Twitter is a valuable tool for businesses to gain market insight, find new customers, connect with the media, keep track of competitors, and MUCH more. However, once you start following a lot of different Twitter users, it becomes challenging to filter through the noise and connect with the people who can impact your business. There are a few easy things you can do to make the most of your time on Twitter:

1) Choose a Twitter application to organize your followers and the industry terms you want to monitor: Some of these clients include Tweetdeck, Seesmic and HootSuite. I'm partial to Hootsuite, which is what I use to monitor and maintain Sync's account and my personal account - it's a web-based client, with built-in analytics. Tweetdeck and Seesmic are desktop applications, which a lot of folks prefer. Take your pick!

2) Create groups, or lists: Twitter allows you to create public or private groups of people, or "lists." Here are a few lists you might want to consider creating; Private lists: industry media, industry bloggers + online influencers, customers, leads, competitors. Public lists: your company's employees, past/current customers who would speak positively on your behalf.

3) Set up smart searches: Naturally, your brand name and that of your competitors should be the first searches you set up. Also think about what terms people who use, or need, your services or product would use online. If your company is specific to a certain location, be sure to narrow your results by zip code radius. Twitter gives you a lot of options for narrowing searches, so browse and take advantage of them.

Now with public mentions, direct messages, a few lists and a few searches, and the stream of everyone you follow, you probably have at least eight columns created, which likely seems much more overwhelming than the simple Twitter.com homepage you started with, right? Once you adjust to this new, multiple-view skimming and prioritizing of your followers, you'll find it actually saves you time by cutting through the clutter to help you find the right people.

How does your company make the most of Twitter? 

Did you know only 23% of Facebook pages have more than 1,000 fans? A recent study by Sysomos shows that far less than half of pages make it to the 1k mark - in fact, 35% of pages never even reach 100 fans.

But what difference does it make to your brand if you have 5 fans or 5,000? The true power of Facebook lies in what happens AFTER someone becomes a "fan" of your page. A study from eMarketer shows that over 60% fans of a brand usually or always recommend that brand to other people - and 60% of fans usually or always make a purchase from that brand.

So how can you get people to become a fan of your page, and what kind of content do you share after you've built up a fanbase? We recently worked on a campaign that yielded some awesome results, so we wanted to share what we did to help you better execute your next Facebook initiative.

The Situation:

The planning committee for the 2010 Congressional Medal of Honor Convention came to us because they wanted to get involved in social media to spark interest and ultimately fundraise for the convention. We wanted to help them create a Facebook page with engaging content and a simple way for fans to make donations. The launch of the campaign happened to fall in sync with two major military days: the Marine Corps birthday (Nov. 10), and Veterans Day (Nov. 11). Using these events to help drive momentum, we began our outreach.

Page Design and Content:

When building a Facebook page, there are two main questions you should address: What does our audience want to know, and what do we want them to do? A strong call to action is probably a given, but making sure you have content that your fans want to engage with is just as essential in the social media space. Our first step was to create tabs within the page that addressed both of those questions. What does our audience want to know? Information about the Medal of Honor itself, the convention and people who have received the medal. What do we want them to do? Donate to the Medal of Honor convention. 

After you've laid the foundation, now what? "Now what?" is where a lot of brands seem to struggle with Facebook - they create a page and then leave it stagnant. We've got two great solutions for having new, quality content to share with your fans - current events and recycled content. Watch the headlines that pertain to your industry and share articles that are interesting and informative. Set up Google Alerts for keywords that pertain to your industry so you're always in the know. In addition to news, share media you've already created for other purposes - whitepapers, powerpoints, blog entries, etc - and translate it to a way that works for Facebook. Recycling content has been our best source of content for the Medal of Honor Convention's page - using existing facts and citations of Medal recipients, we've got daily content to last until well after the actual Convention. 

Attracting Fans: 

Now that you've got an attractive page with a content plan, how do you get people to show up? 

1) Reach out to related groups and pages: No matter what your niche, there are sure to be groups, pages and events already on Facebook that fall within the same area as your brand. Join up with these, start interesting conversations and give members a reason to check out YOUR page.

2) Create a targeted Facebook advertisement: Facebook's advertisements are highly targeted and relatively affordable - you can spend as little as $1 a day if you want. We took advantage of a new feature that we like to think of as "peer pressure targeting" - if you see your friends have become a fan of a page, you might want to, too. 

3) Distribute a targeted e-mail directing recipients to fan the Facebook page: In our case, we sent out an e-mail blast to the South Carolina State Guard - people who fell within two of our targets (South Carolina residents and people with military interests). You have a contact database of people who are invested with your brand, don't you?

4) Encourage fans to share the page: Facebook makes sharing content so easy, and simply empowering your fans to share your story can mean the difference between 500 fans and 1,500. We sent out a notification to all fans with instructions about how to share the page with their own networks - and they did.

When you hear "WordPress," you probably think of blogging. So a lot of people might be surprised to know that WordPress can have much more value for businesses than just as  an ancillary blog for your main website - it can be used to run the main website itself. We use WordPress as the framework for many of our client's websites and find it both extremely flexible for us to customize and extremely easy for our clients to use.

If you’re familiar with the blogosphere, you might not be TOO surprised to know that these two sites that we made for McGraw-Hill were built on the WordPress platform – they have a “blog” feel to them, with new content placed at the top and sidebars loaded with widgets:

 BTW: Stuff You Should Know

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