So you’ve uploaded a snappy profile picture, crafted a swanky bio and officially launched your social presence on Twitter, Facebook and the works. You start to get a few fans and followers, but now what? You keep hearing that it’s important to engage in conversations, but where do you begin? Perhaps you’ve made a few attempts to connect, but without much success. Have no fear - with the small exception of spiders, absolutely hate them - here are a few quick and easy tips to move you toward a dialogue with your peeps.

1. Listen To What’s Being Said

Remember that if people are liking or following you it’s because you’re doing something right or creating something that they feel they can connect with. Do a little bit of reconnaissance work and check out what your audience is saying with your competitors. Look at the topics they're discussing and pay attention to the language and words that they’re using. This can give you some good insight into what they want to discuss, as well as the tone and style that they’re more likely to respond to. Try to emulate a similar approach in your own interactions to get the ball moving and then tailor it to your own brand.

2. Be Open Minded

Depending on what your brand, product or service is all about some of your fans may share some extreme perspectives or questionable notions regarding it. Before you shy away or shut down the opportunity for a conversation, make an attempt to learn more from them. Great ideas can be found in unlikely places and some folks might have a tough time conveying their purpose in 140 characters or less. As challenging as it might seem try to be receptive and make an honest effort to interact with them.

3. Keep It Real

Be sincere and genuine when you take part in an online conversation. When someone has a gripe or a problem with your brand then it’s up to you to address it. Put your excuses in a box, lock them up and throw away the key. Instead, opt for an honest to goodness exchange that reflects your personality in a friendly way. Just remember that with online conversations you can’t see one another or hear one another and sometimes intention can get lost in translation. Consider what you want to say before you say it and think about how it will be interpreted on the receiving end too.

4. Show Some Gratitude

It’s unfortunate that negatives seem to garner more attention than positives in our society. So, when people tell you that they love your latest blog post or when they share an experience that your recent article reminded them about, use it as an opportunity to thank them. If you receive a thumbs up or get a pat on the back don’t hesitate to show your appreciation. Reciprocation is a super conversation starter.

5. Stay Positive

No one likes a Debbie-downer. People are more likely and more willing to connect with someone who is optimistic. All of us experience bad days and we've all had an occasional rough patch, but letting those low-points trickle into your conversation is a big no-no. Put on a smile, swallow your happy pill and give your online conversations a positive angle. In case you need reminding, don't forget what happened between Nestle and Greenpeace when negativity consumed the online dialogue via Facebook.

When you break it down, having a conversation through social media, commenting or other online outlet, isn't really that much different from engaging in a face-to-face chit-chat. Politeness, empathy and lightheartedness will not only help you begin a conversation, but they'll also help you sustain them moving forward.

After you’ve had your website up and running for a bit, or once you’ve been blogging for awhile you’ll want to start thinking about your online ‘community’. Your community is an important, if not integral, component to the success of your online presence. By building a solid brand, creating great content and interacting with your audience, you’re working toward developing a passionate online following that will promote and support you with others.

Build It

Make your blog/site an original, meaning, try to take a fresh approach to the subject that you plan on covering. A great example of an outstanding and custom brand blog is Southwest’s Nuts About Southwest. Instead of spewing a mouthful of corporate hum-drum Southwest has assembled a blended blog that reflects the diversity of its audience and they’ve peppered it with fun and interactive content.

Another super example is the Sharpie blog. Beyond simple blog posts, the Sharpie blog has incorporated a bevy of images and videos that showcase their products in action with everyday folks and artists. The result is a visually entertaining blog that is both inspiring and entertaining.

Take a cue from Southwest and Sharpie and find a unique way to position your blog/site  that’s right for the audience that you want to capture.

Promote It

Make it easy to pass along and share what you’re creating. This means including social share buttons to increase viral opportunities. At a bare minimum, you should feature  Tweetmeme and Facebook Share buttons that can be used to attract others to become a part of your online community. People want to be able to send links and information in quick and simple ways. Integrating social share buttons is a near guarantee that they’ll be able to do so.

Ask For It

You have to ask people to visit, comment and share. It’s a very simple way to remind and ensure your audience that you want them to invite others to take a peek and converse about what you’ve created. Communities aren’t built overnight, but asking others who appreciate your perspective, style and message to find and include others is an ideal way increase growth. Like-minds attract like-minds and you’ll discover that asking people to spread the word about your community is as easy to say as it is to do.

