Blasting out a flurry of tweets listing your products for sale isn’t going to do much to grow your business but if you implement the 5 tips below, I think you will soon see an increase in followers, customers and sales.

1. Work At Building Relationships

Perhaps the smartest thing you can do with Twitter is using it to build relationships of people in your niche. You want to build relationships with people that are leaders in your industry as well as people that could be your potential customers. Paying attention to the tweets from the leaders in your industry will give you great insight as to the latest news and may also give you some good ideas of things to implement in your own business.

Taking the time to build relationships with your followers, can add a personal touch that your customers or potential customers will really appreciate. This is important in the online world because you often don’t have face-to-face contact with your customers especially if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store that they can come to in person.

You’ve probably heard that people buy from those whom they like, know and trust and taking the time to build a relationship is the 1st step in getting people to like, know and trust you.

2. Spend Time Each Day Managing Your Twitter Activity

It’s important to set aside time every day for managing your Twitter activity. You want to be finding good things to tweet about as well as watching your twitter feed to see what the people you are following are tweeting about. You also want to spend this time building relationships by retweeting other interesting tweets and having “conversations” with other people on twitter by using the @reply feature.

The key is that you need to be present on twitter and active in the community in order for people to remain interested in following you. You also want to be thoughtful about how you do this, don’t just blast out a bunch of tweets just to say you did. Take the time to tweet and retweet quality content and join in on conversations that are relevant to your niche and knowledge.

3. Send The Right Kinds Of Tweets

What you tweet is crucial to keeping your followers interested and engaged. You want to be sure to tweet stuff that is relevant to your niche with maybe a few personal things thrown in. Don’t go overboard and tweet about what you are doing every hour but if something interesting happens during the day in your personal life it can be good to tweet this as it lets your followers get to know you. That being said, you don’t want to make personal tweets the focus of your twitter campaign.

Some things you might consider tweeting about include industry news, milestones that you’ve met in your business, links to your latest informative blog posts, other blog posts and articles that you’ve stumbled across that you think your followers might benefit from, quotes, funny and entertaining things you found during your travels through the web.

4. Have A “Twitter Mindset”

When you first start using Twitter, you might be hard-pressed to find things to tweet about but if you develop what I call a “Twitter mindset” you will soon have more than enough content for your tweets.

What is a twitter mindset?

It simply means, thinking about twitter as you go about your daily business. You probably read a lot of articles and visit a lot of websites during your workday and if you simply evaluating each of these to see if it is something worth tweeting, you will have more than enough interesting and informative links to tweet about. It takes a little bit of practice, but after a while you find that you are automatically thinking “Oh, I should tweet this” when you come across content that you find is interesting and useful.

5. Think Less About Selling and More About Socializing

A lot of people look at their web activities to figure out how they can leverage the activity to sell more stuff. But with Twitter, this is totally the wrong mindset to have. Twitter is a social networking platform and you must use it socially in order for it to be effective. When you are on Twitter, think more about how you can connect with more people and what you can do to help them instead of how it can benefit you financially and you will get a lot better results.

Twitter can be a great platform to grow your business and increase your bottom line, but you do need to use it in the proper way. You want to treat twitter the same as you might treat a networking or social meeting in real life and use it for the contacts and relationships that you can build. If you do this the right way, the money will follow.

Guest author Lee Dobbins is a full time internet marketer that specializes in website development and promotion. Visit her site Website Promotion Blueprint to find out more about the different website promotion methods that are effective today.

• 5 Quick Tips For Local Business Owners
• How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business
• 8 Killer Tips to Get Quality Twitter Followers
• How to Create a Twitter Bird with Twitter Followers [Video]
• Twitter Instant: Fastest Twitter Search
• Is MORE Competition Better For Your Online Business?

Erik Qualman from Socialnomics has a deep understanding of this social media change and has created some amazing videos which highlight the ongoing social media revolution. Embedded below is the latest social media video from the 3 part series.

Video below was the second video of the series in 2010.

And below was the social media revolution in 2009.

