The first thing with twitter is don’t wait for followers to start tweeting, you need to be using twitter in order to get the followers. Get used to using the twitter website and any clients so that when your follower numbers do grow your ready to take full advantage.

If you have a website get your designer to put a twitter widget on it, this is the easiest way for your customers to find you on twitter and to see what you’re doing. The widget will link to your twitter account and display your recent tweets, this makes it a nice way to make your website look fresh and updated.

You might be inclined to link your facebook page to your twitter account so that anything you post on facebook will get posted to twitter automatically but this won’t increase the number of people that follow you by very much. People on twitter are looking for interactions so that means you need to use twitter differently from facebook.

A simple way to increase your interactions on twitter is to follow groups and individuals that work in the same area of your business. Mention these people in your tweets or retweet some of the things they’re posting.

On twitter you can setup saved searches, these are useful if you’re looking for certain things or if you’re looking for people to interact with and help. You should setup searches for things to do with your business, products and maybe even the local area. The idea is to find people that are posting messages about things you have an interest in, in the hope that you can offer them help either with a business related matter or maybe they’re just looking for somewhere to eat in the area. Make any interaction a positive one and hopefully you’ll gain a follower.

The main thing to remember is that twitter is all about what you post and how you interact with others. Portray a positive image of your business and be proactive in helping your customers.

But why would you want to use Facebook places on a desktop computer or laptop? Well there are a few good reasons why this is useful:

• See how Facebook places works
• You can easily see if your business is listed
• Can easily find a business to claim

To be able to use Facebook places you will need to have Firefox installed along with the Geolocater plugin. The Geolocater plugin is used to set your location for use in Facebook places.

The first step is to open firefox and browse to http://touch.facebook.com this will bring you to the mobile version of Facebook.

From here you will see the places tab on the right. When you click the places tab firefox will go to the page but pause asking you to select your location.

At this point you will want to open the Geolocater plugin by going to Tools > Geolocater > Manage

Create a new spot by clicking the Create geolocation button in the top right corner. Search for the loaction you want and click the Switch from Select to Search geolocation, give your location a name, fill out any other information you want and click save. You will then be asked Do you want to use this new geolocation? click OK.

Returning to the open firefox tab you will now see your new location selected in the dropdown in the location bar at the top of the window.

Clicking on the Share Location button causes Facebook to use that location for Facebook places.

You are now able to view all businesses listed in that area, check-in to places and even create any business that might be missing.

A useful tip here is that you are able to create multiple locations in geolocater so if you are managing business in different areas you can setup locations for each and just select which location you want to use when going into the places tab.

With the recent updates to facebook pages I needed to go back over all my client training documents and redo some sections to reflect the changes and additions. I’ve decided to put together a few blog posts covering the topic of using facebook to promote a business. This is the first post and the others will appear in the facebook category over the next few days.

In this post I will briefly describe the differences between profiles, pages and groups.

Profiles

A profile is a personal page for individuals. A profile is needed to use either pages or groups.

To create a profile sign up on facebook.com by filling in your details.

Once a profile is created you have the choice of what you want to do with it. You can make your profile as public or private as you want, the default is public. If you are going to use facebook to promote your business your profile should not be the main focus of your customers and you can keep it private with no connections, no photos. and no status updates. If a business feels they’d rather keep everything professional they can setup a dummy profile for the business that’s only used to administrate the business’s page or group alternatively they can turn their employee’s personal account into admins for the page. The second option might not work for every business since it would mean people would be logging into their personal facebook accounts at work.

Depending on your needs for your business there are some limitations of a facebook profile. A profile has a limit of 5000 friends, when this is reached no more friends can connect with you and what’s worse is the friends can not be transferred to another profile, page or group. Anyone that requests to be a friend of a profile has to be approved so this can lead to spending quiet some time approving friend requests each day if your profile became popular.

Another issue from a business point of view is that facebook has evolved in such a way that it is expected that a profile is an individual and so the applications available for profiles are more geared toward the individual rather than having any real business use.

Pages

Facebook pages are a step up from profiles. They are designed to handle so called “public profiles” of celebrities, bands, businesses and brands. Because of its’ intentional design a facebook page has become a powerful business tool and has attracted many application developers that have created additional applications that are specifically aimed at helping businesses to promote themselves.

