As a business owner, you need to know how to use Twitter to promote your products/services. Here’s a quick tip sheet:

• Use your business name in the address of your Twitter page. For example, if you’re Acme Pest Control, set your Twitter page under the address twitter.com/acmepestcontrol
• Identify a person who will Tweet for your business on a regular basis. This may be you the business owner, or it could be a trusted employee or your webmaster, media/PR manager, etc. Whoever it is, make sure they can find the time to Twitter and that they know the tips that follow.
• Link to your Twitter page from your regular web site and any other place you market yourself.
• Post or “tweet” sparingly. This is critical. As people start to “follow” you via Twitter, they will become irritated if you are tweeting them every time you think of some nugget you are sure everyone will benefit from. Tweet a few times a week at first, and make sure it’s about a special offer, or big news. As you start to get feedback from your followers, increase or decrease your frequency as needed. It’s a good rule of thumb to never tweet more than 2-3 times each day.

Think of Twitter as a method of quickly communicating to a group of your friends and customers, like a digital roladex of your business confidants. Don’t tell them secrets or gossip! If you’re a pie store, tell them when you have extra key lime pies that need to be sold that day. Or if you’re a non-profit organization, send a tweet to find volunteers for a last-minute event.

Most importantly, treat your group of Twitter followers as GOLD. These people have went out of their way to tell you they like your company, your brand, your service/product, and you. Reward them by delivering pertinent information in a sensitive manner.

Getting people to visit your web site is easier than influencing them to return.

It’s only a matter of time before first-time visitors dry up. So how do you get folks to come back the second, third, fourth time, etc?

Without repeat visitors, your site will fail.

Here are five tips that will aid you in attracting repeat visitors:

1. Reward your visitors by offering valuable information regularly such as industry related articles, tips, insider information, product reviews, etc.
2. Create a resource page containing links that appeal to your target market; once your visitors know that this resource is available they can return to the site to access the links easily.  Be sure to ask them to bookmark the page, and update the resources as much as you can to add value.
3. Encourage visitor participation through the use of blogs, polls and forums. Make sure that if you implement forums or message boards, that you monitor them carefully. Also, if you don’t get much traffic in the forums, it’s better to shut them down and focus on one of the other methods here. Nothing screams “dead web site” more than forums without any user action.
4. Offer a free digital product like an eBook or catalog and require that the user subscribe to your e-mail newsletter list to receive it. The free offer needs to be enticing enough to motivate your audience to give their email address (grab their zip code too so you can get demographic data). Send your e-mail newsletter frequently and pack it with valuable tips and info (see tip #1).
5. Publish a Content Series - that is, a serialized set of content, such as a four-part look at your industry trends. The first part has to be real good - drawing in your audience so they’ll come back for the rest of the series.

At Boone Digital we don’t just build a Web Site and leave you to manage it. We want to help you attract visitors, repeat visitors, loyal constituents, and customers.

Contact Boone Digital at 989-600-5392 or use our Contact form to request information about our Services.

This tutorial assumes you have already created a Facebook account. You need a personal account before you can create a Facebook page for your business.

1. Log into Facebook and scroll to the very bottom of your screen.
2. Click on the Advertising link in the footer links.
3. Click on the “Pages” link (there’s a flag next to it at the top of the page in the links for the Advertising section)
4. On the Facebook Pages page, click the button “Create a Page”
5. Select the type of business, enter the name, and proceed through the setup for your new page as prompted.
6. Upload your logo and make sure to add your phone numbers, website address, fax number, email address, etc.
7. To activate your page, you will need to “Publish” it. There will be a link to prompt you to do this.
8. Now that you’ve created the page for your business, post it to your wall on your personal Facebook page so your friends will know about it. You can even email your friends (Facebook only allows you to message 20 at a time) to encourage them to become fans of your new page.
9. In the future, to manage your Facebook page for your business, a link named “Ads and Pages” will appear on your Facebook page. To manage, you will click this link to access both areas.
10. That’s it!

So you’ve created a Facebook page for your business, now what?  What can it do for you?  How do you utilize it to create new business?

• When other Facebook users ”fan” your page, a mini version of your logo will show up on their profiles. You can’t “friend” people with your page, but people can “fan” your page.
• From within your Facebook page for your business, you can send “Updates” to your fans to tell them when you have a new product, specials, events, or anything else. This is probably the best use of the Facebook pages for your business.
• Post “Links” on your page that go to specific pages on your company website, such as your products or services page. Or post a link to an article you wrote on your website that will garner interest.
• Create and run Facebook ads for your business and send the click-throughs to your Facebook page and ultimately to your company website. There is a cost for this, but it’s fairly affordable compared to other forms of online advertising.

There are many social networking websites, but Facebook is currently the leader in users and buzz. Don’t miss a chance to market to the hundreds of millions of users that lurk on Facebook every day.