Social media is changing the way we live. Have you embraced Facebook, Twitter, Google into your life…

• Using Social Media for Better Customer Management
• How to Secure Your First Social Media Consulting Gig
• 6 Reasons Why Social Media Trumps SEO
• How to Influence Social Media Influencers
• 5 Steps To Maximize Your Social Media Results
• 5 Revolutionary Social Media Tools for NonProfits

I was trying to access Facebook at a friend’s computer, and as I browsed to the website, I got this alert and Facebook was blocked.

I tried Twitter.com and same for Twitter! Same for email… my entire social interaction was blocked.

My friend chuckled and informed that he had manually blocked social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and all his email accounts so that he could concentrate on his work productivity and not waste time. The blocked urls were released after a few hours (as per his settings) when he was relaxed and free to interact on these sites.

I really like the idea. How many times do we get started to work, and get hooked to chat or Facebook on the way.

How to Block Facebook, Twitter, Email

I hope you are using the Google Chrome browser (its the best out there), and install the Website Blocker extension. Edit some settings and you can block any website for as many hours as you want.

Choose the settings wisely and the extension provides a simple interface to  block websites, as many as you want and at custom times you want. You can also type an optional message.

For example, this code will block access to Facebook.com urls from 0900 to 1700 (9am-5 pm). I have been trying this for a few days and I assure you it is worth your time to use this – and get on Facebook, Twitter and email when you really want to.

How to Block Any Website for Employees / Users

This extension works well if you want to prevent access of social media sites by your employees. Simply block the sites during working hours and they will never know how to access them.

1. Hide the Website Blocker icon from the Chrome toolbar. Right click the icon and click “Hide button”

2. Disable the link from showing in the block message alert which can guide people to disable the options. Also disable the ability to edit settings from the popup alert options

Unless people really know how to browse around into Chrome settings, identify the website blocker, experiment with its settings and disable it –  it should work to block websites for most people. Just keep Chrome as default and only browser on the computer.

• How to Block Foursquare, Paper.li Tweets in Twitter Timeline
• 7 Steps to Improve Your Facebook EdgeRank and Dominate Facebook
• Buy Facebook Phones with Dedicated Facebook Buttons [Videos]
• How to Create a Twitter Bird with Twitter Followers [Video]
• How to Automatically Empty WordPress Trash Daily
• Facebook Marketing: How to Build Your List Using Facebook

Twitter Adsense Ads

Here is what the Twitter ad on Google Adsense looked like

Upon loading, the ad autorefreshed showing the latest tweets of the Twitter account for around 7 times. The cursor shows that you could click the arrows and this will bring you to the new tweet. It seems clicks to these arrows will not be charged to the advertiser as you are browsing the tweets. Click the arrow and get a new tweet.

The image, tweet link and “Follow Me on Twitter” seem to be clickable as observed by change of cursor image (we didnt click at it though). The call of action is clearly very good, and I am sure it will attract a high CTR. I like the Twitter Adsense units. Have you seen such Twitter Adsense units on your site?

We have spotted several strange Adsense ads over the years like ads with 2×2 ads, favicons, no titles, titles in italics and no Ads by Google and interactive keywords. Lets see how this will work out.

Update: @blogsdna tweets that he has spotted such ad units before and “specifically only Windows 7 Twitter account is advertised that way”.

• Google Adsense Sent Free Google +1 Stickers
• My Biggest Mistake with Google AdSense
• How My Google AdSense Hold Got Removed
• Google Sent a Free AdSense Sticker!
• Google Adsense Enlarges First Ad for More Clicks

You can use TwitFooter to show your company’s latest news and to attract new followers. You can track the number of clicks per tweet also.

Twitfooter works with popular email services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, Entourage, etc.. Visit TwitFooter, click “Sign in with twitter”, allow TwitFooter to connect to your twitter using Oauth (so no fear of losing your password) and then Twitter redirects you to Twitfooter page.

This page shows your twitter account’s footer, click “Show Latest tweet” under Setup and copy the code shown on the page and paste in email signature option. Here TwitFooter generating image for your latest tweet. Twitfooter currently supports Firefox and Google Chrome browsers only.

