow a few people to follow more. You can find out who is and is not following you. I would suggest if you do have to unfollow a few people in order to follow more, you unfollow those who aren’t following you back. A great webpage that will show you who is and is not following you is called Friend of Follow. You don’t need to hand over your login, just your Twitter username and it’ll display a list of your friends. You can than manually click a user and unfollow. When I started I would use this and unfollow those who hadn’t even changed the default icon, which at the time was the ugly brown o_O. These next two tools ask for your username and pass, I’ve been using both these for 10 months and NEVER had a problem. There are many bloggers who have written about these, I trust them but use at your own risk. Twitter Karma is a page similar to what you’ll see with Friend or Follow, but you can sort all by those not following, one click and check all, and one click and unfollow all. It’s a great tool, but has a limit of 10,000 follow/following count. Once I hit 10 followers, I had to find something else, I found Twitter Mutuality (now version 2) This tool is very straight forward, it will find all who aren’t following you and start unfollowing. You can stop it at any time by closing the browser.

Oh, btw.. The reason why we follow more and more people is because I’d say 4 out of 5 will naturally follow you back, the other 2 might considering what you tweet about.

Okay, so now we have a good twitter account with a high number of followers, we have to give them some content. You can do this a variety of ways in vBulletin, the easiest is Twitter feed. If you want to do it the right way, I would an application for the section or forum as a whole and user vBulletin Tweet poster by Milad. It’s a great product that will give your forum it’s own “source link” which doesn’t have the nofollow attribute attached. The idea is that you have an RSS feed of your forum or category, and we can make our Twitter account post updates with links and snipits to the threads being created.

Examples of what I’ve done

Here are a few examples of what I’ve done, 2 will be with forum sections and 2 will be with local blogs that I’m a part of.

We have a lot of WordPress styles that are posted on the forum, so I made @Wordpress_Styles to help distribute to those looking for free WordPress themes.

I’m part of this program called Driving Revenue that will credit your account if someone clicks a link to a site like ebay from your site. I have a webmaster auctions section that I use RSS feeds from sites like ebay and other sites, to post the latest deals. I made @Driving_revenue as more or less a test account just to see what I could do as far as building traffic to that section.

Here is an account (@TopekaTweetup) I made for a local tweetup group I’m helping with. I use Twitterfeed to publish the lasts post as well as tweetup updates. We use the same #hash tags when we talk about the tweetups.

Another one I have is @TransformTopeka, it’s one of the “automated” ones that we as a group try to actually chat with local users with as well as it publishes are feeds. Both these Topeka ones also will update the status when someone on facebook comments on our Fan Pages (which I strongly recommend building for your business but that’s for another article)

My best example is my current account, @BrandonSheley is the one I use each and every day to carry on conversations with our members, with local people and with strangers who are talking about things I’m interested in

The one I’m working and focused on now is my @BrandonSheley account, I’m just over 7,000 followers as of this post, but I’m been growing about 1500 new followers each month and that will grow exponentially as I get more followers and can follow more. You can follow 10% more then the people following you.

To wrap this up

I suggest adding your forums icon or a category icon to your Twitter account. You can also upload your own background. Branding your background with your forum or category logo is also a good idea. You want this account to be an extension of the support you offer to your forum members. As you may notice from above, my strongest account is one that I carry on conversations with other users on Twitter. Speaking of conversations, a tool I didn’t mention because I ran out of time is Tweetboard. It’s a fabulous addon for any community that is tapped into Twitter.

As I said, I’ll try to update this post and reply to any questions you may have. I may even be back to write another article on getting the most out of Facebook and LinkedIn. If you want to read a few more articles on Social Media I have a few on my blog.

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• Bookmarks get indexed faster than your website content. Therefore by submitting the content to social media sites like Twitter, Reddit and Yahoo Buzz can be more beneficial.
• If SEO has been a concern for you, sit back and relax. All you need to do is concentrate on your keywords and include them while providing the title in the social bookmarking platform.
• Enhance your reach and share your stories, news and articles in public.
• You can market your competencies and strengths in no extra cost and discover new business opportunities through social web platform.
• You can form your communities and target your audience. If they are interested in your business you would even like to gain more from them through a dedicated marketed campaign.
• Bookmarks help you generate organic traffic through search engines. As the pages get indexed much faster, you can expect a good traffic base within few days.

You can benefit from the social media endlessly. However ensure that you provide quality stories to your readers. After all, the web world lacks quality content and if you can provide cutting edge stories to your readers you are sure to emerge as a winner. Get your act together and identify who is your audience, segment them and position your products and services accordingly. Always remember that you are out there to socialize and share. Therefore make friends and followers who share similar interests. Forming a social group of people with alienated interests won’t really help. Discover enormous business possibilities through social media and increase your web presence.

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Social bookmarks categories your website based on its niche. You could submit your website on all popular social bookmarking sites based on the categories – Social Media, Business, Websites Updates etc. You may get to choose your site as blog or content management system or any other platform.

Tags, Title and Description of your website are some of the essentials that you would require while marketing your website through social bookmarking sites. It is imperative to note that social bookmarking also draws a sizable amount of traffic on your website. And if you have been wondering how is that possible? The answer is that major search engines including Google and Yahoo are friendly to the bookmarking sites. You can achieve a higher indexing rate if you bookmark, needless to mention that they also act as a source of a back link for your website.

Bookmarking your website is pretty simple and easy. You can explore some of the popular social bookmarking sites by creating an account with them and submitting your website. Within few days you would experience an increase in traffic and better indexing of your content on all major search engines. You are all set to earn through affiliates once you start to get a sizable amount of traffic through bookmarks. So what are you waiting for? Get set going and submit your website or blog to major social networks and start realizing the benefits.

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Really, this is only half accurate. The text in the update you’ve made on your social network profile will be indexed, but the search engines will not follow the link and index the site you are linking to.

What exactly does this mean? Let’s use Twitter for example, the text and info in your “status update” will be indxed, but the search engine bot will not follow the URL you’ve linked to and index that site. Now you may ask, why even link to your websites in the first place? Even if Google doesn’t click the links, your friends will and it gets out usefully information they may not have seen otherwise.

I just want to touch on the power of your friends or followers, again using Twitter as an example, but it can also be said for Facebook and LinkedIn as well. When you update your status on Twitter, your followers will all have the chance to see it. Let’s say you have 1,000 followers, and each of them have 1,000 followers.  If even one person ReTweets (RT) your post, it will have a chance to be seen by their 1,000 followers – new people that you don’t even know, and if one of them RT’s it… well, you can see where this is going. So if you have a catchy headline and good information, your single post can potentially be seen by several thousand people seconds after it’s been posted.

So how can I tell if these links will be followed by search engines or not? Look for an HTML attribute called the “no-follow” attribute. You can see this by highlighting a link, right clicking and viewing the source of the web page. If you don’t want to do that on every site you visit, install a toolbar add-on. I use an addon for Firefox called SeoQuake, (they also have an Internet Explorer version but I’ve never given it a try). I’ve been using SeoQuake for a couple years, and have even had the developer comment on our forums. SeoQuake has several options, but the one that deals with the no-follow tag is a strike-though. In other words, if the links has the no-follow tag, it will look like this.

Hopefully, I’ve cleared up some misconceptions about how you’re able to get traffic from search engine via your social networks. In honor of this blog post, I’ve disabled the no-follow tag on this blog. As you now know, that means the search engines will be able to find your website  and crawl your URL if you link to it when leaving your comment.

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