Get Involved With It

An online community can’t grow on its own. You need to take an active role in fostering relationships with your members. Encourage contributions through commenting and be prepared to seek out potentially interested people to invite to the community. This doesn’t mean that you need to launch a spam campaign or make a commitment to stalk anyone into joining. Be yourself, be authentic and tell people that you’d love for them become a part of what you’re putting together.

Repeat It

Whether your online community has 50 followers or 15,000, you need to continually work at adding new members. A stagnant community is also a flailing community. By continually adding new members you're increasing the chances that better dialogues will form, more interesting questions will be asked and novel ideas will be exchanged. These actions in themselves make your community more attractive to others, which will increase your subscriber base. The goal isn't to have a blog or site with the largest quantity of followers. It should be to have the best quality of content and relationships with the people who are supporting what you're creating.

There are many other tips that can be used to build a strong online community. What are some that you've used to enhance your own blog or site? Fill us in.

One of the nice things about social media is that because so many people and brands are using it, the rest of us can glean successful tips and surefire tactics from the masses to make our own experiences and implementation strategies that much better. This list of best practices isn’t comprehensive, but it does build a launch point of basics that are easy to follow and simple to use.

1. Crowdsourcing

Use your social media presence to reach out to customers, users and clients to ask them what they like most or least about your brand, product or service. It’s an excellent way to learn how to improve a feature or scale back a push. Let’s face it, perception is reality and knowing what your audience wants is just about as close to the truth as you can get.

2. Overcome Your Fears

For most brands and businesses, one of the most frightening aspects of social media is that they have to give up control. This means that by making themselves available through social media they’re subject to kind comments and scathing criticism. There’s no denying the fact that your brand is at the mercy of your audience. Set your sensitivity aside, check your ego at the door and make an attempt to understand and learn from any negative feedback that you might encounter.

3. Give Prompt Responses

One thing we know for certain is that social media moves very quickly. Being able to send out a thank you, reply to a question or provide details in a blog comment all need to be attended to as they happen. Make a concerted effort to converse with your fans and followers as soon as possible. If you’re finding that your time is limited, consider delegating and expanding social media responsibility in a team format. A social media team is great for keeping the social media momentum going and it’s helpful in getting a fresh perspective to a new situation.

4. Be True To You

It’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement of social media success. But as thrilling as it might be to build a following of thousands, don’t lose sight of what your brand stands for or what your business is about. Authentic relationships are built on a foundation of genuineness. Keep it real when it comes to interacting with your audience and don’t lose sight of why you began your social media campaign to begin with. People are perceptive and they can smell insincerity from a mile away.

5. Keep A Consistent Identity

Format your brand name and stick with it. Take the name MindSprout for example. It’s used across all of our social media sites as MindSprout so that it’s easily identified and found. I haven’t used variations like msprout on some sites or mindspt55 on others, which can potentially cause confusion and even dilute the brand. Use a service like Knowem.com to stake your brand name claim on all the social media sites that you’ll have a presence on. Additionally, use the same avatar, logo or imagery to create brand cohesiveness across your social platforms.

6. Track Metrics

This is by far one of the most important best practices to follow. Keep track of your social media efforts and measure how successful each one has been. If you’re not seeing the results that you want it’s time to rethink your strategy. A new approach is much better than continuing down a path to nowhere. Use your analytics, link shorteners and sentiment trackers to monitor and learn about what’s working and what’s not.

There are plenty of other best practices that can be used, but hopefully this will give you a good starting point. Just remember to be patient, don't lose focus and choose your social media channels carefully.

What are some of your personal best practices that you would add to this list? Share with us.

Not surprisingly, many businesses have a tough time understanding exactly how social media fits into their overall marketing plan. Social media marketing seems like more of a catchy phrase that consists of nothing more than tweets and posts. In actuality, marketing with social media is much more than that. No, it won’t transform your business into an overnight success, but it can be used as an extremely effective tool when you incorporate a solid plan and strategy behind it.

At a minimum, your social media marketing plan should include a blend of public relations and marketing tactics, as well as evoke flexibility, patience and commitment for the individual or team who will be executing it. Previously, we’ve shared what social media can and can’t do for businesses and it’s important to make sure that you have realistic expectations and a well-developed understanding of what social media is and what it requires before you begin planning.

Pick Your Marketing Objectives

Here’s the broken record part of this post - you have to begin with the end in mind. You'll hear this from just about anyone who's ever had a hand in developing marketing plan. Decide what your objectives are and why you’re putting a social media plan together. What are the things that you want to achieve? Are your objectives sustainable and realistic? Put your thoughts together and dedicate some time to creating this cornerstone of your strategy.

