Social Networks such as Facebook and Twitter have been exploding over the last few years. Businesses have flocked to this new space because that is where the people are. Active business people, sometimes known as “Movers and Shakers” are usually the first to take part in using new networks to their advantage. However, the tone and way you go about communicating with people on social networks is far different then the way most are used to communicating with people, especially when it comes to promoting products and services.

Traditional print and media marketing is equal dumping a bucket of water off of a 50 story building. Some people will get hit, most will miss it. Before social networks there was no way for a business to connect one on one with their target market. Today, the target market is a friend request away. With out the right etiquette and mindset going into social networks, you can easily do more damage than good.

I am all about promoting business. I love making suggestions for products and services to friends of mine when I find that they have a need that I know one of my contacts can fill. For example, I was on Facebook yesterday and one of my friends posted an image of their car that was just damaged after hitting a dog that ran out in front of them. I personally know the owners of the premier body shop in the town that I live in so I contacted her directly and made a suggestion. Dealing with things such as who to trust with your car is a big deal and if I was in her shoes I would have appreciated any suggestions that could have been made. Knowing so many business people in my community I could easily take advantage of my friend’s desires to share their daily ins and outs with me, but I don’t give in to that temptation. I understand how good it feels to help someone out but I also understand when it is welcome and when it becomes annoying. Here are some tips and suggestions that I think should be considered when thinking about promoting yourself, your business or the businesses of others through social networks.

1. Always make your suggestions private.
Social Networks are super public. Most people allow anyone to see their posts and the posts of their friends. The average person on Facebook has 180 friends. This is very exciting to a business person who feels that they have something that could help. However, the public space is not where you want to do this. Although most will want to place their suggestion in public with hopes that all of their friends will see it the suggestion will come across as nothing more than a shameless plug. Shameless plugs = Annoying. I personally take offense to it, give one warning and then unfriend the person. In real life, if someone was to jump into a conversation with out being invited it would be considered rude. How is a person’s Facebook wall any different?

The right way to make your suggestion is to contact the person through their email or through private message. On Facebook you can message people privately as well as on Twitter you can Direct Message them. If the recipient of your suggestion takes you up on it and has a good experience I am sure they will post about it. They post about everything else so why not about their great interaction with your business? After business has closed and you feel the transaction went well you can even ask if they would post something to their Facebook wall or Twitter feed. How much better is a recommendation or testimonial from a happy customer then from your mouth?

Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: When I post something to my Facebook wall or Twitter feed about something and people make a shameless plug about their product or service that is not even relevant to what I was talking about. An example of this would be if the product or service was not available in my area. There is no relevance to what I posted nor that of anyone else who was posting comments under it, the plug was completely shameless and brought no value to the conversation. Why don’t you just slap me in the face while you are at it!

2. Invites to Groups, Fan Pages or Lists.
Creating a list, group or fan page for your business is a good idea. I have one and would recommend you get one for your business. You can even go as far as suggesting to all of your friends that they become a fan of your page, add you group or list as well. However, do not become relentless in attempting to get all people on your list or fan page. They saw it the first time. If they did not add it, they did not want to add it. If you continue to be persistant with getting people to add your page you are frustrating them and almost guaranteeing that they will never do business with you. This is equal to chasing people down and making them come in your door. Have you ever been to Las Vegas or certain parts of San Francisco where the bars and restaurants have people out front trying to get you to come into their establishment? It’s obnoxious, and you only put up with it long enough to walk by. Internally you are telling yourself that you will never go into that place and you probably even feel insulted.

To get people to become fans of your page, group of list you should ask those who are already fans to share it with others. Ask them to type a short message that they can send with the invite. This short message would explain how your business or product helped them. You are more likely to get fans who actually want to know more about you and your product this way.

Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: There is a local restaurant who has both a Facebook profile and Fan page. There is no indication of personality behind these profiles, they seem to strictly be there to be recognized and I have noticed no intention to be an active part of the community. This business would “suggest” that I added their page as a fan every single day. It was really annoying to click “ignore” every day as these suggestions would add up with the others and there is no easy way to “ignore all”, nor can you just ignore all future suggestions for a certain friend. You just have to unfriend them. This is exactly what I did. One week later they attempted to add me as a friend. Maybe they thought that somehow our friendship had been accidentally terminated, because you know how that happens all of the time. I decided to accept the friend invite but I also posted to their wall that I would be more than happy to have them as a friend, but I am not interested in being a fan of their page. I only fan pages that I feel are relevant to me and unless I completely love the business and am willing to shout it from the roof tops, I do not want to be their fan just for the sake of making their fan count ego feel good. Since that post, I have not received a fan request since.

3. Automated Responses
My policy is that if I can not respond personally, I will not respond at all. My Mother used to tell me that if I didn’t have something nice to say that I should not say it at all. To me, a automated response is nothing nice. When someone accepts your friend request or even adds you as a friend they deserve a personal response. If you do not have time to give personal responses then don’t respond at all. The only people who can get away with this are celebrities, if they even care to give you any time of day at all. However, the large majority of us are not celebrities and should not send automatic responses. I have 100′s of examples from Twitter that I could post images of but I don’t feel like throwing anyone under the bus for just being ignorant.

Many of us turn off email notifications from the social networks because of the amount of emails that end up coming in. My suggestion is that you head over to Gmail.Com, set up a free email account such as jeradsocial@gmail.com (not an actual email) that you can set as your email address for notifications on these social networks. Let the new friend notifications pile up and go through them one at a time sending a short personal message. You can even pick and choose who you email. If you are a realestate agent and another realestate agent adds you as a friend, they probably are not going to enjoy the canned response you came up with thinking that the all of your new friends are potential home buyers.

Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: Quote from a recent Twitter direct message: “Thanks for the follow. I’ll look forward to connecting with you! You might also enjoy http://blogname.wordpress.com.” The truth is that this person could care less about connecting with me. I have yet to communicate with her and she has not made an effort to communicate with me either. To me it feels just like going to a Chamber of Commerce event where people are running around like zombies with business cards trying to eat you alive.

In Closing:
If you get one thing out of this I hope that you walk away with a desire to treat people in social networks like you would treat your neighbor. Truth is that we are more in contact with people online than we are our own neighbors living right outside our walls. Respecting people is just as important online as it is offline. Give people your respect and they will respond with theirs.

With all of the self proclaimed “social networking experts” out there it is hard to decide who to believe and trust. Most of them want money from you in trade for what they call their “experience”. However what makes me smile is that almost none of these people have any business experience at all. If they do, it’s not any experience that has yielded something they could brag about. How does one decide who to trust to direct your business in the most public display of communication that your company has ever engaged in? Which social media sites do you participate in and why? To be an expert in something you must have experience. I have never found that one person has had all of the right answers.

For years now I have been using these sites to build SEO for my websites and expand my personal brand. I have been posting articles to StumbleUpon and Digg for years and have seen great results, posting images to Flickr and communicating through Twitter and Facebook. These sites have been huge contributors to the traffic many of my websites receive. There are many different social media websites, each of them with a different purpose.

While browsing around online I came across a single PDF Roadmap that explains everything in plain english. You can download a large PDF here (right click, save target/file as). Drew McLellan put this beautiful breakdown together and it’s content is very sound. As I explained before, different social media sites help with different functions of your purpose and brand. Use it to figure out where to post which types of media for the best results.

It is not rocket science, it just takes someone to put it all together in plain english. If you do not have accounts on these websites, get them. If your website is not set up with buttons such as the buttons you see below for sharing content, then contact your website designer and have them added. Encourage your readers to share your content if they enjoyed it. And please for the love of all that is sacred, stop encouraging the talking heads out there, take initiative and do it yourself.

Finding tools like the CMO Social Landscape help me continue to get better at promoting myself, my business and the content I create.

I know that most of you have had it up to hear with people telling you how you can find business in the social networks but hear me out. If you listen for the right cues you will notice that people are asking for your help, they just don’t know it. We naturally want to help people. In real life it is awkward to interject our thoughts into a conversation we were not invited into. Online we have the opportunity to make suggestions through private emails or direct messages. Watch my latest video where I share thoughts and ideas on how to find referrals for yourself and other people in your contacts list through online social networks.

