With around 21 million unique visitors to Twitter each month, Twitter is quickly gaining traction with small businesses. However, some local businesses are wondering if such a global audience is worth engaging with.

Last week, Deb Ward, a local business owner and Inbound Marketing Certified Professional, posted a thread to the inboundmarketing.com forum asking how she could localize her business’ tweets to a certain geographic location.  While it is not necessary to limit your tweeting so that only certain people in your area can see them, you CAN make your business’s location highly visible on Twitter, thus attracting more people to your brand and generating a network in your area.

Here are a few ways to do this:

1. Include Your Location in Your Bio

Utilize the 160-character bio each Twitter account has to describe your business and what town you hail from. Your business’s profile will then show up in Twitter’s search results for that area which will help you get found more easily.  You can also register your business on Twellow,  the yellow pages for Twitter, to make it easier for consumers to find you.

2. Follow People in Your Area and Your Industry

Start following people from your area. Twitter best practices suggest that you start following people to increase the likelihood that they will follow you back. Twitter users can search for keywords on Tweet Scan to reach new audiences and to learn what these consumers want to know about in your industry. You can also search for the location of Twitter users with HubSpot’s Twitter Grader tool.

3. Tweet About Your Location

Make sure a good portion of your Tweets include geographically specific information — maybe town names, local landmarks or sports teams. If you figure out what people in your area are talking about on Twitter, then add to that conversation in a constructive manner, you’ll generate a lot of local followers.

4. Get Visible

Lastly, geotweet. This application from Schmap produces a link to map with an icon pointing to your business and also allows users to rate the business on a 5 star scale.  Encourage fans of your business on Facebook or other social media sites to tweet the map and rate your business to create buzz.

Finally, above all else, don’t be spammy! Just because you are following people does not mean you can message them every five minutes to go to your restaurant, bookstore, or hardware shop. Remember to keep your tweets interesting and relevant to your target audiences to get people to continue to follow you.  Tweet about promotional offerings or upcoming events that you are hosting and/or that pertain to your industry.  If you create content on a blog, tweet about it to drive visitors to your site.   Combine your geo-targeted efforts with thought leadership in your industry to get your target audience engaged while remaining relevant to the rest of the Twittersphere as well.

By CarolAnn Bailey-Lloyd. Follow her @CarolAnnB.

If you’re new to online business and are trying to surf through the sometimes murky waves of the Internet, then the first thing you need to do is take a deep breath and relax. Nothing can get you more worked up than your own nerves doing a hoodoo number on your mind.  I’m going to offer you a few tricks of the trade I’ve learned along the way and hope that you’ll benefit in some small way.

1. Market Research and Analysis: This is where successful marketing plans spring to action. Justifiably, clients (or buyers) must want to achieve specific goals, so usability and receptiveness are crucial components that ultimately become the deciding factor for potential purchases. Analyze your products and/or services. Obviously, you must have a great product or service to offer your potential buyer.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

• Consumer Demand: What is it about my product (or service) that makes it essential to consumers? What sets my product (or service) aside from other competitors or like products?
• Communication/Presentation: Do I inform my potential consumers with detailed accuracy? Is my product (or service) being presented in its best light? Can I improve its viewer-ability?
• Amenities: Do I offer any special tools or tips (e.g., videos, workshops, eBooks, etc.) that enhance my products and/or services?
• Accessibility: Is my product (or service) easily accessible and within reach?
• Branding: Do I have a memorable slogan/brand? (e.g., Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?”)
• Quality/Affordability: Is my product (or service) affordable, and does it offer quality? Are financing or other loan options available?

2. Strategic Planning and Implementation: Examine your current marketing and advertising campaign to determine the best way to meet and exceed consumer expectations and demand. Try to discern which tactics are working and which ones aren’t. That doesn’t mean you have to entirely abandon the processes that you are utilizing, but it does mean that you might need to take a second approach as to how you go about your day-to-day web operations. After you’ve explored trends, applications, and web 2.0 marketing strategies, it’s time to jot down a plan of action to create real sustainable wealth in your professional business. Remember too, that two heads are always better than one; so get a professional (or personal) opinion from a friend or colleague to get her reaction on your commercial appeal.

3. Website Development and Promotion: The most critical aspects of marketing your product or service online are to know the foundation of Internet marketing and how to successfully harness the power of the World Wide Web at the stroke of your fingertips. How? Since the conception and birth of the Internet, advertising has taken on dramatically new angles, and is steadily climbing to popular ranks among the masses.

While large audiences still prescribe to network and cable television programs, the Web audience is growing by leaps and bounds. Aside from being a vital instrument for student and professional research projects, the Internet has become an ever-expanding media outlet for entertainment, information, work and direct-advertising. By integrating all points of a strategic marketing campaign, virtual web advertising agencies are able to assist clients with interactive ad campaigns that help promote exposure to clients (services and/or products).

In addition to frugal facilitation of free online marketing tools like PR-Inside.com, Free-Press-Release.com, and various online article distribution sites, Web 2.0 technologies are reinventing the way online businesses and professionals perform and succeed in today’s tough economic environment.