Guest author Venkat is founder and owner of Techdows, Technology blogs covers Tips and Tricks, Tech News, Web Apps, Free Apps, Troubleshooting and much more. You can follow him on Twitter at @techvenkat

• Watch Latest Full HD Bollywood Movies Free on Youtube Box Office
• Free Latest Hindi Bollywood Movies Online at Yahoo! Movieplex
• 50 Million Tweets – What’s Next For Twitter?
• 6 Secrets to Make Money with Sponsored Tweets
• How to Block Foursquare, Paper.li Tweets in Twitter Timeline

Then, you began to ask yourself, what’s the point in sending out short tweets and nothing else after that? Boring, isn’t it? Well, I searched the internet and found out that there are better ways of enjoying your twitter experience, such as getting a job, playing, games, posting videos, raising money and building applications.

Read on to discover 11 exciting ways to utilize twitter for real-time results.

1. Capturing & sharing screenshots of your website on twitter: If you want to take screenshots of your website or blog to share with friends on twitter, tweeshot is a perfect tool to accomplish the task for you.
2. Sharing pictures on twitter: You can post pictures on twitter to share amongst your followers using twitpic.com. Iphone users can use instagr.am share photos as well.
3. Raising money for a cause: Are you trying to save the world? You can raise money for a cause using twitpay, a social media payments system for raising money from twitter users via paypal.
4. Making money tweeting other people’s stuff: You can join the a-list of celebrities such as snoop dogg, kim kardashian, and lindsay lohan in making money on twitter. How? Simply sign up on ad.ly and mylikes.com to start promoting other people’s stuff. However, ad.ly requires you to have up to 5,000 followers to be considered for huge advertising deals.
5. Advertising on twitter: If you want to spread your brand’s presence online, you can do that quickly and easily on twitter for a small fee. Simply sign up on any one of these sites (ad.ly and mylikes.com) to start advertising your products and services for as low as $20 per weekly budget.
6. Landing your dream job: Are you in the market for a job? Well, you can use twitjobsearch to land your dream job.
7. Building apps: Are you a developer? You can easily develop apps on twitter, just like those on facebook and myspace. Simply visit dev.twitter.com and create your cool apps to integrate on twitter.
8. Tracking your brand’s #hashtags: Hashtags make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. To track your favourite hashtags, simply use twitter search or tweetgrid to perform real-time twitter searches.
9. Playing online games: You can also play games on twitter such as: spymaster, tweefight, 140mafia.
10. Adding more followers on autopilot: If you want more followers on twitter on autopilot, there’s a simple way to do it. Here comes hitfollow. This site allows you to build your followership up to 3,000 on autopilot, for a small fee of $65. There’s also the free version, which gives you up to 100 followers in seconds.
11. Managing your twitter account: Manageflitter is a site I recommend for managing your twitter account. On this site, you can choose to either clean up or manage who you follow, find out who isn’t following you back, and find out which inactive accounts you follow. Another interesting site is twunfollow.com which gives you daily updates of people who stopped following you on twitter.

Did I leave out your favorite twitter tool from the above-named list? Please share it with us! Happy tweeting!

Guest author Caroline Wabara is the blogtress behind  carolinewabara.com where she writes articles on Internet Marketing, Life and Business Coaching. Sign up today for her Free 30-day eCourse to help get you get started with your own online/offline business success strategies.

• 10 Surefire Ways to Get More Twitter Followers
• The Real Truth About Driving Traffic
• Facebook in Real Life [Video]
• How to Create a Twitter Bird with Twitter Followers [Video]
• $35 India Tablet (Laptop) is Real [Video]
• Real Angry Birds Catapult Toy [Video]

It is not possible for us to ask all foursquare users we are following to turn off sending every check-in to Facebook and twitter. Paper.li updates on twitter also contributes to your anger, but here is how to block foursquare and Paper.li tweets in your timeline.

Block foursquare and Paper.li tweets

Install the Proxlet Chrome extension which works with Web Twitter. Proxlet allows you to mute users, filter or block tweets. We’re using Proxlet to block Foursquare and paper.li tweets.

