Last week Mannix Marketing held a seminar to help local businesses learn how to use Facebook and Twitter to help market online. It was a tremendous event with an outpouring of interest from both large and small businesses from the local area. We were pleased to see the amount of interest exemplified by the audience. The attendees asked a lot of great questions and we tried to capture them all here:

Facebook Questions

• Do you have to have an individual Facebook account to make Facebook business page? (more…)

Today I’d like to talk to you about managing multiple Twitter accounts. Do you own a small business that you want to promote in the social media Twittersphere, but also have your own personal Twitter account where you talk about your aside-from-work hobbies, news stories, etc? Many of us run into this issue where we end up updating one all the time (because we are logged in) while the other gets a little stagnant.

Well, if this is a problem of yours, then your life is about to get a little easier! I recommend HootSuite for those managing multiple twitter accounts. It’s what I, personally, use now for managing my own personal Twitter account as well as all of our Mannix Marketing Twitter accounts for Saratoga, Lake George, Albany, the Adirondacks, etc. (I switched from Tweetlater after just one day of using Hootsuite!)

HootSuite has been more than a timesaver; it has been a lifesaver for me! It’s a fun, cute design, and it makes things incredibly easy….

- Hootsuite Screenshot -

The above is called your 'Hootsuite Dashboard'

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By now you have been told countless times that you need to have your business on Facebook and Twitter. That’s where the people are. And maybe you have been told that pages and entries on social community sites have slowly crawled into listings on search engine results pages.

And maybe you have put off signing up for an account, or building a fan base, because you were ‘waiting to see what happens.’ Well, it just happened.

Both Google and Microsoft have recently come to agreements with Twitter, while Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook as well (you know Google can’t be too far behind there). These agreements will allow the search engines to integrate updates on the social media sites right onto the SERPs.

You can read more about these deals here.

So what does this mean for you? If you have been at the forefront of social media, and have accounts on Twitter and Facebook with lots of fans and followers, then you are in a good position to gain more exposure (and hopefully traffic) from these deals.

If you have accounts but have not kept them up to date, or if you don’t have any accounts at all, there’s still time but you have some work ahead of you. These deals are about real-time search, so it’s not necessarily what you have done in the past that will count (although having more fans and followers will probably be a plus, so you’ll want to increase those numbers). You can position yourself for real-time search by:

• Opening or updating your account
• Building up more fans or followers
• Starting conversations on current topics
• Respond to comments and other posts on topics you are an expert in

So what type of situation are you in? Are you ready to take advantage of real-time search?

With the onset of real time tweets via the giant communication hub, Twitter, comes various creations of real time search engines. Welcome Twazzup - a funny name, a cool engine. The race is clearly on among what is yet to be pegged as the next best “Twitter Search Engine”.

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If you like using Twitter for business, you are going to love TweetLater. It’s a great way to manage multiple accounts and tweet on your schedule, while making it look like you are sporadically on Twitter throughout the day – or week. Let me explain…

What is TweetLater?
TweetLater is a 3rd-party social media tool for Twitter that allows you to schedule your tweets in advance. Here’s a look at how it works… For example, right now you want to say, “Good morning everyone!” but an hour from now, you would like to say, “Check out my new blog post! (LINK)” and tomorrow night at exactly 9:23 pm (more…)