Jerad Hill is a personal brand strategist helping people get referrals online. For more videos from Jerad subscribe to the RSS feed or the iTunes Podcast!

If you are a Realtor and you have heard of Twitter then you need to check out DemandSpot.Com. DemandSpot allows you to easily find people on Twitter who are talking about purchasing a home with in your area. Simply type in your location, set the radius and DemandSpot gives you a way to contact these people talking about homes. The great thing about Twitter is that it allows us to listen for opportunities in a way we never could before. DemandSpot aggregates all of the Real Estate related tweets into one place and allows you to search by location.

It provides nothing other then leads but at least you know the person was actually interested in searching for a home, I mean they tweeted it right? DemandSpot is a free service as of the time I am posting this. Their service is in Alpha so I am sure it will improve greatly over time.

Check out DemandSpot: http://demandspot.com

I know exactly what you are thinking, you are rolling your eyes at the idea of a Twitter bot. You may even remember how annoying they were when used incorrectly on Myspace. I want to share my experiences with Tweetadder and explain to you why it is a must have tool for anyone who takes their persona on Twitter serious.

Tweetadder is a tool that allows you to perform all of the normal functions of Twitter from one app but also allows you to target followers based on search terms and follow them with the click of a mouse.

Warning: People will use this to create accounts and mass follow people with the sole purpose of advertising to them. People already do this as it is, this app will make it easier for them to do so but it’s happening anyway.

Tweetadder is perfect for those of us who promote ourselves and our businesses online and wish to target people with specific interests to follow. It simply makes it easy to do that so you do not have to use the Twitter website and manually follow people. Tweetadder saves you a ton of time.

Twitter has limits set up in place to prevent spammers from creating huge accounts and spamming a lot of people. Those limits are easy to hit manually so I don’t see this tool making Twitter a spam filled place such as Myspace has became.

I am going to walk you through the many features of Tweetadder and explain why they will save you time and better your Twitter experience.

First things first… Tweetadder is not free. There are many levels of licensing for you to choose from to fit your needs. Currently the prices range from $7.95 for a one week one account license to $499 for a 100 account, outright unlimited usage license. To try it out, I purchased the one account week long license. As of the first day using it I followed 200 new people who have the word iPhone in their about section and 160 of those people have followed me back. Is that not worth $7.95 alone? Other services that place your Twitter account in ads on their partners websites will cost much more then that and perform no where near as well.

Support my efforts: As an early adopter of the Tweetadder software I signed up as an affiliate so when you purchase Tweetadder, please follow my link to do so. http://www.tweetadder.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=118 What is great is that you can be an affiliate also and earn income from the people you refer to Tweetadder. After you create an account and have your license of Tweetadder, simply revisit the link I just provided you and create an affiliate account.

When you first launch Tweetadder you will register your license and enter the Twitter account(s) you wish to manage. You can always add more accounts later or upgrade your license to allow for more account usage in the future. Once logged in you will see the following screen.

Who To Follow: In this section you will tell Tweetadder who you want to find and follow. There are different search fields that will search different aspects of Twitter to return the results you desire. You can follow users with in a zip code and radius, follow the followers of another user or search for terms people have tweeted or have entered into their about section of their profile. As you can see, you have a lot of options. This will allow you to find the people who have interests in which you can service in a hurry. Long gone are the days of searching Twitter manually and adding people one by one. Have fun finding people to follow.

Add Followers: This tab allows you to add the followers you just searched for, add followers that you have not yet followed back and set parameters to assure that the use of Tweetadder does not flag your account. I will note as a warning to you: Do not get greedy. You will be tempted to try and follow 2000 people in the first day of having your new Twitter account. I do not recommend this. Nothing looks more fishy to me than someone who follows a ton of people and has nobody following them back. I never follow those people back because chances are they are fake or will just advertise to me. I recommend you check the box that keeps your follower to following ratio at 1.5:1.