Install Proxlet extension for Chrome and search for “4sq.com” in twitter search box. Foursquare tweets are shown by twitter, then click “Proxlet” button and click blockapp foursquare – that’s it and the annoying foursquare tweets will never appear in your timeline again from on. Do same for Paper.li also.

Another Twitter tool, Slipstream also allows to hide and filter tweets. Slipstream available for Chrome as an extension. Install Slipstream for Chrome and search for “4sq.com” tweets from the search box, then select a tweet, click “Hide” button below the tweet and modify the tweet to http://4sq.com and choose to block foursquare tweets in every timeline or home timeline. Then click “Hide” and the filter will be created – Foursquare tweets won’t appear from now on.

Remember both Proxlet and Slipstream works for New Twitter only.

Venkat is founder and owner of Techdows, a technology blog that covers posts on tips and tricks, tech news, web apps, free apps, and you can follow him on twitter @techvenkat

• How to Block Facebook, Twitter, Email for Few Hours Daily
• 50 Million Tweets – What’s Next For Twitter?
• 6 Secrets to Make Money with Sponsored Tweets
• How to Display Latest Tweets in Your Email Signature
• How to Activate Facebook Timeline Now
• 5 Tips to Get Started With Facebook Timeline

The days of the average donor mailing a check or the typical volunteer researching opportunities at a state agency are, largely, coming to an end. The Internet, in particular social media, offers more direct and powerful ways to achieve all of the same goals.

However, it is also a new era for corporate/non-profit partnerships. It is a time seeing more and more companies, who are often developing products and services for individuals or other corporations, retooling their efforts to enable non-profits to achieve their goals faster and easier than ever.

This has given birth to a wide array of tools unlike anything nonprofits have had before. It’s given smaller organizations the chance to reach audiences larger than even the biggest groups could have before and it’s created fundraising and volunteer opportunities, without cost, that would not have been possible just a few years before.

Though the Internet is moving fast in this area and new opportunities are being created every day, here are six of the more revolutionary and important tools out there today. While not every tool may be right for your organization, these are some of the tools all nonprofits need to be aware.

RT2Give

Within hours of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the Red Cross set up a donate via text system that let users donate $10 simply by sending a text message. The tool raised over $5 million in the first week alone. Unfortunately, most nonprofits don’t have the the resources to set up a campaign like that so quickly to respond to their emergencies and immediate needs.
However, RT2Give, the non-profit arm of TwitPay, offers a very simple way to organize a similar campaign using Twitter.

The way it works is that your organization puts out a call to action via Twitter, asking users to retweet (RT) the tweet to donate a certain amount of money. Those who do are then asked to confirm their donation and then, when they do, the money is transferred. Since the retweets are shown in the user’s Twitter streams, this gives the chance for the action to go truly viral and spread from person to person as they each give the desired amount.

The only caveat is that it requires donors to be a member of RT2Give, which only has a few hundred members are at this time. However, as the service grows, it may become a much more powerful way to solicit donations quickly using the power of Twitter.

Connect to Charity

Connect to Charity attempts to solve several of the most difficult problems for someone eager to donate or volunteer for a charity.

First, the site makes it easy to search for relevant charities, letting users locate nonprofits by location, cause and other information. Second, through a partnership with Guidestar, Connect to Charity makes it simple to research a charity and make sure they are legitimate. Finally, it lets users make donations or share links to the Charity’s information, all without leaving the site.

Users can also rate charities, write reviews and link causes to various charities. Connect to Charity also offers a customized Facebook app that lets users promote their favorite charities direct to their friends and promote their personal causes.

Nonprofits can use Connect to Charity’s tools to promote their causes and help spread information about what they are doing via Facebook. It’s also a great place to encourage others to review your organization’s efforts to entice future donations. It is also a powerful tool to research and connect with other, related charities, including those that might be in other areas or in similar fields.

Jumo

Though Jumo may not be the first tool for nonprofits to use Facebook as its center, Jumo doesn’t merely aim to help spread information or encourage donations over the social network. Instead, it aims to create a social network within Facebook targeted at nonprofits, those who work for them and those who wish to support them.

