One of the issues with using Twitter for local business marketing is that by gaining followers through keyword searches, you’ll build up your account with people who will never patronize your business because they don’t live in your area. But by using Twitter’s advanced search features with geotargeting, you can find potential customers located nearby and build a relationship with them, making them aware of your business.

To begin, let’s head over to Twitter Advanced Search and start some geotargeted keyword searches. For example, if you’re interested in finding people in Austin, TX, who are into wine, and perhaps wine bars, you’ll search for the following: [wine bar near:"Austin, TX" within:15mi] as seen below:

The results page will be full of relevant potential followers and customers (and competitors!), giving you some insight into what people are both tweeting about and searching for:

Search for various combinations of keywords and search radius (you might want to increase the surrounding area mileage, for example) until you’ve hit upon the most relevant for your business. In order to automate this process, subscribe to the search feed with RSS, and you can then view the results each day in your feed reader.

Once you see the results from Twitter Search, you can then follow those most likely to be in your customer base and begin to engage them – not selling to them yet, but merely responding to their tweets. One especially helpful tactic is answering questions they pose, as they relate to your business or area of expertise. Make yourself useful to them as a local resource. For example, responding to a request for a recommendation for a local wine shop or bar, or even answering a question about which wine goes with which foods, will help to set yourself up as one of the go-to guys for that topic.

Businesses can also gain a greater understanding of their market and their niche by simply listening to the conversations happening on Twitter, which means that you don’t have to be tweeting away all day – you can use the info as business research without dedicating the time to actually post messages (but it certainly helps if you do!).

A few quick pointers on using geotargeted Twitter searches for your local business:

Be transparent: Being up front about who you are and who you represent is a key element in gaining their trust. Acting as if you aren’t the business owner or employee in order to be seen as objective might come back to bite you, so be open about that.

Don’t spam: Using direct messages to your followers to promote your business is a divisive topic, with most of the long-time users staying away from automatic direct messages and those which are solely designed to sell. While it’s certainly OK to respond to followers with a direct message, unsolicited sales tweets may cause you to lose those people, so do it sparingly.

Be helpful: Pointing people to resources from other businesses isn’t giving away all your business, it’s being helpful. There’s no need to be always pushing your business, because by helping people find what they need, you’re being social, not a salesperson, and people do remember that.

Keep going: Those searches can be a great source for finding other keywords and search terms, so filtering out the relevant ones and making a spreadsheet with the results will go a long way toward refining your local search strategy.

Share: For companies that have multiple users on their Twitter accounts, sharing the local search results (either through RSS or Twitter saved searches) with the team enables a more comprehensive plan to be built. That information can also be shared with the marketing department to help better inform their efforts.

How have you used geotargeted Twitter searches for your local business?

[Derek Markham is a writer, a father, a WordPress addict, and social media butterfly who loves to share what's new and interesting in his world in under 140 characters. Hit him up with an @ reply anytime for help, advice, or just to say hey!]

Image: © Fantasista – Fotolia.com

And we were skeptical because it feels as if we’re already over-saturated with social networking services (plus, wasn’t Google Friend Connect supposed to be the next big network? Or was that Google Wave?).

We have already invested our time growing our Twitter network, and we’ve built up quite a community on Facebook. We’re tweeting and sharing links, we’ve spent the requisite time developing relationships with our clients, our customers, and our peers on those networks, and now here comes Buzz.

How are we going to manage yet another one?

After a week of using it, I’ve got a few observations on Buzz:

When I first opened Gmail and saw Buzz already waiting for me, I jumped right in, and quickly noticed that while Google had already connected me to people I email or chat with regularly, I needed to change that. I’m already communicating with those people on other platforms – I don’t need to also follow them on Buzz.

My second thoughts were “Are we going to have to go through the process of following and attracting followers again? How can I use this differently than Twitter?”

Since many people were already connecting their many services to Buzz, I was getting their Twitter updates, their Google Reader shared items, their blog RSS feeds, and updates from digg.com and Friendfeed.

Every time I checked, I had numerous unread items, and it was rapidly becoming a source of noise, not information. So I unfollowed everyone except those whose updates I really didn’t want to miss, and started only following people that are leaders in their field – people I wanted to be sure to listen to.

My advice for using Google Buzz:

Your Buzz activity shows up on your Google profile, so keep it relevant. You might not want your next customer to see the latest picture of your family poodle that you sent to TwitPic, unless you’re in the dog business.

Only connect feeds to Buzz that won’t overload your followers (like Twitter, for heavy users). Those feeds will update automatically, so make sure you aren’t sharing the same link from multiple services)

Follow the thought leaders in your industry, commenting on their Buzz posts regularly. But don’t act like a spammer or link dropper – only comment if you can add something.

Listen deeper. Find other influential or interesting people to follow through their comments on those posts. Many blogs are now sporting a new “Follow us on Google Buzz” button, making it easy to connect.

