Whether you are aware of it or not, social media and internet technologies are changing standard business practices. In our current economic climate, it’s important to embrace and take advantage of new social media Web 2.0 tools …

What Is Social Media?

Social Media in it most basic form is simply a bunch of web technologies that allows people to share and connect with others.

Social Media can also be described as being “conversational media” in all of its interactive forms including text, video and spoken words – whether face to face, over the Internet, over the airwaves or via mobile technologies such as iPods and cell phones.

One definition I particularly like, is that social media and Web 2.0 are umbrella terms that define the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and content creation. Social media use the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner online.

In other words, social media bonds networks of people with a digital medium and enables them to interact with the content in many ways. It is a space, therefore, where friends and people who’ve been given permission to enter into discussions about common interests can share information and converse.

Social Media And Web 2.0 – Business Uses

Social media is a must if you own a business and should be part of a long-term communication strategy to build relationships with your customers and increase your reputation and brand loyalty.

Social media marketing utilizing Web 2.0 technology is increasingly becoming one of the most cost-efficient and effective ways of generating traffic to your website.  You can reach out to large numbers of people in a very short period of time using social media platforms like Wikis, blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking/tagging and other multimedia, both audio and visual. The key is to do it properly. If you plan your strategy well and execute it properly, you can attract new visitors to your website and significantly increase your number of repeat customers and members.

One of the most important things to remember when creating your social media marketing plan is that you need to offer quality content.  The best marketing plan in the world, social media or otherwise, will fail if you have poor quality content on your website.  You will drive traffic to you website, but they won’t stay long and they will most certainly not come back.

Read the rest of this article here: How To Generate Web Traffic Using Social Media Web 2.0 Technologies

What Is Twitter?

At it’s most basic, it’s a type of online subscription service for text messages, but it can do so much more, especially for helping you grow your business.

Twitter is a tool that allows users to send instant messages and to social network via short messages, also known as micro-blogs.

Users can create Twitter messages (up to 140 characters in length), more commonly called tweets, through their Twitter pages, IMs, Facebook accounts, emails, SMS text messages from their mobile phones and third-party applications . It also has a handy feature which allows you to send direct (private) messages to your friends on Twitter.

Twitter gives you the ability to think at the speed of the Internet. Any bleeding edge thing you’re working on, you’ll find someone doing something similar.

Using Twitter To Grow Your Business – 7 Tips

Twitter is like a blog on a microscopic scale, hence the term “micro-blogging”. Instead of writing whole posts and notifying your mailing list  whenever a new post gets published, a tweet (what a Twitter post is called) can be a maximum of 140 characters only, and the people who are following you get your whole tweet at once, instead of having to go to your website.

What started out as — has now become a huge phenomenon.  Companies like Apple, Intel, H&R Block and Zappos all have a presence on Twitter.  As mentioned earlier, so is the new President of the United States.

So how can you leverage this zeitgeist for growing your business?

First of all, you need to get up and running on Twitter, ASAP.

Once you register your Twitter account, the next step is to start building your list of followers. While this may sound like you have just joined a “cult”, don’t worry … it simply refers to the process of building a list of people that want to receive your tweets and be kept informed about your business, much like building a mailing list for your web site or blog.

Read the rest of this article here: Grow Your Business Using Twitter