In the past, I’ve written about some Twitter tricks, like overcoming Twitter politeness and using Twitter as a followup tool. These methods are great for indirect twitter marketing: they help you create long term relationships. Ultimately, these long term relationships are where most of your leads are going to come from.

For those who want to try the direct route every once-in-a-while, there is a way to find people looking to buy. The way to do this is to use Twitter Advanced Search.

Unless someone makes their tweets private, everything on twitter is open and searchable by the public. This has a great benefit for salespeople looking to enhance their prospecting using Social Media. You can find and connect with people at the very moment that they express interest in your product or service.

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say that you’re a web designer looking for web design leads. Your goal is to connect with people that need a website. Firstly, you’ll want to recognize the type of tweet you’re looking for.

People on Twitter love to ask their network for recommendations on vendors to use. This is part of the curious nature of Twitter culture. Users are judged by the resourcefulness, quality, and responsiveness of their network. Image how nice it is to tweet that you’re in search of something, only to be instantly presented with several vetted results from people that you trust. Pretty compelling, huh? It’s no wonder why there are so many tweets like this one:

Read full article from Nick on “How to Find Leads with Twitter Advanced Search“

I have been arguing for a long time that SEO and Social Media Marketing are becoming the same thing. At least, they work together extremely well, or should.

Some of our new members wonder why the first thing we want to do for them is open up a bunch of social accounts. They picture hour on hour of wasted time wading through these sites looking for customers. But, luckily, that’s not the purpose at all!

I can see this in action when I Google my name, something you can, and should do. Anyway, while there are 387,000 pages currently online for my name, nine of the top ten results are me, not those thousands of other wannabe Dave Sherwin’s! (Sucks to be them.) But that’s not the real point. The real point is the analysis of the 9 results for my name:

1. my name dot com. Well, that makes sense, that’s just good SEO to own the URL of the keyword people are searching for.

2. EzineArticles results. Is EzineArticles a social site? I think so, and many would agree with me, but whether you think so or not, having an account open and posting articles about any keyword (including your name!) just makes sense in your SEO efforts.

3. My blog. A blog is also a social site. People can post, respond, and interact with the blogger, and blogs also get great SEO love from the search engines. So blogging is a great example of the fusion between SEO and Social Media Marketing.

4. My website.

5. Another article directory.

6. A twitter account. There you go, a purely social site coming up on the front page for a search term.

7. My LinkedIn profile. Again, a social site. I don’t do much in LinkedIn, but because I have an account there it ranks for my name when people Google me.

8. A fake guy with my name. How annoying.

9. My slideshare dot com account. Another social site…

10. Facebook.

So, depending on what you term to be a “social” site versus web 1.0, I’d say that about 50% of my personal web presence is from social sites. And in case you’re thinking that a person’s name isn’t that important of an SEO item, think again! People DO Google you! But whether they’re Googling you, your brand, or your product, the concept is the same. Good social media marketing fuzes perfectly with good SEO, they support and help each other, and if you want to be successful online, you need to use both.

Dave Sherwin is the founder of the Social Marketing Blackbox, #1 ranked blogger, and writer.

Get a PLETHORA (it’s a great word, look it up) of great Social Marketing training and downloads **FREE** at:

http://socialmarketingblackbox.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Sherwin
http://EzineArticles.com/?Fuzing-SEO-and-Social-Media-Marketing&id=5756369

So what we are trying to say is that social media is not for marketing ONLY, it should have the ability to run much deeper than that.

3 Areas Social Media is NOT Marketing

1. Customer Service/Relationships – Social Media has lead individuals to have access to many current and potential customers. Being so, many individuals are worried about increasing their numbers of friends and followers. Instead, you should focus about 80% of your time building relationships with current customers by communicating with them on a regular basis. Make sure when they have a comment, question, or concern that you are there to respond. This gives a tremendous sense of customer support and service from you and your organization. This in term makes customers feel cared for.

The other 20% of your time should be used to create new relationships. Yes only about 20% of your time should be focused on expanding your network of friends and followers. Use this time to listen to what outsiders have to say and jump into a conversation intelligently. By providing value via positive communications, you are being branded by outsiders with positive outlook on what your products and/or services have to offer.

Remember, social media should be about quality relationships, not quantity.

2. Product and Service Development - The communication and relationships you are forming with individuals give you the ability to create very tailored products and services. When you have a strong relationship with individuals outside of your organization, you are allowing yourself the possibility to collaborate on internal projects. Social Media gives you the ability to blog, chat, make videos, etc. about your ideas for new products and services. Your current and potential customers can now give you feedback. This can save a lot of time and money in internal research and development as well as stopping you from putting out something others will not obtain from you.

Try your best to include your friends and followers in your research and development wherever possible. Show them you care about what they think about your brand, and show them the satisfaction they deserve when you release a product and/or service that was created with their input.

When individuals have a sense of ownership, they are more likely to utilize what you have created.

3. Entertainment – Having fun is one of the BIGGEST things that organizations are missing out on within social media. Everything does not and should not be structured and corporate like. You should let loose by using social media to play games, have fun contests, and show your bright side. Sites like YouTube have become one of the biggest resources for entertainment, utilize this and give people what they want.

Just as you should have social mixers and employee parties, you should have some extracurricular activities that your friends and followers around the globe can participate in. Perfect example was the Old Spice Guy videos.