Only share the best. We don’t need to know everything you read today in Google Reader. The tendency is to want to share everything with everyone, thinking that gives us a bigger reach, but the reality is that smaller, targeted networks are more engaged.

Manage your attention. Just as you shouldn’t check your email all the time, or leave a tab with Twitter open continuously, you will need to keep the time you spend with Buzz under control. Or, if you’re an info-glutton, you might want to consider a social media diet.

Use filters and labels to manage the flow of information and keep your inbox empty. Find some other Buzz tricks to make it work for you.

How have you been using Google Buzz?

[Derek Markham is a writer, a father, a WordPress addict, and social media butterfly who loves to share what's new and interesting in his world in under 140 characters. Hit him up with an @ reply anytime for help, advice, or just to say hey!]

Image: topgold at Flickr

You know you need to be active in social media networking to get more exposure for your business, so you’re all signed up with a brand spanking new Twitter account.

But now what?

With over a billion tweets sent every month, Twitter can be a rich source of information and networking, and the best place to start is by listening to what others are saying about the products, services, and issues in your field. You can do that by finding the leading voices in your niche to follow, and then watching the conversations they have with each other.

A simple way to grow your network is with one of Twitter’s built in tools: Twitter Search.

For example, if I was a local business, I would start with the nearby area. A framing store in Santa Fe, NM, would begin searching for Tweets about Santa Fe, then add in searches for Tweets mentioning both Santa Fe and art, and continue to drill down on keywords that are related to photography, art, or galleries, in the surrounding area. They would also use the advanced search engine to input location or further filter the results.

Businesses should also search using those same keyword terms without the location, as they’ll be farther ahead the larger their network is, even if they aren’t local customers. For a web-based business, you can skip the location searches and go straight to keywords that relate to your business, including as many longer tail keywords as you like.

Search, Subscribe, and Save:

When you find some searches that really hit home for your business, either subscribe to the RSS feed for those searches (top right hand side of search page), or if you search from your home page, save the search there. That way, you can easily tap into the results on a regular basis without setting up the original search again.

Follow or Filter:

Once you’re viewing the search results, click through to the listed users’ profiles and follow them if they are an interesting or influential voice (my rule of thumb). Higher numbers of followers doesn’t necessarily translate into an engaged network, so don’t get sucked into thinking that the best Twitter strategy is to follow massive amounts of people and to amass the most amount of followers. A smaller group of followers who are actually listening to you and responding to you is much more useful to you than those of most ‘mega-follower’ accounts.

Add Value:

If you have anything to add to their conversations, send them an @ reply with your view on the subject at hand. They’ll see it in their stream, and notice you, perhaps following you back as well. One especially important task in social media engagement is responding to questions or helping to solve an issue for them – the more you do that, the sooner you’ll begin to be seen as a resource for your industry.

When in Rome:

It certainly doesn’t hurt to just lurk and listen at first, especially if you don’t understand how others are using Twitter, but my advice is to simply start tweeting, regardless how many followers you have.

The temptation (and a big no-no for new users) is to just start broadcasting only links and information about your company, but that doesn’t help you to grow your network or to build relationships. A smarter strategy is to start sharing other people’s links and tweets, adding in some links to yours here and there, with the ratio staying heavily on helping other people out.

Rinse and Repeat:

If you’ve followed along so far, you should now be following a good-sized group of people that share information about the topics you’re interested in, and you will have the searches saved on the homepage or subscribed to with your RSS reader.  This is your base – something to build on a little each day.

You’ll scan the searches for potential conversations you can add value to, for new and interesting people to follow, and for ways to help others with their messaging. Use a Twitter scheduling application or a multiple Twitter user application to schedule these tweets throughout the day or to collaborate so that someone is always monitoring your niche. If you devote even a half an hour each day to these tactics, your network will grow larger every day, and it will be a focused network, not a general one.

Tip: If you find yourself closely following a smaller subset of people, start to filter those conversations by either putting them into a Twitter list, or using the ‘group’ feature found on many Twitter applications. You’ll be able to focus in easier on the people you need to pay attention to, and you won’t waste countless hours wading through the Tweet-stream looking for it.

[Derek Markham is a writer, a father, a WordPress addict, and social media butterfly who loves to share what's new and interesting in his world in under 140 characters. Hit him up with an @ reply anytime for help, advice, or just to say hey!]

Image: © Photosani – Fotolia.com

But love the concept or hate it, the iPad does represent a much more robust option for anytime, anywhere access to social media applications, compared to the smaller form factor of mobile devices.

