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To Tweet or Not To Tweet…

At a recent seminar about social media marketing, I met a woman whose boss had sent her, saying, “Go learn about that social media stuff so we can start tooting or tweeting or whatever it is.” She was new to social media, uncomfortable with much beyond a personal Facebook page. As the presentation continued, she furiously took notes:

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace.
LinkedIn, Ning, Tagged.
Bebo, Orkut, Delicious.
Tumblr, StumbleUpon, HootSuite.

I realized this woman was trying to learn to use every major social media outlet in two hours. The result was that she learned little more than the fact that there is a lot to learn when it comes to social media. And this is exactly why so many small business owners still don’t use social media. They see how many different options there are and decide they don’t have time to learn how to use a dozen sites, let alone manage multiple data streams once they’re set up.

Twitter Tweets and Facebook Fans

The key to self-managing a successful social media campaign is to learn to use just one or two social media outlets to start. And if you’re going to start anywhere, start with Facebook and Twitter, both of which enable users to start small, learn the format, and slowly build up to more sophisticated usage methods.

We discussed Facebook business pages recently, and they’re a great place to get your feet wet. Once you have a bit of a fan base set up on Facebook, Twitter is a great second step. Twitter is also free, and it works well with Facebook business pages because the two can easily be linked, meaning a single “tweet” can serve the dual purpose of updating your Twitter and Facebook pages at once.

What’s a Tweet? Just saying it makes me picture Tweety Bird.

A “tweet” is a 140-character statement that can include a link to your website or blog, a product update, a special offer, a contest: essentially anything you want. A tweet is a lot like a “status update” on Facebook, but it does more. Much, much more.

First, your tweets have the capacity to reach a lot of people from Day One because when your posts appear in your Facebook feed, many of your contacts are likely to link through to Twitter and start “following” you there, just as they “like” you on Facebook. Even better, tweeting can increase your search engine rankings when you keep an eye on including SEO keywords in your tweets. Many people accomplish this by hash tagging their tweets. Check out what we mean by following TribalVision on Twitter (@TribalTweet). We’ll hash tag a link to this article.

Still overwhelmed by all this social media? Give us a shout, and we’ll tell you how TribalVision can design and manage a social media strategy that’s just right for your business.