* Emerging web 2.0 technologies (e.g.: Twitter, FaceBook MySpace, LinkedIn, VOX, Me2everyone; Google Reader, FriendFeed, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Blip.fm, YouTube, HolisticTwitter, InSocialMedia, Wordpress, eBlogger, etc.) are excellent networking tools to help brand you and your services (or products).  *Psst…Twitter is my personal favorite social networking site, but I’m not telling anyone!

Don’t forget to utilize Meta tags and basic hotmail coding including anchor text links and linked graphics to enhance your web presence and visibility. This means using keyword/keyword phrase-rich, original content as copy and as distributable articles to assorted article-hosts.

To your success!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

By Chris Johnson of Guerrilla.me - Follow him @genuinechris

One reason alone is why I’m on twitter. To make money. I don’t mean to give Lara the willies. But it’s true. I also post stuff about my kids. I also have made great friends from twitter. I’ve also learned a ton about the world. Still, at the end of the day, twitter is about earning customers for me. Or, should I say, helping people. It’s working. I’m doing enough business to support my family of 4, just from Twitter.

[Honesty Box: We live in the Midwest and are radically cheap.]

This is the ethos you need to have starting out:

1.) Value And Honor Every Relationship Possible. Twitter is about relationships. It’s about small communities, ideas bouncing around. You’re there to help everyone possible. You’re there to be of service. Get it? You have to help people. Let’s get specific: be of maximum service to 100 people at and around your level. Get to know them. Go out of your way to help. For free. If you need to, put a spreadsheet down to remind yourself to interact with them and encourage them.

2.) Stop Broadcasting & Automating. OK, you can repeat stuff. And you should. You can use Twuffer. And you should. But if you’re gonna roll with the “Hey, here’s a widget that gives you 9,000,000 indifferent followers in 5 minutes,” you’re not giving anything good. You’re not adding value, you’re the guy at the wedding trying to hook you into MLM. You’re also marking yourself as a newbie. Use search.twitter.com to follow keywords as I mentioned in this post.

3.) Stop begging for love from the big names. I see people trying to get attention from “name brand” blogger with 25,000 followers with nothing more to give than “Hey check out my site, what do you think.” You don’t make it big by getting a @mrskutcher to notice you. You make it big by giving value to someone with 500 followers, and having him get so happy he refers his friends to you, on and off twitter. Help people first and you’ll win.

4.) Get Local, dog gone it. Probably the biggest mistake I made was to eschew the local market to chase other business. That was dumb. It’s something I’m correcting, but I’ve lost the first mover advantage in Columbus, OH. I’ve just started reaching out. What I’ve learned? Twitter provides instant rapport when you call on them. Twitter + your local area makes it even better. Had I done this a year or more ago, I would have had results much sooner.

5.) Don’t Follow So Many People. Following is a promise. To care, to watch, even if intermittently. To link, to help. I “follow” 1800 and that’s far too many. I can only watch about 300-400. I am representing that I care about people I don’t know, and that, I find deceitful. Your mileage may vary depending on how you use twitter, but following people you don’t watch isn’t my thing. I’m in it and about relationships. True fans, true friends. Not mass numbers.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Twitter is the easiest form of social media to measure, so make sure you’re getting the most from it.

By Marshall Sponder | Entrepreneur.com

The news is slowly sinking in that Twitter can help small businesses succeed beyond answering customers’ questions, networking and providing education. Within a fairly short period of time, Twitter could permanently change how small businesses operate to include hyper-local marketing, advertising, financial information, customer service, data mining, product and service alerts and micropayments.

Immaturity of business models and metrics and ROI questions surrounding social media are making Twitter cumbersome to use for many small businesses, but change is coming as more startups are building Twitter into their business models; meanwhile, Twitter metrics and tracking have also been rapidly evolving. New metric tools such as Twitoaster and ViralHeat are constantly being released to track Twitter’s effect on sales and marketing.

Twitter is the easiest form of social media to track, due to its open interface and data. Any kind of actionable data is worth tracking. For example, business owners can start by tracking how many followers they have at any one time, how many times their posts were shared and how many replies they got. They can also track more complex calculations such as how much their Twitter followers are worth. For example, Hillstrom’s Twitter Quality Score is calculated by dividing the number of followers by the number following, and a score of 1.5 or above demonstrates that a Twitter account is worth following and has quality information and offers for its followers.

Next, track your sales or word-of-mouth mentions back to your Twitter account. Use a URL shortener, to track how often your content appears on Twitter, and tie it back to sales. For example, you can establish a shortened link to a specific promotion and track how many times it has been clicked on and shared, which is important in social media.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/webmetricscolumnist/article202516.html#ixzz0M2A1pEXc

by Travis Campbell

A lot has been made of Twitter as its popularity grows (significantly, I might add), so have the reasons for having a solid Twitter marketing strategy.  In this post you’ll learn the three rules every online and small business entrepreneur should know when using Twitter for business, and why.  Without these in place, your experience with Twitter will be of minimal value, and can even hurt your business altogether.

