TwitterWatchDog.com

I mentioned that I would address why you should have a twitter account for your business and it comes as sort of a gift in time for Christmas, especially for those who are first timers to TwitterWatchDog.com. Just to give you a little background on where I live – I live in Centralia, Illinois, which is in southern Illinois, barely within the St. Louis metro east. Centralia is a very small place. It is a city that has a annual Balloon fest that attracts a lot of people from over the region, and a large yearly Halloween parade, much larger than some of the city parades I have seen growing up.

I have the privilege to talk to a lot of small business owners. Centralia is a place where people are still a bit hesitant about the internet, but those in business are contemplating if they need a website. The problem is, a lot of them do not have that much money to fork out for a shiny website made by a big kahuna web design company. I offer my services. I often talk to them about Twitter as I believe any business should plug into the social network.

This is helpful on several levels. If you use Twitter to connect with others, and they find you trustworthy, you build a reputation that is easily searchable. You help your business virtually get on the map, and furthermore, you get your town/city on the map. A lot of smaller cities do have a website, and for places like Centralia, it is great to see business coming in from anywhere. The brilliant part about Twitter is – IT IS FREE!

There are many tools to find people in your general area or even in your niche. You do not necessarily have to have an e-commerce site, but if you have products you like to feature that are unique to your business versus others in your niche, Twitter would be one of the great places to share that information. You never know, you might either make a good transaction over the phone, or actually set up an e-ecommerce site.

Another thing is that you can use Twitter to provide Live Support too. There are several places already that do, like Best Buy’s Twelp Force. Even though they are a larger business, small business can use that as an example to help others.

Going further, Twitter is great for freelancers. Freelancers are small business owners in their own right too. Using Twitter allows them to connect with others in their niche. The number of projects I have paired up with other freelancers who needed my skills are more than I can count, and a lot of them came from connecting with them on Twitter.

There are more reasons, but I thought I would allow some room for conversation. If you are a small business owner, what are your reasons? How have you used Twitter so far for your business?

Follow Nile Flores of Blondish.net on Twitter – @blondishnet.

10 Easy Steps with training videos, live calls and a complete support system to help you succeed faster with Twitter.

On December 8, 2009,Techsmith, developers of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio, released a new version of Jing, a screen casting, screen capture software that works on Mac, Windows XP, and Vista.

In short, Jing is another neat tool, that allows you a fast and easy way to add your screen captures and screen casts to Twitter.  Jing is similar to Screenr that I posted here on Twitterwatchdog several weeks ago.  The following is a summary of some of the features of Jing.

Screen Capture – Capture What You See.

With Jing you can capture any thing on your desktop (image, text, and icon), or just make a video of your desktop.  You can initiate a capture by clicking on the Jing’s “SUN” icon, located on your task bar after installation, or by pressing a hotkey of your choice.

Record What You See and Do on Your Desktop

With Jing you can capture a window, pane, or region to capture or record.  All you have to do is select a window or a region on your desktop and Jing will record up to five minutes of video of everything that appears in the selected area.  You can “point to things with your mouse, scroll, flip through photos, and click around in a website or application” and Jing captures it all. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are a regular Twitter user, then HootSuite is the perfect Professional Twitter application for you.  Some of the basic highlights of HootSuite include the following where you can:

• Create and manage multiple Twitter accounts
• Share your Twittering duties with other trusted users
• Manage your RSS feed directly from HootSuite
• Track how many people have clicked on your links that you have tweeted.
• Pre-schedule your messages or feed to post on your blog or Twitter account
• Use Ping.fm to post to multiple social networking sites at once.

Now, HootSuite has added some new cool feature and expanded the capabilities as listed above.  So, I just wanted to provide you a brief overview of what I just reviewed on the HootSuite website.  Some of these new features as listed include:

• Creating and importing Twitter list
• Linking directly to Facebook and LinkedIn
• Scheduling Facebook and Linkedin status updates

Create and Importing Twitter List

HootSuite now allows you Read the rest of this entry »

- by James Roughton

LinkedIn is implementing something new for those of us who use Twitter. With the new feature you will now be able to tweet your LinkedIn status to your Twitter followers or automatically post your tweets as your LinkedIn status. With the new features you can communicate both ways.

It is easy to add your Twitter account to LinkedIn. All you have to do is go to “Home” and you will see a Twitter symbol below your “Network Updates.” When you link with Twitter, Twitter will ask you to verify your account name and password. And once your account is verified you will be asked how you would like to share your tweets in LinkedIn status. LinkedIn will ask you which Twitter account you would like to share. This is assuming that you have multiple accounts where you will have a drop down menu. You have several options:

• Yes, share all tweets
• Share only tweets that contain #in or #li – See explanation below.
• Or not to share tweets at all

Here is an excerpt from LinkedIn Twitter discussion on Hashtags: “Hashtags (#) are a way to provide additional context for your tweets. Use #in or #li to publish your Twitter updates to your LinkedIn status. Just make “#in” part of your tweet (for example, “Working on a new blog post about design optimization. #in”), and it will be displayed as your LinkedIn status. These can be added to your tweets at any time and will override your sharing settings. If your tweet is personal and you don’t wish to share it with your professional crowd, just exclude #in or #li.”

There is one important thing that you must do to ensure that you can send tweets from Twitter to LinkedIn. You must check your Twitter account to make sure that it set up as public. To do this log into your Twitter account and go to Twitter settings and make sure that the “Protect my tweets” box is not checked.

In a statement from LinkedIn Co-founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone, they conclude that their sites go together like “chocolate and peanut butter.”

This is great new enhancement!

Do you use LinkedIn and/or Twitter for Business?
(please share your insights with us)

You can follow me on Twitter @ jamesroughton or safeday or my website.

Watching out for you, one tweet at a time -TwitterWatchDog

Get instant Twitter Watchdog Secrets, Tips and Tools that will help maximize both your personal and professional Twitter experience. Just enter your name and email address now.

-by James Roughton

Tweetburner

How would you like to track your posts?  Then you may want to look at Tweetburner.  Tweetburner allows you to post directly to your Twitter account from your web browser.  The nice thing about this site is that it will shorten, share, and track your posting to Twitter.

To get started, all you have to do is create a FREE account.  Once you are registered you will see a button on the Front Page, called a bookmarklet, that you can drag to your toolbar.  Once you have this bookmarklet on you toolbar, you will be able to post a customized message and then link any site that you wish to share. Tweetburner calls this post “Twurl this.”

On your Front Page you have the following options:

• Recently shared Links
• Most popular Twurls in the last hour
• Top 10 URLs with most clicks in the last hour

Across the top primary links you will see menus items for:

• Your stats
• Archive
• Settings
• Sign out

For those who post to FriendFeed, there is also support.  You can post to either Twitter or FriendFeed or to both at the same time.

I hope that you find this site useful.

You can follow me on Twitter @ jamesroughton or safeday or visit my website

Watching out for you, one tweet at a time -TwitterWatchDog

Get instant Twitter Watchdog Secrets, Tips and Tools that will help maximize both your personal and professional Twitter experience. Just enter your name and email address now.

- Reporting by David Lawsky; editing by Carol Bishopric

LinkedIn And Twitter Link Up

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – LinkedIn and Twitter have linked up. Starting immediately, users of LinkedIn and Twitter can cross-file to each other’s services, by checking a box on either Twitter or LinkedIn.

Read the rest of this entry »