This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Are you using Twitter to market your business? Are you looking for new people to follow that will hopefully become future customers? Do you think people tweeting near you may, at some point, be your customers?

Why is finding local Tweets beneficial?

• Target nearby Twitter users to encourage them to come to your store
• Build Twitter followers and fans of your brand by connecting with them
• Keep up on local events and promotions that you should/could participate in
• Pay it forward by helping out a neighbor that is looking for advice, a product or just a good place to eat around town
• Connect with people who share your interests locally

There are a few ways to look for Twitter users that are near your geographic area.

Here are three:

1. Try using Bing’s fancy mapto see who is tweeting in your area.
2. Try doing an Advanced Twitter searchfor people tweeting about particular things within a given area.
3. Use Tweets by City to see who is Tweeting from your city or about your city.

Happy local Tweeting!

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

You many have noticed something kind of cool on Monica’s post yesterday. When Monica referenced Elisabeth Osmeloski’s tweet about Google+ effecting search results, instead of being a hyperlink to the tweet on Twitter, we could actually embed the tweet right into the post!

In the past few weeks Twitter has done a lot of design changes to it’s mobile applications and website. One of these changes was making it possible to take a single tweet and embed it onto a website. All you need to do is copy and paste the line of code and you can have the tweet right on your website. If you have a WordPress blog, all you need to do is copy the link and paste it. Now from your site people can reply, retweet, favorite and follow the person who wrote the tweet.

Pretty cool right?

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series.

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

I love the end of a year. I love the holidays. I love the fresh start feel of a new year. I LOVE end of the year lists! This week Techcrunch shared with us the Top Twitter Hashtags of 2011.

A hashtag (#) is a way to mark a conversation on Twitter. Then you can refer to that content later and/or connect with other people who are using the hashtag. To learn more about Hashtags you can read What is a #Hashtag or How to Use Twitter Hashtags and Search to Make your Twitter Experience More Valuable.

So without further ado, here are the top Twitter Hashtags of 2011

1. egypt
2. tigerblood
3. threewordstoliveby
4. idontunderstandwhy
5. japan
6. improudtosay
7. superbowl
8. jan25

So Twitterers were talking about Egyptian revolution, Charlie Sheen (#WINNING), memes, sports and the devastation in Japan. Actually pretty well rounded when you compare it to the top web searches of the year, which is dominated by celebrity names.

So that is what people were tweeting about this year. I found the list from 2010 and 2011 was definitely a more serious list of hashtags. Interesting how Twitter is becoming a voice for change all over the world. Wonder what we will all be tweeting about next year.

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

The other night I got to go speak to a great group of Credit Unions about Social Media Best Practices. As I was preparing my presentation, I was happy to find that there is a specific TweetChat exclusively for Credit Unions looking to use social media. What a cool way to connect with your peers on a topic and learn from each other!

If you are not familiar, a TweetChat is usually an organized regular event. The participants have a determined time to ‘meet’ on Twitter and discuss a certain topic. To mark their conversations, they use a hashtag. What you have is a large group chat and you can discuss your topic in real time with people from all over the world.

Why would you want to participate in a Tweet Chat?

1. Network with people like you all over the world – You can attend a Tweet Chat from anywhere. In your specific industry, you may have very different needs, customers, challenges and opportunities. Sometimes the most helpful ideas come from people who understand where you are coming from the best.
2. Establish yourself as an expert and build your network – An idea that may seem obvious to you could have been bogging someone else down for months. Share your experiences with your peers and establish yourself as an expert.
3. Get traffic to your blog and/or website – As you are meeting all these new people on Twitter, you can refer them to blog posts or services you provide around the topic you as a group are discussing. Also, just by networking with new people, you will generate some interest and traffic as they take a look to see who you are and what you are up to.
4. Get more qualified followers – If Twitter is merely a numbers game for you, you are probably not using it to it’s full potential. How many followers you have isn’t as important as WHO those followers are. By participating in a TweetChat, you will meet real people who share your interests, work in your industry, are experienced Twitter users and it will, in turn, boost your number of quality followers.

Participating in a TweetChat

Tweet chats can be whenever. Most are set to particular days and times of the week. Some have the same moderator each week while others cycle through guest moderators for a different feel each chat. Most TweetChats run about one hour.

So how do you find a good TweetChat for you? There is a pretty reliable schedule of TweetChats that you can refer to. Once you try one out, you may find others people like to recommend specifically for the topic you are most interested in.

Where to start?

Some of the more popular business TweetChats are:

• #blogchat, Sundays 9P EST – all about blogging. Mack Collier brings in some great guest moderators. This is a very popular one so be prepared to read a lot of tweets.
• #smallbizchat, Wednesdays 8P EST – for small businesses and startups.
• #B2Bchat, Thursdays 8P EST – a chat specifically for those of us in B2B industries.
• #LeadershipChat, Tuesdays 9P EST – leadership themed.