MediaFunnel on iPad

Below is an approximation of how MediaFunnel will render in Safari on iPad.  For MediaFunnel, iPad represents a device that will allow mobile users to easily manage multiple social media accounts within a single iPad view.  With its 1024 x 768 resolution, iPad will give users the same level of control and access as with a notebook or desktop computer.  With soon to be introduced Facebook support, there will not only be access to multiple Twitter accounts, but also to multiple Facebook page walls — all within a single, iPad screen.

iPad will also allow MediaFunnel administrators and editors to review and act on queued tweets and posts no matter where each person happens to be.  MediaFunnel contributors will have a more convenient interface for contributing content from events, conferences and more.

Overall, iPad will provide social media teams with a variety of ways to create more content and better content — and to more conveniently engage with their audiences.

• Profile: Create a profile that reflects you.  Enlist the help of a graphic designer if you can to add pictures that tell your travel story to your background.
• Following: There are a lot of amazing travel people to follow.  You can find great ones on WeFollow and ShortyAwards.  The travel community on Twitter is very into reciprocity, so if you follow and retweet posts that resonate with you, it’s the best way to get followed back and retweeted.
• Lists: Many folks have developed great travel lists.  You can find some of these here.
• #TravelTuesday: This Twitter meme has legs.  Every Tuesday, travelers, travel writers and travel pros a like tweet their best info using the #traveltuesday hashtag.  Join the conversation and watch it unfold using search.

Twitter is a great place to find clients, options for cross promotions and to be discovered by travel writers.  It’s easy to get started, so if you’re not tweeting yet, get aboard the Twitter train!

1. Use Cotags, so users can follow who’s tweeting. Cotags are the little signatures that you’ve likely seen at the end of tweets. They look like this ^NG.
2. Assign each user a topic upon which to focus. This prevents duplicate tweets and also keeps the stream varied. To encourage and inspire your team, create a list of example tweets.
3. Make sure customer inquiries are handled promptly. If you don’t have hundreds of inquiries it’s easiest to assign a given task to one person or set up an on-duty schedule. This ensures continuity and prevents multiple replies to the same inquiry. If you have a lot of inquiries, set up a way to decipher who will handle which tweet. For instance, one person could review tweets from people with handles starting with A-M and another takes the N-Z.
4. Have a gatekeeper, if necessary. Not everyone is familiar with Twitter, its protocols or its etiquette. Also, it’s possible that you might want to be able to edit or review tweets by some or all of your employees.

• Tweet promotions that are Twitter only. This will give you a measurable response and could increase your followers. Example: “Twitter only deal! Free shipping with code TWSHIP.”
• Use hashtags in your promotional tweets to extend their reach. Some of the most popular deal-related tags are: #blackfriday, #coupon, #savings and #deal.
• If you’re a brick and mortar retailer or restaurant, use one of these tools to find tweeters in your area and follow them. Make sure to be posting content that would grab their attention. Example: “Free appetizer with any entrée today at our 2nd and Main Street location!”
• Run a Twitter contest. For some tips, see our previous post on this topic.

Here’s to a happy and profitable holiday tweeting season!

• 48% of Twitter users who saw a brand’s name mentioned on the site would go on to use a search engine to investigate further
• 34% have used a search engine to find information on a product/service/brand after seeing an advertisement on a social networking site
• 30% have learned about a new product, service or brand from a social networking site
• 32% said messages about printable coupons on social sites resonate with them
• 28% said messages about sales or special deal notifications resonate with them

If your company is ready to put your brand on Twitter or if you just want to take it to the next level, you may want to check out how the most mentioned brands on Twitter are managing their profiles.  You can find them here.  You may also want to ask yourself some strategic questions before taking the leap.  Social media expert, Jeremiah Owyang outlines some important questions here.

• Listen first.  Before your new recruits post their first tweet, have them spend some time reading the tweets you’ve posted in the past and the tweets of those you follow.  This will give new tweeters an idea of the tone that people use on Twitter and should reinforce that it’s not all pointless jabber or self-promotion.
• Know the basics.  Make sure they understand RTs, @replies, common courtesies, etc.  Check out our Twitter primer, do’s and don’ts.
• Search.  Teaching Twitter newbies to search is like dropping off a kid in a candy store.  Encourage them to search for things that interest them as well as things that pertain to your brand.  This will heighten their appreciation for Twitter and give them ideas on how and what to tweet.

Keeping the Training Wheels on for New Twitter Users

If you’re not quite ready to let your new tweeters out on their own, TweetFunnel can take some of the stress off.  Different user roles let you choose who can contribute tweets to the “funnel” (for review) and who can publish directly to Twitter.   This easily lets your new tweeters contribute tweets, but gives you the option to approve and/or edit them first.

For example, if your new tweeters don’t quite understand the proper use of hashtags yet, you can add tags to their tweets before posting them to Twitter.  You can check for typos, make sure they aren’t spilling confidential info or just help them write more efficient tweets.  Then, once they get the hang of it, you can take the training wheels off and let them post directly.