By creating a profile using their Facbeook account, users can seek out relevant organizations to follow, other users who share common interests and get updates on news that might interest them. In short, it is a way for users to connect with charities the way they already connect with their friends.

Any and all non-profits are eligible to set up an account with Jumo, thus creating a new way to both connect with those who support your organization’s goal and attract new individuals to their cause who might not otherwise find out about them.

Crowdrise

One of the more powerful tools that businesses have used social media to exploit has been game theory. Sites such as Foursquare and Waze have gotten others to do everything from visit bustling stores to drive down lonely roads all to earn points and prizes.

Non-profits can register as charities with Crowdrise and then create “projects” for specific needs or events. They are then encouraged to use other social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to get the word out.

Crowdrise lets charities take advantage of the game theory trend by trying to make donating fun. Donors earn points for their generosity, are entered into contests and are encouraged to spread the word to receive more points. Users earn points every time they give, prompt others to donate, or get votes, encouraging greater community interaction.

Best of all, projects on Crowdrise don’t have to be solely about receiving donations, but can also be aimed at getting volunteers, making it a good fit for almost any nonprofit.

Causes

The “big idea” behind Causes is that anyone should be able to create a change for the better and Causes does this by allowing users to create “Causes” and attempt to rally support via Facebook. According to the site, all Causes have the same playing field, whether a multinational non-profit launching a major campaign or an individual wanting to renovate a small park, and they live or die based on their leadership and support, not their financing.

As a Facebook app, it has a great deal of viral potential and it allows nonprofits to connect with other organizations, known as affiliates, and then send messages to their members as well. As Causes, no matter who they are created by, gain momentum, its users can solicit donations, pass around petitions or organize users via bulletins and memos sent both via Facebook and email.

Members within a Cause can take initiative and post bulletins and attract new support for it, enabling anyone to become a critical member of a Cause, though only those approved by the Cause creators are able to become administrators and send out bulletins or take official action.

Bottom Line

Turning the social Web into a promotion tool is still something that’s being explored and driven by businesses. But as they develop techniques and methods that work well, nonprofits have been quick to line up and apply the same techniques.

The social Web provides opportunities never seen before in the field of marketing and promotion and that goes for all organizations that need public attention, not just charities. However, given the way charities build upon communities and grassroots efforts, it is a much more natural fit for nonprofits than most businesses.

So even though businesses may be pioneering promotion on the social Web, it’s charities that may reap the greatest rewards, in terms of dollars collected, awareness grown and change affected.

Guest author Lior is a marketing consultant for iAdvize, a live chat support software company. You can also write guest posts here.

• How to Use Forums as Social Media Marketing Tools
• How to Find Different People Online Using Social Media Tools
• Using Social Media for Better Customer Management
• How to Secure Your First Social Media Consulting Gig
• 6 Reasons Why Social Media Trumps SEO
• How to Influence Social Media Influencers

How is social media affecting you life? Are you addicted to Twitter?

• Using Social Media for Better Customer Management
• How to Secure Your First Social Media Consulting Gig
• 6 Reasons Why Social Media Trumps SEO
• How to Influence Social Media Influencers
• 5 Steps To Maximize Your Social Media Results
• 5 Revolutionary Social Media Tools for NonProfits

• Only 29% of all tweets produced a reply or a retweet. Of this, 19.3% were retweets and the rest replies.
• 92.4% of all retweets happen within the first hour of original tweet, 1.63% of retweets happen in second hour, and 0.94% in third hour. This means that if a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is very likely that it will not be retweeted.
• 96.9% of @ replies happen within the first hour of original tweet, 0.88% of replies in second hour.

So if your tweet lives for such a short time span, you much choose the right time to tweet, when most of your followers are online and logged in to Twitter.  Some people like to post the same tweet several times a day to catch different time zones and get more retweets.

• Best 24 Hour Deal: Buy Amazon Kindle on Woot for $150
• Earth Hour 2011 Today: Turn Off Your Lights
• Earth Hour 2010: Turn Off Lights on March 27 at 8:30pm