How Smart Businesses Use Twitter – Hint, It’s not About How Many Followers you Have!

listening on twitter - phtoto by: opensourcewayVanity metrics is the phrase used to describe numbers that are impressive but vastly overrated. Take Twitter for example. People and programs, blogs and articles focus on how to gain more followers but few touch on the real value of twitter; listening.

Out of the 1 billion Tweets every week, how valuable would it be to know when someone mentioned your brand, service, product or competitor? Being able to see and respond to these social media blasts puts you in the more powerful position of responding to activity rather than creating content and trying to gain followers as mentioned in the article linked to above.

One well timed tweet in response to a question or mention could be worth a lot more than a month’s worth of aimless tweets just to seem active. And what about geo-targeted listening? Noticing someone tweet about photo booth in general is not half so interesting as hearing someone tweet about renting a photo booth in Denver.

Geo-targeting your listening by choosing keywords within your area of service or largest target market cities can turn you into a ninja twitter! Just imagine tweeting to a friend that you needed a good dentist in New York and getting a tweet within 24 hours from a local dentist near you offering a 20% off coupon if you come in and mention that tweet. Talk about target marketing!

If you are an avid TweetDeck user already, try out this listening strategy from Slideshare. This brief slideshow shows you just how to put twitter, your brand name and your keywords to work for you. Chris Brogan had a neat little how to painted out for you more savvy readers on his blog for listening on Twitter too. Seems simple enough. If you  know how to use an RSS reader than you can do this. If not, well, a tool below might serve you better.

Here are some great links to twitter listening services that email you results daily. If you get hooked, most of these services have an upgrade for around $20 per month to get more listens and alerts for more keywords:

http://socialmention.com/

http://tweetbeep.com/

https://en.mention.net/

 

 

Two Cool Tools For Photo Booth Owners Or Those Looking To Buy A Photo Booth

Whether you have purchased a photo booth and are in business already or are considering buying a photo booth to go into business for yourself, the right tools can  help you plan and grow your business.

There are an overwhelming amount of tools available for entrepreneurs but a few stick out for creative value and time-saving qualities. Most photo booth owners will be working from home which presents its own class of hurdles. Space is limited, distractions are ever present and organizational problems can quickly become overwhelming.

Sanebox  is one cool tool that helps business owners keep a messy inbox clean. It’s very unlikely that owners will keep an entirely separate business inbox from their personal email.  Most people simply forward their business email to the email they use most often. It just makes sense.

There is no problem with doing this but a cluttered email box can become an administrative nightmare. Missed emails, untimely responses and distracting alerts are but a few of the distractions that can sideline productivity. That’s where Sanebox can help. For only $5.97 per month owners can have their non-priority emails shifted to a different folder that they can view later and a host of other powerful features like follow-up reminders.

Follow-up reminders allow conversation tracking to ensure timely correspondences with your most important contacts. When you send out a reply to an email, you can set a reminder to alert you if the other party has not contacted you back. You can set the reminder for any duration: minutes, hours, days . . . etc.

You can also move and store bulky email attachments in the cloud if you sign up for, or have, a free Dropbox account.  It will store your attachments and provide links that you can send where clients will be able to download them, allowing you to send more and larger attachments without over-limit messages or all that time uploading.

It also works from mobile devices and has an elegant way to deal with spam, inbox reports and a five-level priority message for ultimate control. That’s about $72.00 per year versus the cost of an administrative assistant who you would have to train and trust with your passwords and private contact list. They advertise a 14-day free trial with no credit card required to sign up. Seems like there is little to lose by trying this new cool tool.

The other cool tool comes to us from http://www.ideapaint.com/. Ideapaint turns your walls into dry erase boards for far less cost. Like to think visually? Then this is THE product for you. Turn a space, wall or entire office into a marker-safe environment for to make your master plans to take over the world. The paint also comes in clear if you want to keep the color of your walls. At $255.00 for 50 sq. ft. of wall space, you can get a far larger board than you can buy online and save on the way. To put it in perspective, a decent, 4’ x 6’ melamine board sold on Amazon goes for about $220.00. That’s 24 sq. ft. total for nearly the same price as the amount of paint that would cover more than double the space.

In total these two cool tools come to $297.00. For less than a dollar a day you can seriously upgrade your workspace and get a hold of your inbox. For photo booth owners, why not try painting the inside case of your AAAPhotoBooth as an additional backdrop that clients, especially party and wedding customers  can graffiti with signatures and love notes, capturing the spirit of the event?

Get creative, get organized and grow your business. Let us know what you think of theses cool tools and suggest a couple tools you’d like to share!

 

 


 [JAG1]I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules against this, but it doesn’t quite sound right to me—just deleting “greatly” would work; alternatively, try something like “the right tools can be a big help with planning and growing your business.”