Micro-blogging Tips

Micro-blogging has hit mainstream, but not everyone has adapted to it. For example, Twitter only allows you to “tweet”, or message,  up to 140 characters. This isn’t much room to tell the world about your recent adventure to Las Vegas or the new product your company is about to introduce. For those of you are are used to article writing or blogging this is a significant change.

With a few tips and a little practice, you can meet the the challenge of getting a message across is such a small amount of characters. Here are a couple of tips to fit your “tweet” into 140 characters:

• User characters. You should start using “&” for the word “and”, # for number or %, or use = creatively.
• Contractions are your friend! Instead of using “it is”, use “it’s”, or “will not” use “won’t”.
• Shorten your URL’s. A long URL can use up far too many precious characters. Use websites like http://bit.ly/ to shorten your URLs.
• Only when absolutely necessary use common texting abbreviations. Use “2″ instead of “to”, or “brb” for “be right back”.  Be warned! These work, but look very unprofessional.

What other tips do you have for getting your message out to the world in under 140 characters? Post them below and happy “tweeting”!

Small Business Strategies for Facebook

Even if you don’t have the budget to promote a new movie (like Disney does), your small business can benefit from Facebook’s marketing strategies. Use this list of tools and tips to show you how.

1. Networking: Use Facebook as a Marketing Tool: This article focuses on how entrepreneurs can use Facebook as a self-promotion tool and turn social networking into professional networking.
2. Top Five Viral Facebook Techniques: Learn how to make the most of referrals, giveaways and other simple apps with the tips in this article.
3. Web 3.0 Marketing with Facebook: Find out why Facebook is great for small businesses wanting to tap into a large, global market.
4. Facebook as a B2B Marketing Tool: This article chronicles how ordinary Facebook users have begun to use the social networking community as a place to self-promote and improve business.
5. Top Ten Ways to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business for Free: If your company doesn’t have a huge marketing budget, don’t worry. This article gives tips on using Facebook’s free features to reach consumers.
6. Entrepreneurs Need Both Facebook and LinkedIn: This article from the Small Business Trends website details why entrepreneurs should take advantage of the many self-promotion and networking opportunities that Facebook offers its members.
7. Time for Facebook?: This author tries to figure out why Facebook, not just e-mail, is a useful tool for keeping contacts. Readers will also find tips on how to become more savvy at online networking.
8. Make Money with Facebook Applications: Web designers and developers are encouraged to create their own Facebook applications as an on-the-side moneymaking project.
9. Using Facebook for Business: A Real Life Example: The analysis of a real-life Facebook marketing strategy will help other small-business owners determine if a similar technique is right for their company.
10. Facebook Platform: This page includes “everything you need to get started building a Facebook Application.” Ready, set, design!
11. Facebook, a Marketer’s Friend: This article from The Wall Street Journal tracks a small-business owner and her lucrative, profitable adventures with Facebook marketing.
12. Five Ways Small Business Can Benefit from Social Media/Networking Sites: Small-business owners will find ways to use Facebook to meet their unique marketing needs.

Add a form to Facebook

In this post I will show you how to add a custom tab to your Facebook Page using the Facebook Static FBML application.

First, add the Static FBML Application to your page. The Facebook Static FBML application gives you the ability to add advanced functionality to your Facebook Fan Page. This application will add a box to your Page in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customization. Installing the app is easy, but actually getting to the area where you edit can be a little tricky.  When you add the app it will give you choices of which Page or Pages you want to add it to.

Second, create your opt-in tab. After you have added the app, head to your Page and click on “Edit Page”.  Locate FBML in your list of applications and click on the pencil icon to edit. In “Box Title” you can give the tab a name like “Email Signup” or “Newsletter”. In the “FBML” section, simply paste your form code in. You can style your form and imagery to give the Box some look and feel, similar to the car image I added in the example above. One key customization I added to our code was <form method=”post” action=”http://url.com” TARGET=”_blank”> at the end of the url to open a new browser tab or a window so the user doesn’t lose their place on Facebook.

Last, add the new tab to the Facebook navigation. Where it shows “FBML” on the “Add a New Tab” drop down, will be the custom name you gave the new Box.  If you are running out of room with your Tabs, you may need to scoot some things over to give your new Tab some visibility.

This App will also live on your “Boxes” tab in a condensed version, unless you go back to Edit Page > FBML Settings > Application Settings and remove it from the Box and just leave the Tab (which I recommend).

One last thing, if you have trouble getting the Box to appear as some have noted, simply “Add Another Box” and copy the exact same code in.

Enjoy! Please comment if this helped you!

Adding a link to your tweet on Twitter

Twitter allows you to add a website URL (address) up to 40 characters without any problem. For example, if I wanted to tweet “TGIF! Carefreetrip.com is packing and heading out to Las Vegas tomorrow! http://www.carefreetrip.com” this would work just fine. You cannot link text in your tweet, thus you just add the URL and Twitter creates the link for you. If your link is longer than 40 characters, you will need to use a link shortening service like http://bit.ly/ or http://lizzer.com/.  This will allow you to convert those long URL’s into tweet friendly URLs. Happy tweeting!