As we have introduced people to Twitter, we’ve had a lot of questions about the Twitter lingo. Twitter is basically just like a very short blog, but there are some key differences, mainly the built-in social community. So we’ve got a two part post that will help explain common Twitter keyterms.

Microblogging: The term microblog is a label for instant communication via the Twitter platform. It’s a compound phrase that describes the limit of characters per post (micro) and the frequency of status updates throughout the users day (blog). A synonym might be “microjournal.”

Follow: To receive messages on Twitter, you follow other people and companies you’re interested in—which means you get their messages as they post (put another way, their messages show up in your incoming timeline on your Twitter home page). Conversely, people get your messages by following you.

Tweet: Users refer to an individual message as a tweet, as in, “Check out this tweet about our new healthcare marketing package.” People sometimes use it as a verb, too, as in, “I tweeted about the stimulus package this morning.” If “tweet” is hard for you to use with a straight face in a business context, try “twittering” as a verb instead. Alternatives include “post,” “message” and “update.”

@username: For companies, one of the most useful things about Twitter is that it lets you exchange public messages with individual users. Simply start a message with @username of the person you want to reach, like this:

“@CNN I agree with your comments about the current state of the economy.”

If CNN is following your account, your message will appear directly on their Twitter home page. If they not following your account, your message will appear in their folder of @username mentions. People who are following both you and CNN will also see the message on their Twitter home page. Finally, the message will appear in search results, and people who come to your Twitter home page will see it among the messages in your outgoing timeline.

To find the public messages that are directed to you (i.e., those that start with your @BusinessName) or that mention you (i.e., those that include your @BusinessName elsewhere in the tweet), head to your Twitter home page, and then on the right side of the screen, click the tab labeled your @BusinessName. For businesses, it’s a good idea to keep a close eye on incoming @mentions, because they’re often sent by customers or potential customers expecting a reply.

Direct messages (DMs): Direct messages are Twitter’s private messaging channel. These tweets appear on your home page under the Direct Messages tab, and if you’ve got email notifications turned on, you’ll also get an email message when somebody DMs you. DMs don’t appear in either person’s public timeline or in search results. No one but you can see your DMs.

The one tricky concept with DMs is that you can send them only to people who are following you. Conversely, you can receive them only from people you’re following.

You can easily send DMs from the Direct Messages tab by using the pull-down menu to choose a recipient and then typing in your note. To send a DM from your home page, start your message with “d username,” like this:

“d LEVELTWO what do you guys think about using so many hospitals using social media?”

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We’ve discussed why using Facebook is important for your business’s social media marketing campaign, so here’s a short list of rules to follow when using Facebook as a way to interact with your customers and encourage new customers along the way.

1. Go Slow and Steady, Don’t Overdo It
   Your fans use their Facebook as a personal communication tool. While they have shown interest in your product or services, remember that there is such a thing as too many updates. Keep your status updates, videos, pictures, and blog posts consistent, but don’t overwhelm them with information. Post at least something a day, but don’t overdo it.
2. Contact Your Fans Directly
   Your small business is built for customer interaction. You may not have thousands of fans and tons of comments on each of your blog posts, but you’ve got an advantage on the large companies because they have no way of interacting with all of their fans. Follow up with new fans and reply to comments. Don’t spam them with messages to buy your stuff right now, rather encourage that one-on-one relationship.
3. Don’t Spam
   Treat your customers like you would want to be treated. Posts in all CAPS and with big flashy buttons won’t help you sell your products any faster. Instead it will likely result in a loss of fans.
4. Consider it an Educational Experience
   We’ve said it before, but it’s still not old. The most important part of social networking for businesses is to make your content interesting. Let your visitors in on a few industry secrets and they’ll come back for more later. Establish yourself as an industry expert.
5. Create a Facebook Page, Not a Profile
   Take a look at our recent blog post called “The Difference Between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Profile.” Don’t risk getting banned from Facebook because you didn’t obey the rules.
6. Use Incentives
   Your marketing tactics may have changed, but those traditional marketing pulls are still just as strong. Offer new fans a discount the next time they come into your store or order your services.
7. Post Occasional Entertaining Statuses
   Put some personality in your updates. Fridays are always a good opportunity to post something a little off topic. If you find a funny video post it on your facebook. Or share a joke with your fans. Especially if there is a way to tie it into your own business. Like a dentist might post a joke about a kid with braces. It’s a great way to break the ice.

