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Liverpool Chamber Of Commerce – Not A Grey Suit In Sight

Date: 5th February 2010
Comments: 1 Related Categories: Guest Blogs

Chamber Roundel Large

A guest blog by Nick Jones of Liverpool Chamber of Commerce

Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. Sounds pretty boring, eh? Makes you think of men in grey suits sitting around congratulating each other over brandies, maybe?

Well nothing could be further from the truth. Liverpool Chamber is the city’s largest, oldest and busiest business support organisation. We run over 100 networking events a year, provide vital support to companies large and small and are the voice of business in local and national government.

We like to think we are innovative, approachable and vibrant. But how do we let everyone else know?

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Our top 3 Twitter Activities

Date: 21st January 2010
Comments: 2 Related Categories: Guest Blogs, Twitter for Business

A guest blog from Bryony Thomas

I run Clear Thought Consulting, a management consultancy specialising in marketing transformation programmes for small businesses. In the last six months, through Twitter, we have:

  • Hooked up three people we hadn’t previously known with new paying clients.
  • Met up with somewhere in the region of 20 local experts who are now on our referral list.
  • Received two good quality leads, with a combined value in five figures.

It is a fantastic tool for doing business. And should definitely be on the list of marketing techniques to try in 2010 for every small business. Our top three activities on Twitter are:

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Can businesses outsource their social media? Can they turn over Twitter, Facebook etc to a third party to look after?

Date: 19th January 2010
Comments: 5 Related Categories: Guest Blogs

Happy New YearA guest blog from Joel Hughes

Businesses of all types, shapes and sizes are starting to take a long hard look at social media, and one of the key questions which quickly comes up is:

Who can look after my social media needs?

Companies are unsure of whether their current internal resources can (or even should) meet this demand, whether they need to recruit for a new role or whether they can outsource the work to a consultancy or agency.

Unsurprisingly there is a huge swathe of companies who are more than happy to say they can handle all aspects of your social networking needs. This sounds attractive…

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Using Twitter for HR Case Studies – What Twitter Does For Me

Date: 15th January 2010
Comments: 2 Related Categories: Guest Blogs

A guest blog from Graham Salisbury:

OK. So what does Twitter do for me?

At the basic level it’s an integral part of my masterplan to launch my HR Case Studies blog onto an unsuspecting work!

I first developed HR Case Studies in July 2010, intending it to be (as it says on the tin) “a resource pool of HR related updates and HR case studies from the national press for teachers of Business Studies.” Twitter is invaluable not only in driving traffic to the emerging site, but it also serves as a live stream of news items for potential inclusion on my blog.

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The Enormous Networking Space that is Twitter

Date: 13th January 2010
Comments: 1 Related Categories: Guest Blogs

A guest blog from Andrew Knowles

Twitter makes me money and I don’t know how I’d manage without it.

No, I’m not a spammer and I’m certainly not selling a get-rich-quick scheme lifting cash from the pockets of the gullible.

I’m just a regular bloke (if there is such a thing) who’s decided to go freelance because the hours are longer, the pay’s worse but the job satisfaction is a million miles higher than it was when I was on a payroll. I also like to think it has good long-term prospects!

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Using Google Reader to make sense of Twitter