Know Your People

You need to know who you’re trying to connect with and where they’re at. It’s also helpful to understand what level of social media interaction they currently have. For example, if you’re selling vitamins to seniors then tweeting about them all day isn’t your best bet. Find out what your audience likes and dislikes and get involved with them.

Get Engaged

Social media is anything but passive. It’s about a two-way conversation and that means you need to plan on being involved and contributing to the dialogue. Your social media plan should include how time will be allocated to develop relationships and communicate with your audience.

Stretch Your Creative Muscle

Once you’ve nailed down some of the basics for your social media plan you’ll want to customize your strategy. Brand it and make it your own, after all social media isn’t based on tweets alone. Get inspired by taking a look at how other businesses have leveraged their social media presence.

Measure and Evaluate

You need to figure out what success means to you and how your social media plan will measure it. Choose which key metrics are most important to you in measuring your ROI and set-up methods to gather data on a regular basis.

At the end of the day, a social media marketing plan can be effectively used to build brand awareness, brand loyalty, build word of mouth marketing and convert customers into brand ambassadors. Put some thought and creativity into you plan that goes beyond tweeting and posting and you’ll be on your way to enhancing a relationship between you and your audience.

Were these suggestions helpful? What are some other key points to consider when beginning a social media marketing plan? Share with us.

So you’ve spent all night writing a blog post that can only be described as the pièce de résistance to your dedicated followers. Clearly, you’re proud of what you’ve produced and you’ve poured some serious effort into developing an outstanding representation of what great content truly is.

But what do you do once you’ve posted that bright, shiny new blog entry and it’s dashed to bits in the comment section? First off, don’t be offended by the feedback about your masterpiece. Instead consider following some of these suggestions to help you work through any negative comments.

It’s Not Personal

Harsh comments can be tough pills to swallow, but remember that it’s not about you. It’s just about perspective. You’ll never be able to make your blog satisfy the opinions of all your subscribers. Plus, being able to produce content that sparks a debate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You’re setting up a place to inspire conversation and that’s a good thing.

Keep Calm

Take a deep breath and a step back before your respond to any negative blog comments. Remember that you’ve created a blog to exchange information with readers and ultimately, your readers come first. Take an objective stance and respond openly. If you find this person continually engaging in negative, abrasive or combative commenting consider flagging their comments and remove them from future posts.

Embrace The Feedback

Hate to say it, but comments on a blog post, both good and bad, demonstrate that you’re developing and sharing insightful topics that readers are connecting with. Brush your ego aside and roll with the punches. Use the comments from your readers as learning opportunities to help you create better posts and acknowledge different views.

Give Thanks

Strange as it may seem, thanking people for leaving blog comments is a great way to show that you’re focused on creating a transparent blog, not to mention that it is an easy way to involve readers by encouraging them to offer alternative ideas or solutions.

Depending upon how active and passionate your blog following is they may jump in and answer the negative comments for you. Make sure that you follow-up to show that you’re listening and open to discussion. It will show everyone that your blog community is a place where people can be themselves.

Have you experienced any tough situations with your own blog comments? Share with us.

A retweet on Twitter is a simple, but powerful ways to take your content that you're sharing with current followers and potentially making it viral. When someone retweets (RT) what you've posted the message goes beyond your personal follower pool. It's instantly sent to other new tweeters, which exponentially increases awareness about your brand through your tweet. Similar to other social media phenomenon, a RT is more coveted than achieved, but by following some of the suggestions below you can finesse your tweets to make them retweet-worthy in no time.

1. Retweet Others

Famous Beatle and singer/song-writer John Lennon once said, "the love you take is equal to the love you make," and that same philosophy can be applied to Twitter. You need to retweet other tweeps if you want them to retweet you. This doesn't mean that you need to go on a RT rampage. Pick and choose good tweet content that is worth sharing and make it happen through a retweet. Include @reply so that they're looped in on your generous efforts.

2. Embrace Hashtags

Overuse of hashtags can appear spammy so employ them sparingly. Because hashtags organize tweets so that people can follow them based on category you have a good chance getting your retweet pushed out to many like-minded tweeps at the same time. In other words, a hashtag is like a group. For instance, if you sent a tweet about your award winning chocolate chip cookie recipe and add #cookies to your tweet it will show up in the #cookies hashtag feed and everyone reading that feed will see your tweet. If you want to know how hashtags are trending or being used visit Hashtags.org.