Interested in talking to us about advertising on Facebook? Contact us or visit our website. Become a fan of LEVELTWO on Facebook.

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If there is no other reason to join in on the social networking for businesses, this one statement should be important enough for any company to see the value.

Protect your corporate identity. Register your social usernames or someone else will. Sites like Twitter and Facebook don’t monitor username registration. Anyone with an email address can sign up for any username that is not already taken so be proactive about your online reputation and grab your company’s name on the major social networks.

And just in case you were wondering what those other reasons might be, here’s a short list of a few more reasons to jump into the social media networks.

1. Online Reputation Management – making sure you are the one that is in control of your name and brand socially.
2. Customer Service – if people know you can be reached via Twitter, they will reach you. You can often help people much quicker and easier through Twitter. (140 chars, or less baby) Saves a ton of time from annoying phone calls, am I right??
3. Tips – Get in front of the millions of people who are using Twitter everyday. Tips are a great way to get people checking back and can help increase the number of followers you have tremendously!
4. Services – Let it be known why you are on Twitter, and how exactly you can help people via Twitter (what services you are willing to offer etc).
5. Humor – Just because you are on “trendy Twitter” does not mean you can’t be yourself and make people laugh. In fact, the more you are yourself and let people know its the real YOU, or the REAL COMPANY that they have grown to trust and love, the more likely it is going to do you good – and get you more followers.
6. Videos – If you are in a field that has videos, Twitter is a great place to share them – especially if they are going to make people laugh, teach them, or in some other way “enlighten” them!
7. Content promotion – Got a blog? Well make sure you put up a “tweet” every time you got a new post live. The more people that like it will re-tweet it and share it. The more people share it and pass it around, the better it is for you (but that should be a no brainer huh?)
8. Product promotions – Its OK to promote products that you offer on Twitter – it really is. Just make sure you are doing other things with your Twitter account besides just “promoting”. You are more likely to make sales and gain (not lose) followers by mixing it up!
9. Contests – A great way to gain new followers and get more people interested (or knowing) about your brand. Offer something that will get people talking about, and linking back to you. This is very powerful when done right!
10. Reach new customers – You want to be doing everything you can to be finding new customers. The old hard core base is great, but the only way to expand and gain more customers is by stepping outside the traditional methods of marketing.

Find LEVELTWO on your favorite social network.

Tips from Mat Siltala over at dreamsystemsmedia.com

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While Google gets all the attention, it’s easy to forget that the search industry is much more than just Google. There’s are many tools that provide search results on a wide range of topics. While Google might provide a global search on a broad range of keywords, many search engines hold very strong niches in many different industries.

For example here is a short list of a few non-google search engines that are based in very specific niches.

Westlaw – Online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals

PubGene – Visualize and navigate current understanding of genes

Bioinformatic Harvester – Crawls and crosslinks bioinformatic sites

Daylife – News search engine, organizing and distributing the world’s news

Topix – News aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography

Yahoo! News – Top news headlines on current events from around the world

HotPads – Real estate, house, and apartment search engine

Zillow – Search engine for real estate and homes

GlobalSpec – Search engine of engineering and industrial products

Indeed – Job search engine

Picsearch – Image search search engine

PriceGrabber – Online shopping search engine

mySimon – Price comparison shopping search engine

Bing Shopping – Microsoft’s shopping search engine

The best approach to search engine marketing is to diversify your search marketing portfolio. The little dirty secret about search engine optimization is that you ultimately have no control on how search engines display your website. Each search tool uses a different algorithm to determine their best results and it is a constant battle to stay at the top of the search result page.

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While millions of users twitter away details about what’s happening in their life, you can use Twitter to market your product and services to customers in your area.

We’ve put together a list of some online and mobile tools you can use to search, find, and interact with people in your area.