Some of these chats are more popular than others and keeping up can seem overwhelming. To keep up with a TweetChat you can either just use a Twitter search or if it is a popular one, use the service TweetChat to keep up with rapid tweets.

The first few times may seem a little odd but once you get into the swing of things you will really come to appreciate some of the conversations you have and people you ‘meet’. If you don’t feel like you have anything to say, feel free to linger in a chat until you do. As with all of your social media marketing and content – make sure when you participate you are adding value to the conversation!

Photo credit: opensourceway

This blog post should start by mentioning that Twitter has made its own photo sharing service, pic.twitter.com. The roll out of that service was in June but is now available to all Twitter users. The hosting for the service is provided by Photobucket (you know, the site you used to house all your MySpace photos on?). This change negates the service of other popular photo sharing sites like Twitpic, Yfrog and even Instragram.

So… now that Twitter as its own photo sharing service, they have bulked up what photo sharing means. Now your photos will be shown on your profile in a gallery. The most recent will be the first ones displayed on your profile and then your followers can click to see more and view all of your photos.

What does this mean?

It means more people are going to see your Twitter photos. Right now, once you post a photo, it could be out of someone’s stream two minutes later. Now the images will be there longer. Plus, with Twitter controlling photo sharing, I think you will see more photo views.

A few other thoughts and observations:

• The service still seems a little buggy but I am sure that will iron itself out.
• People may take more care with their photos. Some people just slap up low quality photos to show a point or something that is happening at that very moment. Now that they are automatically added to a ‘Gallery’, users may take more care and consider their photos a more permanent fixture on their Twitter profile.
• This could freak some people out. Some people use their account for both personal and business and may be uncomfortable with photos lingering around more publicly.
• How did they already get your photos if they just launched the service? The went to the photo sharing sites tied to your account like Yfrog and Twitpic and took them. Tricky Twitter, very tricky.

So with this new change, will it change how you use Twitter photos?

Photo credit: shioshvili

We actually get this question pretty often from small and medium sized clients alike (B2B and B2C clients too), so I wanted to share with you our opinion on how many social media accounts you should have.

First off, it truly does depend. We think it is best to start with one. Make it really easy for your customers and fans to know what page they should follow/like/subscribe to. Start with one account and strive to make that account become popular. You want lively conversation, good feedback and loads of followers or subscribers.

I’m popular, now what?

Not a bad problem to have… too much action on your social media accounts! After your Twitter account or Facebook page gets some traction, then you can start outlining what people are using the page for. Some may use it for things like customers service, job opening questions, inquiries about products and support. Once your page is popular and you can identify the needs your users have then you should consider breaking the page into sections.

Things to keep in mind

If you are going to maintain several social media profiles, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• More accounts mean more time. Do you have the resources to keep multiple accounts fresh and deliver relevant content?
• Keep all of the accounts fresh and full of information, an account that doesn’t look ‘lived in’ won’t get much traction.
• Make a plan before to alert your current fans and followers of the new resources that are available to them.
• If it isn’t working, don’t be afraid to cut your losses.

So don’t start your social media marketing by spreading your content, time and accounts thin. Let them grow first and then let the users decide which direction you should take your profiles in. What we always see is people trying to do too much and then burning out, leaving a bad taste in their mouth. Start small and as it builds, think about expanding.

What do you think? Should businesses start with multiple accounts or with one?

Photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa

Twitter has really grown up. People know what it is and millions of people are using it. We keep hearing about businesses finding great success with the medium but are you convinced? When we stop to hear the success stories, we hear a lot about the same companies over and again.

I like Twitter. I do! I do acknowledge it isn’t for everyone. B2B or any kind of marketing has new tools to use. I also see how it can be a major distraction for many of us who are busy doing hundreds of other things each day.

The number one goal in marketing is to get in front of your buyers and decision makers and prove to them that you are the right choice for them. We go where those people are. We always have. For some of us that was television, magazines, newspapers, their mailboxes, billboards, etc. Now we need to consider where they are online. They could be on Facebook, Twitter, searching for things in search engines, or watching videos on YouTube. Find out where they are and be there.

Set Business Goals, not Twitter Goals

If you are going to dedicate time and resources to Twitter, set some goals that align with your business goals. Your number of Twitter followers is not a business goal. More traffic to your site, more people signing up for your email newsletter, more people buying your products online may be better goals to keep an eye on.