Date: 6th January 2010
Comments: 2 Related Categories: Guest Blogs, Twitter Musings
I just wanted first to say thanks to Nikki for the invite to show how I use Twitter in my business and how it helps me keep on top of what is going on in Spain.
Recently I put up my twitter mosaic on my blog so you could admire all of those beautiful people who I follow. Now there are some people on there who I shouldn’t be following because I started using Twitter a long time ago and used something called autofollow (Forgive me for I have sinned). One shortened word, “Don’t!!!”. It allows spammers to send you rubbish all the time. Twitter is a broadcast medium and a conversation at the same time. If you are just broadcasting then you are not listening and you need to listen to your market.
Social media is now the best way to get up to date with relevant information about what you are interested in. If you are reading this then in theory you are interested in Spain because you have a desire to come to the country either to live or visit. So what do you get from my Twitter acounts @grahunt and the more corporate and businesslike @valprop? Well news and views about Spain and you get to discover how others are living their lives here for good, bad or indifferent. However I get a lot more from Twitter.
I live here and, as I said, I follow my market and keep on top of what is going on so that if anyone asks me a question I can answer it from a position of knowledge rather than guesswork. I use various tools to do this, one of which is the rather wonderful Google Reader (If used right) but another is Twitter.
When you go to www.twitter.com it seems a rather empty thing, this is why the majority of people go there, think to themselves “This is Useless” and leave never to return. Twitter depends on what you are doing with it and in order to do something with it you need to get inside it. This is done by using Twitter tools rather than just Twitter itself. Personally I use Tweetdeck to follow and send messages (Although others prefer tools such as Seismic or Mixero) and I use Google Reader to follow RSS feeds on terms mentioned in Twitter. Let me explain more.
Let’s say you are interested in Valencia where I am. You can set up a Twitter Search at http://search.twitter.com
Now the actual results are nothing to write home about. There are flights to Valencia, Valencia in the States and other Valencia stuff in Spanish. You probably wouldn’t want to scroll down or go onto page two etc… etc … etc… So you need to use the little orange icon in the top right corner. That is an RSS feed. When you click on it it will give you the option to follow in Google reader. Google Reader is brilliant because you can have one line summaries of everything and check every mention of Valencia on Twitter since the last time you looked with links to articles, pictures and loads more. (Just hope that Antonio Valencia doesn’t have a good season at Manchester United. The day he signed was hell as sifting through everyone Twittering about it was awful)
Why do you want to know this information? Well you will find absolute gold there including property for sale in Valencia, stories about great days out, pictures of places you will want to visit and people to follow in Twitter who will give you much more information by following their tweets and also you can engage in discussion with them to get more info about the place, in other words you have somebody on the ground who can give you the background of the place.
Remember you can do this for any term but let us stick to Valencia.
On Tweetdeck you can organise your contacts you find into columns so that you don’t miss what they say. You could follow me for example on @grahunt or the more business based tweets on @valprop and you would be flooded with info about Valencia and Spain as I use the quite brilliant Posterous service along with sharing stuff I find on Google Reader to post news that will be interesting to anyone who is thinking of coming to Spain. (My Posterous blog of interesting stuff can be found at www.grahunt.posterous.com . At times there is stuff not related to Spain too) In Tweetdeck you could put everyone you follow in Valencia into a single column to separate them from family and friends for example just like you do in Facebook maybe.
How does it benefit me as a business. Well I have defined RSS searches such as “Moving to Spain” “Going to Spain” etc set up. They tell me when someone is thinking of coming over, is on the point of coming over etc… If i feel the information I supply can be helpful to them then I will follow an message them. Get this though, I will not spam them with sales offers. Remember, I don’t like being spammed so I don’t see why anyone else should like it either. Make the initial contacts friendly and informative. You can move onto email, Google Wave or wherever later for more in depth conversations. The person who has tweeted “Right that’s it I am moving to Spain in January” is usually happy to start up that conversation and then just believe in the power of the random connection. You never know where an initial contact will lead but the fact that it can lead somewhere means much more than idly sitting around and hoping that clients knock on your virtual door wanting to buy your product.
So do you now get why I place such a huge importance on Twitter? It is real time and gets you the info about just about any subject you want right now. Compare it with the search engines which will find you the most relevant websites about your search term. However the information on those websites might well be years old in many cases. Twitter is more immediate.
Get yourself on Twitter and blog about your impending move to Spain and I will find you and follow (I will then of course hope to sell you a house because you will trust me due to the fact that I have given you so much great information ;-) )

A guest post from Graham Hunt – thanks Graham!

