I’ve come across a couple of different uses for Twitter:

• Social networking
• Constant contacting

I’m sure there are more things to use Twitter for, but for the purposes of my blog, I like to stick to what I know and understand.

Here’s how Twitter works: sign up for an account and then post “tweets” on your account. Tweets are 140 character or less messages. Other people sign up to follow you, which means that they receive your tweets in one of a couple of ways. Either  they can login to Twitter.com and check who they are following, opt-in to receiving the tweets by email, receive them on their SMS via cell phone, or use one of the many Twitter apps that have sprung up over the last couple of years.

I have to admit something now: I signed up for Twitter a couple of years ago, and until this year didn’t really know what to do with it. I was recently talking to the marketing manager of Western Rivers Expeditions and they have a Twitter account and aren’t doing anything with it. I imagine a lot of you have Twitter accounts and aren’t doing much with them.

I suppose Twitter is about being connected. The origins of the site revolve around text messaging. Originally, you signed up, sent your tweets to Twitter via your phone, and received other people’s tweets the same way. I think the original model has had to embrace the other delivery methods. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that for Twitter to work for your business, you need to have something to say. Not just something to say, something relevant. Oprah could post anything to Twitter and it would be relevant. You and I? What do we post about our businesses that people will want to tune in to?

I have a couple of answers to that question: specials, alerts, coupons, or news. Two weeks ago I started a new business (part-time) cooking and delivering authentic Italian food. I use a Twitter account to tell all of my followers when the next menu is going up on the website. I only do one day a week, one dish, and very limited amounts. Twitter helps me get the word out to past customers that the new menu is available and that they can make their orders. The same would go for specials or coupons or special industry news. Maybe you could continually feed your followers with interesting quips or ideas relevant to their business or lives.

The point is relevancy. If your Twittering is not relevant, it will not help your business. On the other hand, if you can make Twitter a place where your followers can go to get more info to help themselves, it will stick for you.

As of this writing, Facebook claims more than 200 Million Users, more than 100 Million of which access the site on a daily basis. That’s a pretty good group of people that are using the site on a daily basis. To be sure, everyone that is in business wants a piece of that action. The problem that I have heard among the online marketers that I talk to is that Facebook is not a place for buyers. Let me go back…

There are four ways a business can use Facebook to generate business:

1. Buy Facebook Ads
2. Create and Maintain Facebook Fan Pages
3. Create and Maintain Fan Applications
4. Use Guerrilla Posting to Promote Products and Services

Again, what I hear around town is that Facebook is not a place for buyers, so buying Facebook ads is less effective. Facebook is a social network, people say. Users of Facebook don’t want to buy stuff, they just want to get on and chat with friends and share pictures and stuff.

Let me address this right now: Facebook may not be a place for buyers, but you can more effectively target your customers using Facebook ads than any other online ad marketplace I have seen. Google Adwords will let you target geographic areas and specific sites, but beyond that you are stuck to whoever sees and then clicks on your ad. Facebook ads are more specific. You want males 18-34? You got it. You want women with the word “kids” in their profile? You can target only those specific people. With Facebook ads, you can pare down your results to a wild level, unheard of even in the nichiest of marketplaces.

I have been buying ads for a book I wrote, Who Are You Really?, through Facebook, and had modest success. Honestly, buying ads to sell a book online is less effective, but I wanted to experiment with those type of ads and see how it worked before I recommended it to clients. I have had a dozen or so sales from the ads, but the good part is that ads convert well. If someone is clicking, more than half the time they are buying.

The second way to get business through Facebook is Fan pages. Fan pages can be a powerful way to communicate with your fans and to spread the word about things, as long as you have a relevant message to share. It’s akin to Twitter, where if people become a fan, they are going to get updates from your fan page and you can keep them informed. If you don’t have a relevant message to share with people on a regular basis, i.e. specials, events, new products, etc, then fan pages are less effective.

Applications can be a good way to keep in touch as long as they are fun and keep people interested. I have only seen a half dozen companies successfully pull this off. It seems like a fairly expensive way to get and keep customers…

Guerrilla posting is an art form. There are people that can do it and people that just suck. The key to being a guerrilla poster and having it be successful is two fold: get thousands of friends and be covert. I have about a thousand friends right now on Facebook, and I posted status update that invited people to help me test a new product, Contadino’s. Within minutes I had enough people for the test. Not covert, but not a solicitation for business either.

On the other side of the coin, I have one friend on Facebook (FOF) that only solicits business. I don’t want to see his ads in my updates page, I just don’t. He never has anything good to say or interesting, it’s all ads and sales. I blocked him after about a month of it…I just couldn’t take it.

One FOF that I admire is Kurt Bestor. He’s a composer and has thousands of FOFs, but the only time he is selling something is about once a month, and it usually comes in the form of a giveaway. He updates his status with fun, interesting things that are happening in his life and keeps us all informed about what he is up to professionally without selling us on anything.

Posting is an art. If you are overt in your attempt to sell people or trap them in to something in Facebook, it is really obvious and people avoid it. If you are bold and declare it as it is, without it being the only thing you ever Facebook about, then you will be better served using Facebook.

I’ll be talking more about this in the future, as well as hitting up Twitter, and iPhone/smart phone topics in the near future…