The Small Business Guide to Twitter by @simplybusiness

Do you have a parent, friend or colleague ready to ditch his or her digital training wheels and head into Twitter's open wilderness? These pointers should get them started. And even Twitter experts might benefit from a quick refresher on the platform's valuable tools. First, the basics: What is Twitter all about?

Twitter for Business

You would be forgiven for thinking public relations was one thing - comprising activity such as writing press releases, conducting media briefings and attending events - and using social media for marketing purposes was another, but in today's digital world it isn't that black and white.

Jessica Reed Social media channels establishing two-way communication between brands and consumers have heralded a new set of expectations on resolving issues. Recent statistics show the trend: 71% of of 16-24 year olds go online when they have a problem with a product (2012 Sitel Study); 67%of 23,000 consumers in a J.D.

Ever wondered what the function of Twitter's 'Favourites' tool is? Can it be useful to you in the long term? Here's a little look into how to find and start using Favourites, as well as how to use these tweets to build your brand and website content. So, what is a Favourite?

On Twitter, your username, or handle, is your identity. If you can, sign up for Twitter by using your name or a variation of it as your username (assuming somebody else isn't already using it). For example, if your name is John Ira, you may want to pick a Twitter username such as @johnira or @john_ira.

Twitter offers the ability to import a list of your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and/or LinkedIn. This enables you to find Twitter accounts of your contacts, and to follow them. If you are setting up a company Twitter account, you may want to skip this step.

Both businesses and individuals can benefit from customizing their Twitter profile to represent their own personal brand. While Twitter doesn't allow you to edit all elements of the layout and design of your Twitter page, you can adjust a number of text and image based elements that can make your profile feel more cohesive.

I just finished a great Twitter panel at the Amazing Hispanicize Conference and promised to post this follow-up before attending the evening cocktail festivities. So excited to be here with such engaged and interested attendees. Many are asking what ROI they can get from Twitter.

Happy Monday. I'm in the process of drafting an official social media policy for Outspoken Media. Historically, we've worked under a "common sense"/"don't be a jerk" policy, but as the team continues to grow, it's important to get something official on paper.

The board room is preaching social media, and the interns are still the ones practicing. Five reasons your intern should not be managing your social media.

It's fair to say that Twitter is now a well established platform. With over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily it's become one of the most visited websites on the Internet.

Last Monday, we talked about gaining control over and organizing your blog posts by utilizing an editorial calendar. Today, we’re going to talk about being a bit more organized with Twitter. I’m going to show you how to schedule Tweets.

Twitter is an online social networking tool in which users post 140 character updates of what is going on in their lives along with links to things they think are interesting, funny, or useful to their followers ("following" being essentially what "friending" is on other sites).

Twitter has long established itself as the ultimate platform for sharing and exchanging link content. For bloggers and brands, Twitter has surpassed Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Reddit, and is only rivaled by Facebook as the most effective and consistent way to build website traffic through social marketing.

You've heard it a lot. The key to your social dominance lies in your ability to connect with your brand influencers and get them to pass on your content and their networks just how great you are. It's well-intentioned advice but it means nothing if you don't know who these influencers are and how to go about identifying them.

Followerwonk Followerwonk is a social analytics megatool that digs through Twitter data. Use it to track your follower gains and losses, compare Twitter accounts, do global searches in Twitter bios, and analyze any account's followers! Soon it will be able to make you cotton candy and espresso, because it pretty much does everything.

Today, I wanted to write a bit about Twitter, in a post that I've been meaning to write for a long time. I regularly speak to clients, business contacts and people at our conferences who want to use Twitter more, or who have struggled with getting past the initial stages of using the site.

This post was originally published on March 31 2010, but still has the value and has therefore been moved up. At the end of the post you will find more updated content as an extra on this post. Admit it, size matters. Your Twitter followers have become as big a question as "What's your number?"

Today a lot of marketers are struggling to find ways to stay on top of social media marketing. Being able to connect with those who are talking about your brand or sharing your content can be extremely powerful, but also extremely time consuming.

Social Crawlytics is a tool which was developed a few months ago by Yousaf Sekand (@ysekand). The tool allows you to crawl a website and get a report on the social statistics of that website on social media: how much were specific pages shared on different social networks?

You're ready to send out your newsletter. Your main goal is to drive traffic back to your site, convert that traffic into leads, and those leads into customers. So, how do you tell which email marketing campaigns were successful?Easy. Use the Google Analytics URL builder to track your ...

An introduction to the 6 new Social Reports in Google Analytics In my previous post I wrote about the increasing importance of social media with SEO. In this follow-up I'll show how Google Analytics can be used to assess how effective you are in generating social signals through an engaged audience.

Twitter is amongst new media channels that are challenging how we communicate, with whom we communicate and perhaps most fundamentally how we (Marketers) influence people. Sadly execution and analysis of these new social media channels has been hobbled by old world thinking.

About a week after Twitter Advertising became public, I signed up for access. I then received the following email invitation to expand my presence on Twitter by advertising on Twitter. Today, I want to tell you about the Twitter Advertising options available to businesses and show you the setup process for creating your own Twitter Advertising campaign with Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets, and Promoted Trends.