3. Short And Sweet

Twitter has a 140 character limitation on all tweets. The character cap seems even tighter when you factor in a shortened URL, @reply, hashtag and retweet. So, when you craft your tweets think about the other elements that can encroach on the 140 characters. Your tweet should be short, succinct and simple so that your tweeps know what it's about and when it comes through as retweet it won't be partially dissected by Twitter.

4. The Best Time

A-list blogger and social media expert Dan Zarella spent some time analyzing and evaluating retweet data to determine if there were certain days or times that favored retweets in comparison to others. Zarella observed that beginning in the morning business hours on Eastern Standard Time (EST) the quantity of retweets steadily increases. Additionally, content that begins as a tweet during this same timeframe will gain a significant number of retweets than original content posted in during other times.

There has been additional debate about specific hours throughout the day that tend to yield more retweets versus others. Some people believe that the hours after lunch and at the end of the work day are when the largest percentage of retweets occurs, however, because concrete data is unavailable we've refrained from exploring this area in our blog post.

5. Ask For It

If you want to get something retweeted then ask for it in your tweet. Sounds simple enough, but surprisingly many people choose not to include a call-to-action on their tweets.

How are you using retweets to drive traffic to your blog? What results have you seen? Add a comment or two down below.

As powerful as social media is perceived to be there's still quite a bit of mystery that surrounds it. Brands recognize that they need to be involved, but they're struggling with assigning a dollar-value on social media exposure and how it equates to revenue. Because there aren't any tools or systems in place that can spit out data on a company's return on investment (ROI) for increasing its Twitter followers many businesses find themselves wondering if they're just spinning their profit wheels in a social media mudslide.

It should come as no surprise that brands small and large share common concerns regarding social media. Even though concerns may be similar brands should be aware that they'll need to exercise different strategies depending upon whether they're B2C or B2B. Aside from defining goals and strategies, here are some of the social media obstacles that may confront brands.

1. Choosing the right social media channels.

Brands that know who their target market is and what communities they belong to can integrate those niche social sites into their strategies. Using a blend of social media dominators like Facebook and Twitter with other focused social sites might be a good launch point for some brands. The truth is that the right social channels are the ones where your audience engages itself and that are also right for your brand.

2. Converting fans and followers into customers.

You might be surprised to find out that most of your brand's supporters are already customers. These people have interacted with your brand on some level and they're proudly supporting it by liking, following or subscribing to the news that you share. Make it worthwhile for your brand loyalists to enjoy special perks, discounts and sneak previews that others might not be privvy to. Preferential treatment isn't a bad thing in the land of social media. When word leaks out that your brand awards BOGO offers to Facebook fans each month you can bet that it will be taken advantage of.

3. Creating impactful social media campaigns.

Often brands will find themselves in a creative rut and unable to pull together a meaningful social media campaign. No matter who you are take comfort in knowing that we've all been there and this is a challenge that will probably surface from time to time. When you plan a campaign try to build it with your audience in mind, not for yourself. Remember that a campaign isn't a press release or a widget - it's an actual strategy. Position, objectives, strategy, tactics and key messages are the core campaign components. Layer in video, blogs, newsletters, PPC and other elements to make your campaign memorable, and sustainable.

4. Managing social media productivity.

One of the most commonly quoted challenges from brands is not being able to budget time and productiveness for social media. Without a plan in place, social media activity can be a major time suck. Execute each social media action with an objective in mind and keep your focus on the task at hand. If you're responding to customer inquiries on Twitter, only respond to customer inquiries. Avoid jumping over to LinkedIn to see what your groups are buzzing about.

5. Increasing subscribers and fans.

Hands down this is one of the biggest challenges for all brands. Unless you're a brand that's been arounds for decades or who has a national presence like Starbucks or McDonald's, you're not going to have millions upon millions of fans. Keep scalability in mind and don't get caught up in what other international brands are doing. Next, remember to share information that your audience would like to know and would appreciate having. This doesn't mean an endless barrage of details about your brand. It means pulling good, credible data from other sources and funneling it down to your loyalists.

There are plenty of other challenges that brands are facing and will continue to face. This is just a handful to get your wheels turning and to think constructively about how to overcome them.

Let us know what some of your brand challenges are and share with us below.

From Denmark to Detroit, social media is a worldwide phenomenon that seems to be part addiction and part necessity. With Facebook's recent announcement that it's hit 500 million users and Twitter's move toward advertising with @earlybird it's becoming more apparent that if you want to get the word out about your business you need to step into the social media arena. However, all the excitement about social media doesn't mean much if you can't decipher what it means and what it's doing. Analytics to social media are like a compass to a navigator - if you don't understand where you're at you won't know where to go.