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The trouble with people who tweet is…

Date: 5th January 2010
Comments: 4 Related Categories: Guest Blogs, Twitter Musings
The trouble with twitter.
The trouble with twitter is now that it is so mainstream that everyone has an opinion on it and are not afraid to share it.
Fortunately they all conflict on how to get the best from twitter, so it’s still fun :)
Tweet what you eat?
I was reading on Facebook the other day where someone had updated their Facebook status with ‘Stop sharing what you eat on twitter”.
There were 5 or 6 ‘likes’ and 3 or 4 comments agreeing with them. I didn’t agree because it’s the little things that make a person a whole and
enables me to decide to continue following them, or not. Building a relationship and starting a conversation is easier when talking about the
smaller things like whether to have cheese or ham in your sandwich…
All work makes Jack such a dull boy…
Have you ever seen a tweetstream with no personal references in it?
Do you follow any?
Does that person engage with you?
My experience is no, someone who solely tweets about business doesn’t engage,
They are there to broadcast their business message and it’s dull to read! But what they do get is relevancy when you do a search in the twitter
stream for particular information. I have found 2 business tweets a day work well for our same day courier business. If you do a search, we
are near the top everytime, something we have been unable achieve with our website until recently. So do the solely business tweeters have the edge
over the non business tweets? What do you think?
Who are you and what do you do?
When I gain a follower I always ask what they do, and sometimes I get a response back that I find rather rude… “Read my bio”. Yes, rather than participate in a
conversation the person tells you to read their twitter bio. Their 160 characters defines them as a person and tells you everything you need to know, of course it does.
Imagine walking down the street, meeting an old friend and asking them what they are up to now and they respond with “Google me” or worse still “look at my website” or
they thrust a business card into your hand and you have to look, rather than listen and get to know then. Imagine chatting to another parent at the school
gates and you ask what they do and “read my bio” is the response. Even worse you get chatting in your local pub and ask the person you are talking and
drinking with what they do… and getting “read my bio” as a response.
“Read my bio” is a conversation killer. There is no worse conversation killer than “read my bio”, it’s almost like saying I am too important to bother with you.
BUT…
But people still tweet what they eat, send each other links to describe themselves, start a conversation and gain business from twitter. Being a person works.
I know, I get phonecalls everyday from people who say “how are the kids? how are the dogs? and can you move XYZ for us”. Over the last year we have won
huge amount of business through twitter, and long may it continue. It starts with being a person first and a business second, and that may involve
mentioning food, drink, fun, sharing jokes and participating in the community, sharing the wins and commiserating the losses. But most of all, it involves
being a person.
Sarah Arrow
Sarah is the most followed courier on twitter in the UK, possibly the world. Not a bad achievement for a regional courier with national coverage.

SarahArrow_biggerThe trouble with twitter, a guest post by @Essex_Courier.

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Be our guest – we’re looking for guest bloggers!

Date: 17th December 2009
Comments: 9 Related Categories: Guest Blogs

The guest posts that we publish here on Business on Twitter are among our most visited, and it’s clear that our visitors love to find out more about how YOU use twitter, how YOU make it work for you and the apps and gadgets that YOU find work best.

So we’re looking for guest posters who have thoughts about twitter and would like to see them on this blog.

The guest blogs can be about anything to do with Twitter, and of course can promote your own Twitter account, your website and your courses / books / products / services – as long as they’re educational, informative and useful to our community.

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Tweetminer – A Guest Post By Thomas Clifford

Date: 8th December 2009
No Comments Related Categories: Guest Blogs

This is a guest post from Thomas Clifford of  Tommytrc, who you can follow on twitter at www.twitter.com/tommytrc

TweetMiner is the brain child of Justin Vincent, @justinvincent on Twitter, who started coding TweetMiner to solve a personal problem he had with other clients. No twitter client offered RSS feed integration or user experience like TweetMiner. He saw the way other Twitter clients handled scheduling and thought it was too tedious and said “there has to be a better way!” Justin is coding this all by himself, while other twitter tools have had millions in venture capital, not here! Justin codes TweetMiner in his spare time.

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Retweetize – Retweet and win points!

Date: 8th October 2009
Comments: 2 Related Categories: Twitter Apps

Retweetize

Thanks to Ankesh from Retweetize for sending us this!

How To Get More Traffic From Twitter

Reciprocation is a smart business idea.  You scratch someones back.  And they scratch your back in return.

But up until now, there was no reciprocation tool available that helps you generate traffic via Twitter.  That has changed now because of the launch of the ReTweetize.com website.

ReTweetize is a simple easy to use and a completely free ReTweet exchange application that will help you generate more traffic.

Here is how it works:

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