Do you think Twitter promotes better business over Facebook?

We got a “no” response and a “I don’t think it does” which then sparked the following

Discussion with a fan, Deborah of TeachPreschool.org

Deborah Teach Preschool: I don’t think it does

SocialWants: Is this from experience?

Well, limited experience. I have heard from another gal that she gets more hits on her sites from Twitter than any other source. She has about 10,000 twitter followers and about 2000 or so FB fans.

I am completely the opposite – I have just over 3000 twitter follwers and just under 10,000 FB followers so I see the biggest hit on my website from FB.

I think it is all where you put your energies in. I find Twitter to be more time consuming. It needs your presence for the live streaming and you have to flip back and forth to keep up with the conversations. I simply don’t have the time to commit to constant monitoring of my Twitter account. But when I do give it solid attention, I see a big difference in activity on Twitter but little increase in my blog. One reason is because I post links to lots of other sites so my tweets run down the wall and out of site very quickly.

ON FB I can leave a post for a longer period of time and still post links elsewhere. I get TONS of hits daily from this approach. Less then half the work in many ways. But I do make sure I communicate daily, update links daily, and answer all questions within 24 or less hours. FB by far is my biggest asset to my blog and to reaching out to other teachers.

If you want to succeed in your SEO or any other business online, it is important that you know the effective ways about social media optimization. Below are some of the tips to help you market you prevent the risks of facing some of the most common social media marketing failures.

• List down all the things that you want to accomplish using your marketing strategy. Some of the things that you may want to include in your objectives are networking, SEO, customer relations, branding, and so many others.

• Always reach out for your target audience. Think like the way your target market does. What are they looking for and most importantly what do they want the most.

• Always give content that has the quality that they want. And see to it that you do it consistently. Consistent quality content is the key to help your social media marketing successful especially when it comes to search engine optimization.

• Do not give more time to marketing. Instead spend more time focusing on your content. If you would give high quality content, you do not have to try hard marketing because it will already do the work for you. You would be surprised to know how your website would become popular simply because you have the right content.

• Never abuse the power of optimization. With the right social media marketing strategies, sooner or later you will become part of the highest rankings in search engines. However, if you over-optimize it would actually do more harm than good in your website. Search engines are now doing some actions on sites who over optimize to prevent it from manipulating the results given by the search engines.

• Instead of giving a link to your site’s homepage, link to your About Me section so that they would know more about you first and your website.

• Include resources in your link. People would get tired if they would see that you are promoting your own website again and again. Look for websites that are relevant to yours and include it in your content. Do not even hesitate to include the links of your competitors as well. You might be surprised to know that this can actually be a great way to start networking and interlinking which is very essential in any new website.

• Create a good social network with the other website owners. Those who are in the same niche as yours may be your competitor but it actually does not matter when it comes to marketing social media. They can be your partners by exchanging links, joining online ventures together, and so many more possibilities. Other than exchanging links, you can also exchange comments at the same time.

Author enjoys writing on wide range of topics and recommends SEO Houston for Social Media Marketing services. You may visit for more details.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Basilone
http://EzineArticles.com/?Avoiding-Social-Media-Marketing-Failures&id=4595767

There’s some really effective things that made the Old Spice campaign possibly one of the best Social Media campaigns to grace the Internet.

There’s four things that they did really and well and four things that we can all apply into our own Social Media.

Watch Mikes Video Here

To begin blog marketing you first need a blog. The next step is to ensure that your blog is updated frequently. Post content in your blog regularly for the best results. Some will post once a day and others once a week. Whichever it is, be consistent with it and know that it will pay off to continue posting as you should. This is a great way to get started with blog marketing. You wont have a blog to market if you do not post in it regularly.

While most free blogs all look the same, you can make sure that your blog design stands out. You don’t want your blog to look and feel like everyone else’s, so make it different. Having your own look is a huge plus in the blog marketing world. You will find that most blogs all look the same and you can have your own look by just using HTML and adjusting the code to suit your taste. You are going to see that this will truly make a difference with your blog as well as your readers. Try to get a theme that is going to match the market that you are promoting in your blog. Doing so will make it look even more professional. You don’t want your readers to confuse your blog with others do you? If this is something that you are concerned about, you will definitely want to make sure that you change yours to make more personable. However, if you are not worried about it or concerned about it in the least, you can leave the design as one of the free templates that you see so frequently used.

Something else that will help you with your blog marketing is exchanging links with authority blogs and websites that are in your same market is another great way to get the word out about your blog. The authority sites are going to have a higher page rank, and will also be listed high in Google’s search results. So do some searches and check those out and see if they are up to exchanging links. If they are not, you could always just add those into your blog roll. You do not need permission to do that if they are not into linking. However, in the world of blogs, most blog owners are thankful for all links, and are willing to return the favor. This is a great way to market your blog that some do not think about or use. If you use this technique to get your blog seen, you will not be sorry. You can even use this for website marketing, and you will see a lot sites do that.

For those of you who are getting started with social media marketing, here are 12 video tutorials to help you properly setup many important basic functions. This post focuses on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, which are the three networks I reccommend everyone setup for themselves and/or their business. Leave a comment below and let me know if there are other social media outlets you would like to learn more about

Read and WATCH more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6049/must-watch-12-awesome-social-media-tutorials.aspx/?source=email-magnet-49#ixzz0r1xRrHOj