If the thought of analytics and numbers makes you shudder you're not alone. There are more people than not who feel intimidated by numerical data. The two toughest aspects of social media analytics are interpreting information and deciding what analytic tools best meet your needs. Fortunately, basic analytics doesn't require a PhD in statistics and the internet is filled with outstanding free tools and resources to help make metric crunching easy. So, if you can't afford enterprise-level services like Scout Labs, Radian6 or Sysomos, you'll want to check out some of the freebies below to help you get a grip on your analytics.

Blogs

Use PostRank to help rank your blog content and news and and to determine what your fans are reading, sharing and organizing. It also identifies what your most popular posts are in your RSS feed.

Think of BlogPulse as a search engine for blogs and their posts. It's similar to Technorati, but it provides additional views such as trending and conversations so that you can see search competitive topics and how other blogs are ranking.

Comments

Beyond standard search for keywords and brand names you’ll want to penetrate what’s being discussed in blog commenting systems too. That’s where YackTrack comes in. Simply enter your keywords or terms to see a nicely organized list that you can drilldown to get specific mentions from.

Branding

One of the more substantial branding tools available is Social Mention. It aggregates user generated content from across multiple social media platforms and streamlines outcomes into a very simple and easy to interpret web page. The one thing Social Mention doesn't do is show a report over time. A work around this missing feature is to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter daily data that you gather. Otherwise, it's a great (and free) tool.

Perhaps more of an entertainment tool rather than a true metric evaluator, How Sociable measures your brand's keywords throughout 32 different social media sites. There's some confusion around the 'visibility score' that How Sociable has developed and not all data appears to be accurate. For example, if you run a search on iPhone it yields a visibility score of 9,453 and a Google PageRank score of zero. Odd to say the least. Looks like brand visibility metrics might have a few glitches, but it’ still worth exploring.

Trends & Topics

Head over to Addict-o-Matic and enter a unique search term, brand or product name or just about anything and it will perform a search that delivers the buzz (or results) broken down by social media platform. It's a very convenient snapshot that let's you look at your social reach and the social sites where you have more presence in comparison to others.

Twitter

There are so many Twitter tools available that deciding which one to use can be a daunting task. For the purpose of benchmarking your brand against your competition, Twitalyzer is ideal. It shows you what social media strategies are working and what’s not, which makes it easy to adjust social media campaigns to maximize better results.

The power of influence is a core component in any social media campaign. Knowing who has better reach and strength and engaging with them can help persuade your audience to promote your brand. Klout measures influence as it relates to your brand through Twitter. You can identify which customers and communities are more likely to become brand evangelists and work with them to drive conversations.

Another hand Twitter tool is TweetStats. You can graph how many tweets per hour, day and month, as well as look at your tweet timeline and reply statistics. TweetStats is a fantastic way to track your level of interaction and look at areas that need improvement.

Google

Google Analytics (GA) may leave you feeling unnerved, but it actually does a tremendous job on tracking numbers and data. We'll save GA how-tos for a future post. In the meantime, use PageRank Checker to see what Google thinks of your site. Using a scale from zero to 10, with 10 holding the most authority, you can run a quick search to find out how you rank.

In order for GA to actually work on your website you need to install tracking code on each page that you want the Google bot spiders to crawl. To make sure that you've set-up your code use SiteScan to confirm that you've performed a correct installation. Although SiteScan and PageRank Checker aren't direct analytic tools they are helpful in gauging Google-related tasks and standards.

Competitive

Quarkbase has been touted as the ‘imdb.com for websites’. By entering a website’s URL you are presented with names of people associated with the site, traffic data, social popularity, site description and sites that are similar. This is one of the best free competitive research tools available. Data can be used to help you better position your brand and establish goals and objectives.

There you have it. Granted, there are so many tools, free and paid, that accessible on the web, we hope that this short list gets you moving in the right direction.

What are some of the other free tools that you're using? How do you make them work for your brand and what do you like best about them? Share with us.

If you’re looking for a Twitter solution that combines both marketing and management then you absolutely must check out Market Me Tweet. Before you roll your eyes at the thought of yet another Twitter tool you’ll be happy to know that Market Me Tweet is a true stand-out from the pack of Twitter apps that have permeated the social media realm. What sets Market Me Tweet apart from the competition is its branding capabilities and that’s good news for businesses small and large.

