Small business owners will have heard all the rave and buzz about Twitter, and how this microblogging site can help enhance their respective brands. But if you’re not particularly adept at social media, you might be hesitant to dedicate your time and spend all your efforts on something you’re unsure of. Don’t worry; it’s perfectly natural. It is indeed difficult to cut through all the noise and find out what exactly you’re getting from Twitter. How does it help your brand? What are people saying about it? In what ways can you manage the so-called “Twitter sentiment” when you don’t even know what that sentiment is? Below you’ll find a list of Twitter tools to help bring you closer to the answers you’re looking for. These are tools for tracking Twitter sentiment – or how people perceive your brand – in the popular social media site. Twitter Search: It goes without saying that the volume of Tweets that the world – Read the full article

A number of business owners and brand managers use Twitter as a tool for communicating advertising and marketing messages, but the popular social media and microblogging site is also an equally powerful public relations tool. Twitter is especially effective in helping you manage your online reputation and plan your crisis communications strategy. Where before, one turned to PR firms in times of crisis and controversy, sticking to traditional media is no longer enough today. Why? Because: People are making and engaging in conversations 24/7, real-time, on social media networks. People are sharing information and opinion through the Internet now more than ever. Dissatisfied customers (or employees), competitors, and unscrupulous stealth marketers can spread false information or commit brand identity theft as easily as they can push their own agendas. So here Twitter comes to save the day! In cases of crisis that can potentially significantly damage your business or brand, you can leverage this tool to respond, interact, and manage – Read the full article
These days it’s not just enterprises, global brands, and small businesses leveraging the power of social media – non-profit organizations are getting involved, too. Social media has indeed sparked new ways of giving: take Twitter, for example. The massively popular microblogging site has been used time and again to raise funds and support charities and other worthy causes. Not only is Twitter an innovative avenue for fundraising; it’s also a pretty effective one, too, provided you follow these great tips. Engage with people who can help The key to fundraising on Twitter is connecting with people who can help and keeping them upbeat throughout your whole fundraising campaign. You may be able to get a random group of people to read your tweets, but if they’re all twelve-, thirteen-year-olds who’d rather buy the new Justin Bieber CD than make a donation, you might not be able to hit your targets. So start by using the Find People or Twitter Search – Read the full article

Millions of people watch the NFL Super Bowl every year because they love American football. That’s why it’s consistently one of the highest-rated programs every year. Millions more watch it even though they don’t like football. Those of the second kind watch primarily because of the ads. And why not? So many commercial campaigns have made the Super Bowl their ultimate showcase: from Apple’s 1984 commercial to the Budweiser “Bud Bowl” campaign, to the dot-com ads in 1999 and 2000, Super Bowl tradition has proved that the game is where high concept ads and extravagant, expensive commercials are often placed and broadcast. It’s not just the people in advertising watching and talking about the Super Bowl ads. There’s a whole nation of armchair critics out there, eager to compare opinions with other armchair critics. That’s why Boston ad firm Mullen has partnered with social media monitoring company Radian6 in bringing the ultimate Twitter / Super Bowl experience, the Brand Bowl – Read the full article

Twitter helps companies build their brand by introducing a new method of audience communication. Engaging, brief messages build interest and customer loyalty. In 140 characters or less, a company can inform their audience of their latest products or trivia knowledge. Any useful information will propel companies towards this goal. Tweeting and Marketing Companies can write Tweets that are automatically posted three to five times per day. Experts recommend frequency to keep customers interested. From a single article, companies can probably extract 10 or more tweets that represent the main points of the article. Only 25 to 30 minutes a week is required to generate daily Tweets for an entire week. Successful companies engage in a concept called mutual branding. This concept engages both employees and the company on a mutual page. The employee’s photograph and the corporate logo both exist on the page. The better the employee performs, the better the company looks. Feeds and Retweets Retweets and feeds will – Read the full article

Last week we published a guide on how to monitor Google Places reviews, Web updates, and content changes. It was well-received by our readers, so we’d like to build on the post and share info this time on tools for online reviews monitoring and management. Hopefully, this list will help you track online reviews of your brand, product, establishment, service, or business – and enhance your reputation as more customers talk about you on Google Places, Yelp, online directories, local business listings, and social media sites. Or, if you’ve used any of the online reputation management tools below, do let us know by leaving a comment below and sharing with us your experience. ReviewPush Texas-based ReviewPush markets itself as an “online review management tool for small to large businesses”. It offers a dashboard for monitoring / tracking reviews, protecting your brand and reputation, engaging with customers, and enhancing product offerings and promotions (such as coupons). ReviewPush features include: Continuous social – Read the full article

It’s not uncommon for businesses today to use social networks – namely, Twitter and Facebook – as a platform for engaging with customers and managing customer relationships. This development has given rise to an increasing number of social media solutions and dashboards, each promising to streamline all tasks and bring a new level of ease in customer engagement. Let’s take a look at the best of these solutions and their features. MediaFunnel MediaFunnel is a social media suite for businesses and enterprises, with a host of features designed to make Twitter and Facebook accounts easier to manage. One of these distinguishing features is Multiple User Roles, or the ability to assign Administrator, Publisher, and Contributor roles and grant various levels of permission to review or publish tweets and Facebook posts (for greater editorial control and efficiency). Apart from monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions and tracking the performance of links via Bit.ly and BudURL, MediaFunnel also enables you to – Read the full article
There have been changes to the services being offered by Google and, more notably, Facebook in the recent days, each trying to amalgamate the service they offer with one similar to Twitter, in that you can subscribe to individuals status updates and posts, regardless of being their friend or not. Facebook Facebook’s introduction of the subscribe feature allows users to follow celebrities and people they have an interest in, introducing a whole new range of settings allowing control over who can see your posts and whose posts you are exposed to on your own news feed. Twitter found itself introducing accessibility to the lives of celebrities when it started in 2006 and had many celebrity endorsements, most notably Stephen Fry. This is the kind of publicity that Facebook and Google can’t possibly replicate. So far, the celebrities I’m suggested to subscribe to consist of Mark Hoppus and Jared Leto, probably due to the lack of take-up from the celebrity world. – Read the full article