Here are a 4 things you should consider measuring if you are going to participate on Twitter:

1. Traffic Sources – An easy data point to keep an eye on is how people are getting to your website. If you have a web analytics program on your site, like Google Analytics, you can see what websites people are coming from before they go to yours. If you are participating on Twitter, make sure Twitter is one of your top traffic referrers.
2. Create specific landing pages – Whether you promote specific content or create a page for more information for Twitter followers to view, create a unique page for them (called a landing page). Keep an eye on that specific page’s traffic and how people interact with that page.
3. Conversions on those landing pages – Once people are on your website or a specific landing page you want to perform some type of action. That could be downloading a whitepaper, signing up for your email marketing piece, buying something from your ecommerce store, etc. Whatever you want people to do on your website, make it very clear and measure those conversions from specific traffic sources (like Twitter).
4. Influence – Instead of just measuring how many Twitter followers you have, measure your influence. You can use a service like Klout or just keep track of things like how often you or your company are mentioned on Twitter. Also keep an eye on Twitter lists. How many people are bookmarking your content and what are they categorizing you under?

I hope that helps give you some ideas of some relatively easy data points to keep an eye on to see how Twitter is working for your business.

We talked about measuring your Twitter efforts and a lot more at our recent Twitter For Business: Intermediate/Advanced webinar. The slides from that presentation are below. You can sign up for other free upcoming webinars here.

Photo credit: olarte.ollie

Today is Sherlock Holmes day! January 6th is widely considered to be the popular detective’s birthday. In honor of this special day, I thought I would name a few of my favorite free tools for being an online detective for your website and maybe even your competitors*.

So grab your magnifying glass and your pipe and let’s start doing some snooping!

6 Free Online Tools for Internet Marketing Detective Work

1. Analytics to ANY bit.ly link – I love using Bit.ly for shortening long URLs. It makes them easier to share and lets you track how many times people click on your link and who shares it. Very cool. I could drool over the analytics involved for hours. What I just learned last week is you can look at the Bit.ly analytics to ANYONE’s links. All you have to do is add a + sign to the end of any Bit.ly link and you can see that link’s data. So how popular is your competition’s links in there tweets? Now you can take a sneak peek. Cool right?
2. Spy Fu for your PPC detective needs – Spy Fu lets you get a little data on what people are spending on keywords for their PPC accounts. You can see who is paying for those terms, view the ads and get a range of what they are paying for those terms. Here is an example if you look up the keyword ‘maine lawyers‘. It gives you a range of information that is pretty useful when deciding what terms you are looking to target in your PPC campaign.
3. Manage Flitter to clean up Twitter accounts – After you have been on Twitter for awhile, you may notice that your dashboard gets a little cluttered. Maybe you followed people in the beginning and then you realize they aren’t what you were looking for. Try using Manage Flitter to clean up your Twitter account. Find out who you are following that isn’t following you back. See which accounts have gone inactive since you first starting following them. Determine who of your followers is quiet and who talks a lot (maybe too much). Your Twitter stream is only as valuable as the people you are following, so this is a good way to get rid of some excess baggage. You can also search your users Tweets and their bios.
4. Who is looking at your profile on LinkedIn? – Many of you already know this one but it is kind of cool (and kind of creepy). On the right hand side of your LinkedIn dashboard there is a box, like I have pictured here to the right. If you click on that blue text, you will get a list of people who have recently looked at your LinkedIn profile. In the free version of LinkedIn, people have to opt-in to have their profile displayed there. If they haven’t opted-in then you will see a description of the person who viewed your profile. For example, if I looked at your LinkedIn profile it might say ‘Someone in a leadership role in the Marketing Department of a Web Services company, in Portland, Maine’. Even just the descriptions give you a good idea of who is poking around in your LinkedIn profile. As LinkedIn becomes more of a qualifier for professionals researching who they are going to do business with, it is helpful to see who is researching you.
5. SEO Book Toolbar for all your ranking needs – This one takes a little more work on your part to download the toolbar and it has lots of features (maybe too many) but the SEO Book Toolbar is pretty cool. I think my favorite feature is the SEO X-Ray that lets you see the SEO elements of any page, inbound and outbound links and meta information. It also has Rank Checker right in the Toolbar, so you can see how your site (or someone else’s) ranks for particular keywords. You can also get some more data in the information tab like the age of the site you are looking at, traffic estimations and more. I also like that you can turn it on and off, if it gets too overwhelming.
6. Seo-browser shows you how a search engine sees your site – SEO Browser is also free but you have to register (just your email address). After you sign up, the program will show you just how a search engine reads your website. Got a giant flash or image header? A search engine can’t see that. It also has some other cool information like page load time, number of words and images (with and without alt text) and other features that search engines consider important. You don’t just have to do your site, you can also take a peek at other sites and compare their results to your own.

That should give you enough evidence to do some serious internet marketing planning. Maybe give you some new ideas or maybe reassure you that things are going pretty well. So I hope you have some fun with some of the tools I mentioned above. Happy Sherlock Holmes Day!

*Please note that if a tool is free, it is because they want you to buy something else or so that they can sell ads. These ideas are for fun and a little data gathering but should not be used as proven fact.

UPDATE 1/24/2011: People must have sneakiness on the brain lately! I wanted to update this post and share with you a post from KISSmetrics – 7 Sneaky Ways to Use Twitter to Spy on Your Competition.