For the most part, Market Me Tweet is similar in scope to the Hootsuite dashboard and its functionality. Users can integrate multiple Twitter accounts to track and tweet too. It can monitor keywords, schedule tweets in advance, track conversation threads, follow and unfollow users, autotweet RSS feeds and much more. As previously mentioned, the big difference is that it allows users to ‘brand’ their tweets.

For instance, if you’ve ever sent a tweet using a tweet client like TweetDeck, Tweetie or Hootsuite, you’ve probably noticed each tweet is labeled with a backlink to the application used to generate the tweet.

With Market Me Tweet you have the ability to customize your own branded backlink that not only features your business, site or blog name, but let’s you choose the URL to link back to. In essence, you can optimize your brand and drive traffic back to your site.

The benefits of being able to brand, optimize and create backlinks to each of your tweets is a home run for your online social presence. For every single tweet that you send and that someone else retweets you're creating additional exposure via a customized backlink. Incredible!

Of course all amazing tools come at a price, but the nice thing is that Market Me Tweet is reasonably affordable. There are several monthly price plans available to suit your individual or professional needs. The investment that you make will pay back in spades, especially when you consider how many backlinks your tweets will be generating throughout the Twitter-sphere.

Are you already using this revolutionary tool? What type of success are you seeing? Drop a line and keep us posted.

When done correctly, a social media marketing campaign can yield tremendous results. With that being said, social media is more than just creating a social profile and calling it good. It's about interaction and engagement.

According to 2010 Twitter statistics, the micro-blogging site has more than 106 million registered users and it's adding an average of 300,000 new users each day. A total of 55 million daily tweets along with 3 billion unique searches show that people are extremely interested in sharing information with one another and want to learn more. Clearly, Twitter is a powerful social media force that has the potential to connect brands with their target audiences.

An important part of social media is knowing that different marketing strategies need to be used on different social media sites. A cookie cutter approach doesn't cut it in the word of online marketing. Here are a few simple steps can be used to develop a solid base that will help you build your brand presence and following on Twitter.

1. Attract the Right Followers

Sometimes the excitement of launching a Twitter marketing strategy can dilute the purpose behind it. Stay focused on who you want to attract as a follower. This means that you'll need to look toward other relevant tweeters and join-in on their conversations. People naturally gravitate toward others who have similar interests. If your brand is all about insurance then you'll want to look for some of the successful a-listers on Twitter and start tweeting with them. Others will take notice and follow you as well.

2. Original & Optimized Tweets

Getting caught up in your own brand happens to the best of us. Try not to broadcast a 'me-me-me' message when you're tweeting. You'll establish more credibility and appear more genuine if you tweet about information and resources that are helpful to your audience. This doesn't mean that you need to avoid anything about your brand, it just means you should be selective and sporadic when you share brand-related tweets. Followers are more inclined to list and reach out to you when they see that you've set your ego aside.

3. Share With Retweets

This is truly one of the most powerful ways to build long-lasting Twitter relationships. Retweets are an excellent way to augment your Twitter marketing strategy. Think of a retweet as social media currency - you give a tweet and someone pays you twofold with a retweet. They're like pats on the back that show other tweeters that what you've shared is worth spreading around to everyone. The Twitterverse is only so small and retweets give others outside of your following a chance to see the type of content that you tweet about.

4. Integrate Twitter With Other Social Media Outlets

All in all, the social media realm is a fairly friendly place. You really don't hear much about social media services trying to pillage each other's users. Thankfully, everyone plays well with one another and as a result many open APIs have given developers an opportunity to create applications and programs that integrate different social media services with one another. You can connect Twitter to Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and, well, just about any social media outlet. This is an important component in your strategy because even though you're marketing hub is Twitter, social integration allows you to expand your reach to other audiences.

5. Use Twitter Tools

If Twitter is a social media vehicle (base model) then Twitter tools are all the bells and whistles that you can use to customize it and make it a lean, mean social media machine. There are thousands of different tools that can help you monitor, follow, schedule tweets, analyze and much more. For additional tool suggestions, check out MindSprout's Delicious page and type Twitter in the tag search. Some tools that are worth checking out include:

• TweetPhoto - exchange and share photos on Twitter
• TweetStats - graph and track your Twitter usage and reply statistics
• TweetBeep - keep track of conversations that mention your brand
• Mr. Tweet - this tool seeks out follow-worthy tweeters just for you

By using the steps above you can craft a customized Twitter marketing strategy that will increase your brand awareness and leverage your brand's presence among the competition.

What are some of the other ways that your brand is using Twitter to market itself? Please share with us below.