3 Rules of Using Twitter for Business

Ok, so you have heard of Twitter by now, but many questions remain.  Why should I use this service?  How can it help my business?  Let me encourage you to watch how others are successfully using it and follow their lead.  Here are three things I’ve observed others doing successfully, and am patterning my own profile after as well.  These are general and open ended rules, feel free to comment at the end of the post and add to the conversation.

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Use Twitter to market your homebased business.

You’ve probably heard of Twitter, even if you aren’t sure what it is. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service–think public instant messenger stream. From your mobile device or computer you send updates called tweets, which are text posts of up to 140 characters. Your tweets can be read by others, and you can sign up to follow the messages others write so that you can get short, quick updates from them.

As a homebased entrepreneur, Twitter gives you an open door to connect not only with other entrepreneurs but also other companies, marketing experts and more. As homebased entrepreneurs, these tips, connections and opportunities can spell great marketing options for you.

The bottom line is Twitter can help you grow your home business.

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Entrepreneurs are finding the fast-rising microblogging site to be a useful tool for reaching out to customers

By Jeremy Quittner

Here’s what happened when Chris Savage, the chief executive of Wistia.com, searched for the phrase “private video sharing” on Twitter, a social networking site. One post he found read, “A teacher requested a private ‘video sharing’ Web site so that specialists can observe student behavior—can anyone refer one?”

That got Savage’s attention. He e-mailed back: “Still looking for a private video sharing site?”

Minutes later came the reply: “YES! It’s the first request for one—thought I’d hit up my tweets before [I] go digging.”

Savage: “Cool. You may want to check out Wistia.com. Full disclosure, I’m the CEO; -)”

Read article…

Since it was launched last fall, over 1.5 million people have graded their profiles using Twitter Grader.

But what does a Twitter Grade actually mean — and how can you use it to improve how you use Twitter?

Here’s the scoop: Your Twitter Grade is a measure of how well you’re using Twitter as a marketing tool. The number is a percentile score based on how effectively you’re following best Twitter-for-business practices, compared to all the other people that have been graded.

To give you a better sense of how you can improve your use of Twitter as a marketing tool, here’s a breakdown of a few questions Twitter Grader asks when grading your profile (as well as some of the thinking behind them):

1) How many followers do you have? Reach is important, and Twitter Grader puts some weight on the number of people following you. Offering interesting content and interacting often online will get you more followers. Also, those who have a lot of followers are frequently thought-leaders in the space.

2) What is the power and influence of those people following you? Choose your friends wisely, and build a network of people who have have large networks themselves. To have influential people follow you is powerful.

3) How many people are you following? If you are following more people than are following you, it reduces your grade a bit. This “poor ratio” often (although, not always) implies that a person is following too many people at once, instead of letting organic relationships naturally develop. Remember to build your network organically, step-by-step.

4) How often do you update and interact with your network? Being an active member of the Twitter community defineitly gets you points. Remember to consistantly interact with your network. However, tweeting excessively without reason can hurt your grade.

5) How often does your network engage with you? Twitter Grader thinks very highly of people who are tweeted at, cited in the context of a tweet or retweeted. To have people interact or reference you shows authority. Give people a reason to talk about you.

What do you think? Are there other best-practices Twitter Grader should be assessing? How do you use Twitter for marketing?

By Rochelle Paul

A couple weeks ago, I spoke with San Francisco area Social Marketing expert, Rick Rochon. Rick and I talked about the various ways to use Social and New Media/Marketing opportunities.

Rick’s expertise is to use nearly or totally free marketing options. Twitter is one such method. Providing a small business owner with another avenue (Facebook & LinkedIn being other options) to build relationships with customers and clients via a platform that allows you to target them, for them to chose to let you into their lives, and doing so in a free manner. Indeed, the biggest investment faced by the small business owner is time.

Let’s quickly cover the basics of Twitter.

Twitter is what is considered a microblog. A microblog platform provides the writer with the chance to write whatever they want, within 140 characters. That is characters. Characters include punctuation, spaces, letters, everything. A very short amount of space. About three sentences.

Twitter has grown by leaps and bounds since its beginning in 2006.

Rick calls it “the conversation”. If you post something on Twitter, it’s a “tweet”. The people following you, “tweeple”. The world you move through, the “twitishpere.”

Twitter is open to everyone, and every age, demographic, group can be found tweeting around. Unlike Facebrook and LinkedIn, where the participants have been traditionally one group (college students growing into everyone, or business people) Twitter seems to have, from conception, been targeted to and attracts, nearly everyone across the board.

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Written by Sarah Perez / March 26, 2009

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally intended for communication among individuals, a number of organizations have begun to actively participate on the platform. However, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy companies are doing both.

Before any company employees start tweeting, it would be a good idea to remind them that the same rules that apply to other web participation (like blogging, for example) also apply to Twitter. “As Twitter is a public forum, employees should understand the limits of what is acceptable and desirable,” says Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner. “If organizations have not defined a public Web participation policy, they should do so as quickly as possible.”

Based on Garnter’s research, they have narrowed down the four different ways that companies are using Twitter today: direct, indirect, internal, and signaling. Here’s what those mean:

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