ForumsAdvertising, Sales and Marketing

I agree. Companies that use social networking solely for marketing purposes are missing the point, and people quickly see through these efforts. The trick, I think, is to find a balance--maybe 25% marketing content and 75% contributing to the online conversation. Companies need to truly value what their customers are saying, or their social media efforts will look shallow and vacant.

We have been tweeting for a month now and as a company we have seen some great results.
I agree you can not just use it to sell items all the time. I agree also that you need to add content that is helpful to others with links.
Many of my clients are following us to see what we are doing and new offerings before we release a newsletter.
Another helpful hint is to add twitter to all your social networks like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and others. You can use Ping.fm to add all these and only have to use Twitter to update everything.

Hi lily89 and welcome to the SBOC!

I agree that Twitter only works within certain industries. It doesnt make much sense for my business unless I'm being followed by my local market.

Here's how I see Twitter...its an extension of a company's brand. Think of your online marketing presence as a big octopus. Your main website should be the body of the octopus. Each of its tentacles would represent Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Myspace. All doing the work to pull your audience/customers back to the main body. A company can Tweet about upcoming events, press releases, product launches etc., but ultimately everything should point back to the hub.

I may be wrong but that's just my view

-caffeinated

Since joining twitter several weeks ago...lot's of folks are aware of my services...it's a great way to connect.
Follow Me on twitter.com/lindastrasberg

Well... I run a gamers community website, and it seems for me to use twitter is useful because every time I do something new, I just twitter about it. One way I get a few followers, is when I follow a few people, as a nice gesture, people will usually follow you. Following too many people may be considered spam, so I then stop following people that don't look like they really like games, such as a few people that don't look like they play games. One good following is people that look like they will enjoy your content. If you are a lawyer, follow people following another lawyer, and if you are an artist, find an artist, follow them and their followers, then stop following those you feel don't look interested in your line of work. So far this method has got me a few followers a day.

Good luck!

That is a very good point. Many companies do depend to heavily on social bookmarking and other cheap inefect methods. These methods become inefective only because there is no quality to them and they are shallow and meaning less.

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