Unfollow: Use the Unfollow tab to remove people whom you are following that are not following you in return. If you have chosen to follow to many people you may want to use this option to remove the people that chose not to follow you. If you got to carried away with the last tab then you may hit a Twitter limit which means your followers to following ratio is to far apart. I like the option that allows you to unfollow people who were followed using Tweetadder. This will make sure that none of the higher end people or companies you follow because you respect and desire to hear what they have to say get removed.

Messages: Now we are getting into the tools that can potentially be used to spam. I suggest that you think of sending direct messages in the same context that you think of sending text messages from your cell phone to your close friends. Only send them when you need to and always make sure they are relevant. Sending unwarranted direct messages to users at random is a big No No in my book. However if you are administering a Twitter account for an event or conference you can use this tool to send out updates. Direct messages do have a higher chance of reaching the person you send it to because most people have their direct messages go to their email or via. SMS to their cell phone. The messages section will allow you to set custom messages to be broadcasted out to your followers. You can set the time and date that those messages will be dispatched, which makes Tweetadder a really useful tool. You can load messages from a file or enter them directly into Tweetadder.

Tweets: Tweetadder can be used to send out tweets at any time or date you set. This could be a great tool for events, conferences, speakers, sports teams and more. Use it as a tool to thank attendees of your event or to set up custom #followfriday tweets you don’t want to forget to send out. You can also use it to custom reply to messages that were tweeted back to you in response to the message Tweetadder sent out, how cool is that!

Automation: Each tab described above has features with daily limits that can be used to assure that your Twitter account does not get flagged as a spammer. Continuing on with my example, my search for people with the word iPhone in their profile returned many more twitter profiles then I would feel comfortable adding in one day. Using the automation tab I can set Tweetadder to follow the maximum amount of users I had set in the Add Followers tab, remove users who did not follow me back, send out twitter messages and tweets as specified on their respective tabs. This allows you to focus on conversing with those new followers and cultivate those new relationships.

Let Tweetadder worry about following new people and unfollowing the old. You can now focus on your followers and creating more value for them. Though there will be many who will abuse this software I suggest that you use it to grow your business or friend base so that you have a larger contact base to share your passions, products or services with.

I hope that my article on the new software Tweetadder helped you decide to download it and give it a try. Remember, it’s only $7.95 to try it out on one account for a week. The amount of targeted followers that you could get in that one week is well worth the $7.95. If you are serious about your Twitter persona then I am not sure why you are still reading this article. Go give it a try now. Click the banner below.

Last Wednesday about 50 Modesto locals collectively showed up at Hero’s Pizza to socialize and network. Those in attendance ranged from homemaker Moms to Presidents of large companies in our area. All of us had one thing in common, we all used the social network called Twitter. If you are unsure as to what this thing called Twitter is, watch the video titled “Twitter in Plain English“. The event was called The Modesto Tweetup (@modestotweetup) and was only advertised by word of mouth through Twitter itself. Less than a week before the event Lloyd Gomez (@lloydgomez) did some graphics for posters and a quick tee shirt design. Income generated from the shirt sales went to support the March of Dimes. I witnessed quite a few people including myself purchasing shirts. In fact I am wearing mine as I write this!

Using PeopleBrowsr.com we linked up 2 laptops to big screens which displayed tweets live on the screen so we could experience the reach a group of local twitter’ers have all at the same time. My laptop (pretty mac) and Daniel’s laptop (meh Dell) (@danielversola) ran the screens. Naturally, I brought a camera and took pictures which are available on my Flickr account.

This Tweetup was the 3rd in succession for Modesto, the first two were impromptu dinner gatherings. The success of the 3rd Modesto Tweetup spurred @lloydgomez, @danielversola, @BDUBweitl and @jeradhill (me) to start planning right away for the 4th Modesto Tweetup which is scheduled for May 20th at Hero’s Pizza in Modesto. The purpose of the Tweetups are to get together for networking and socializing. Our goal is to always have a philanthropic connection to each gathering such as our support of the March of Dimes at the Tweetup last week.

It will be exciting to see what happens at the next Tweetup. If you are a Twitter user, please make sure to follow @modestotweetup so you know what is happening. If you would like to get involved, feel free to contact me, we would love to hear your ideas.

See you on Twitter. Follow me at http://twitter.com/jeradhill