1. Twitter Search
   You can use the advanced search function built into Twitter. We wrote a detailed how-to back in March. “Twitter tools for those who don’t have an iphone.“
2. Social Meetup
   While you can make an impression on the internet, you can really gather a lot of new contacts and leads by attending a meetup that is organized online. A group of people that are interested in the same topics will schedule and plan to meet to discuss their common passion. Here’s two great places to find a meet up in your company’s industry:
   – Tweetup Meetup – http://tweetup.meetup.com
   – Twtvite – http://twtvite.com
3. iPhone Apps
   If you have an iPhone there are several apps that can provide you with geo-locating tools.
   – Twinkle
   – Twitterfon
   – Twittie
   – Twittelator
4. Non-iPhone Tips
   TwitterLocal is similar to the advanced Twitter search, but you are able to manage your local Twitter feeds directly from your desktop using their free software. It’s basically a free way to do what the iPhone apps provide.
5. LocalTweeps
   It’s a local Twitter directory. You can use this local twitter directory to find and interact with users in your area. Since it is based on zipcode and not on city names your listings and searches can be much more specific. Other similar services include:
   – NearbyTweets
   – happn.in

If you found these tips useful, please consider subscribing to our blog via RSS or email. You also follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates.

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My RSS reader is overrun with people talking about reputation management (see screenshot to the right). I do my best to wade through as many articles as I can, but I’ve noticed a trend in what everyone is talking about when it comes to reputation management.

Most of the blog posts just list out all the free online reputation management tools because that’s what most people are after. They like the free tools because unless you are a large company with a huge amount of online conversations about your brand, you may not be convinced that your business really needs to take online reputation management seriously. So until that day comes, here’s our list of free online reputation management tools and when you’re ready to dive in, we’ll be right here. By the way, this list is in no particular order.

• http://monitorthis.info
• http://www.blogpulse.com
• http://www.google.com/alerts
• http://news.yahoo.com/rss
• http://twittermeter.com
• http://tweetvolume.com
• http://backtweets.com
• http://monitter.com
• http://tweetbeep.com
• http://blogsearch.google.com
• http://www.backtype.com
• http://technorati.com
• http://www.cocomment.com
• http://www.yacktrack.com
• http://boardtracker.com
• http://boardreader.com
• http://www.big-boards.com
• http://search.twitter.com
• http://socialmention.com
• http://www.serph.com
• http://www.keotag.com
• http://www.filtrbox.com

However, if you are convinced that the internet is too big of a place to let your brand’s reputation run free, you might be interested in our own Reputation Management tool.

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About a month ago we shared some tips on harvesting and managing customer testimonies. Today we’ve got a new tip for gathering feedback from your customers and new visitors. It’s a feedback form from GetSatisfaction.com.

Get Satisfaction is your connection to the community of people who use your products and services. It’s a unique way to create a transparent, free-flowing dialogue between you and your customers. Make it your entry point into the conversation and transform your customer service from a cost center into an engine for building culture and creating evangelists.

- Create and retain passionate users
- Get users involved in improving your products and services
- Reduce customer churn and repetitive support tasks

Take a look at this image from the GetSatisfaction website.

Customers can:

- Find a company or product
- Ask a question and share how they feel
- The business will get an email notification of the new activity
- Other visitors or customers can join in on the conversation and contribute to the discussion
- The visitors and the company are now connected in an interactive discussion that will help your company address the needs of the customers

There is even a built in reputation management system so that you can keep track of what people are saying about your product or services on Twitter. Also, see our post about our own online reputation management product.

LEVELTWO on GetSatisfaction. Leave a comment!

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Hi! Welcome to The Next Level blog. This is our very first post, so we’ll go ahead and introduce ourselves and explain why we are here.

Who We Are – LEVELTWO is a marketing agency in Dallas, Texas. Find out more about us at http://www.ltwo.com.

What’s The Blog About – We will be discussing why it is important for your company to use social media marketing and interactive marketing like PPC, SEM, SEO, and SMM. What is the difference between search engine marketing and search engine optimization? Why is it important to use medical lead generation? How can internet marketing bring my company new business? We’ll do our best to answer those questions, but to make this blog successful we want you to be involved!

How to Get Involved – Whether you agree or disagree with our marketing advice, we encourage comments from our readers. You can also follow us on Twitter @leveltwo, join our Facebook page & MySpace, or send us an email to social@ltwo.com.

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