With the recent changes a facebook page can do everything a profile can do. The differences for a business are that a page does not have a friend limit and a page does not have any privacy functions, in essence a facebook page is an online public profile for the business. Another feature of a facebook page is that it can be controlled by several different users each with their own profile. If an administrator posts something on the page then it appears to have come from the page rather than the individual and as with profiles anything posted on the page gets distributed to the entire page’s friends.

One of the new changes and a huge addition for businesses is that a business can now use facebook as their page. Under the Account menu there is an option to “Use Facebook as Page”. This option lets the user select a page that they can use as their profile. This enables the business to go on to fans profiles and other business pages and leave comments and posts as the business instead of their own personal account.

Groups

Groups are used for discussions and events etc. Groups are a way of enabling a number of people to come together online to share information and discuss specific subjects. They are increasingly used by clubs, companies and public sector organizations to engage with stakeholders – be they members of the public, employees, members, service users, shareholders or customers.

It’s an interactive YouTube video based on the quiz show “Who wants to be a millionaire” made up of several different videos from different users. You make your way through the videos by answering the questions and if you get stuck you can call one of the familiar faces from YouTube to ask for help.

If you haven’t seen it before give it a go

As part of the settlement, the record companies will supply Eircom with the IP addresses of all persons who they detect illegally uploading or downloading copyright works.

Eircom will then contact the subscribers directly and either warn them or terminate their account.

This move brings us into a strange situation where it’s no longer just governments shutting down the internet but now we have the multinational companies. This is just another step in a long line of things that have been happening over the last year and especially over the last few months. Even YouTube have resorted to muting videos that contain copyright music.

Each thing on its own might be seen as an acceptable step but looking at the bigger picture these people are slowly closing down the net. When will these companies just give up and embrace the technology of the 21st century? They might find themselves better off if they did.

Read the full story here

Now when I watched her videos and subscribed, her latest video had a few thousand views and I was around the 8,500th subscriber but looking at it now her latest video has over half a million views and she has over 13,000 subscribers. Ok so some would say that just proves the power that sxePhil has but there’s another point to this.

As I said earlier I’m left wondering is Boxxy for real or is this a brilliant marketing strategy by the Gaia website, which Boxxy mentions repeatedly in her videos. Now I’m guessing that since her video views have shot up, that like me most people asked themselves “What the hell is this Gaia website she’s going on about?” and doing a quick search would have found Gaia Online. I’m guessing that their visitor stats have shot up in the last few days and if Boxxy is not working for them then they definitely owe her something.

Don’t get me wrong I hope Boxxy is for real because in this time of recession, job losses and general negativity we need someone to brighten our days, make us all feel a bit better and help us to see that the world isn’t all sad and down beat that there’s still people out there that’ll be happy no matter what.

So Boxxy it’s a great start to your YouTube career and I hope you keep it up, as for me I hope to get back to writing some regular posts again. I’ll finish this post with Boxxy’s latest video.

From the comments being left on my other posts people seem to be having trouble with the visitors map feature on Bebo.

The above picture shows the box at the top of the visitors map page and shows your current account setting and the options to which you can change it. The box on the left shows your current setting, which in this case is “Public”. On the right shows the two options you can change this to, Anonymous and Off. Your profile has to be set to Public in order to see the pins on the map. Point to note here is that Bebo seem to be only showing pins for people who have visited your profile in the last 24 hours, so your map might have nothing on it for times.

If you see something different from what’s in the picture above then your account is different in some way. I’m guessing Bebo have different settings depending on your age.

Hope this helps some people

If anyone’s interested please check it out. You’ll find information on our Harvest Fair Festival, the Halloween Ball (which I won last year with my Dr. Octavius costume), the Fiddler’s Weekend and lots lots more. Thanks

Since we can’t give all this stuff away individually (100+ giveaways would equate to a new giveaway every two hours for more than seven days, which would drive everyone friggin nuts), we’re going to have four giveaway rounds a day, once every six hours. Each round will have three prizes of varying radness and will be open for entries only for six hours. You can enter ONCE per round on as many rounds you like (until you win something, that is). Winners will be selected randomly.

So all you have to do is leave a comment, what have you to loose. See the full story here