Used correctly, Twitter can become an integral part of your projects from client screening to web site integration to ongoing client education and interaction. In this post I will step through some ideas on integrating Twitter with your projects and clients before, during and after the project process.

Read the rest at TwiTip!

The goal is to attract “fans” to your page so that you can amass a virtual following of sorts. This enables you to keep a close level of connection with people interested in your cause, and to see what those people are like. It’s great for connecting with clients, prospects, partners, users and other parties who might interact with your brand.

As a regular Facebook user, I’ve noticed four primary reasons why people become fans. I’ve highlighted some ways you might be able to take advantage of those reasons if you’re thinking about building a fan page.

Reason One: They’re obligated

Ok, no one is obligated to do anything when it comes to Facebook, but your “real” friends and family will look pretty bad if they don’t become a fan of your cause. This is the easiest group to attract to your page because they know you personally. In fact, you should start calling out to this group first as it will allow you to build a base of fans. Once you have the base built, you’ll experience a bit of a snowball effect as people you don’t know as well might start jumping on the bandwagon. The cool thing with Facebook is that users can see what other users are doing including what they’re becoming fans of.

How you can use this

Once you setup your fan page, send out a quick invite to all the people you know. I guarantee within a few hours, you’ll have a core following of your closest friends and family. Next, get people you know from local groups such as the Chamber of Commerce to become friends. This will have a rippling effect that’ll help build a strong base of fans.

Reason Two: They connect with everything

There are people who become fans of anything and everything they have encountered or think they want to encounter. They’ll become a fan of the restaurant they’re thinking about going to, their hometown, other towns they think are cool, things that they think reflect their personality and so forth. Some people do this because they are really connected while others just want to show off. Some of these people are also experimenters and connectors, and can help you spread your message.

How you can use this

Be there. Make your presence known on Facebook. But most importantly, provide superb service. The combination of those two factors will guarantee fandom from this group of users. The next step is to identify the connectors within your Facebook network. These are the people with hundreds of friends on their account. By giving them the channel along with good service, they’ll tune in. It’s also a great idea to connect your offline and online presences. For instance, if you deal with many people face to face or via email, let them know that you’re on Facebook. If they’re a connector or experimenter, they might just become a fan of your page.

Reason Three: They believe in the cause

Many people have genuine beliefs in a cause and are interested in staying informed. Facebook pages provide one outlet for staying up-to-date. Users will become a fan to receive new postings, videos, photos and other updates. This is also a great opening for interacting directly with users as they are the most engaged group.

How you can use this

Maintain an active fan page. Post enough updates to keep people coming but not so much that you look like a can of spam. Post interesting things, too. Videos and photos are among the most engaging pieces of content. You can also link over to your blog or podcast. The key is to provide a rich content stream that your most avid followers will want to consume and recommend.

Reason Four: There’s an incentive

Many of the big companies like Papa John’s provide users with an incentive for becoming a fan. Whether it’s a free pizza or some sort of prize, people always flock toward the chance of winning something. This is a great way to build up your Facebook fandom, especially if you can do it in a way that’s viral (e.g. posting a funny video that starts off your contest). The unfortunate downside is that you’ll gain a lot of “cheap” fans. They’re disposable and only come to you for the prize. The upside is that you do have a small amount of time to win that user over via rich content and updates.

How you can use this

Launch a promotion for people to become fans of your page. Everyone should get an incentive and it should be something pretty good (I’d say at least $5 to $10 in value but that’s completely arbitrary). That’s the easy part. The hard part is to then engage these users. Once you get them as a fan, give them more than their carrot; feed them rich and interesting content about your organization and industry. The incentive is just the hook.

This is by no means a conclusive list, but it should provide you with some of the basic reasoning I’ve discovered in why people fan things. Maybe you’ve noticed other reasons. Feel free to share in the comments section!

Facebook is a powerful tool. No other tool in the history of human social behavior has been able to give people the mass level of connectedness that Facebook has. You can locate pretty much anyone on the network these days. Hell, both my mom and dad are on Facebook.

You can also find clients on Facebook.

Many people, especially those who lead a nightlife of questionable character, might find this concerning. Facebook is a tool for connecting with friends, not clients, right?

Wrong. Once you get over the realization that Facebook should not be your private getaway from professional interactions, you’ll extract much more power from it.

About 15 or 20% of my friends on the social networking giant have done business with me. That means these people who have paid for my services can access a piece of my personal life that was once inaccessible or hard to find out. Sounds strange? Sure, but building good client relations is all about sharing a little of yourself. Facebook just makes it easier.

Facebook has also made it easier to control who can see certain portions of your profile. Maybe you don’t want clients to see you drinking your favorite alcoholic beverage from a shoe. Privacy options can help you turn that capability off.

However, my rule of thumb with Facebook is that if I’m posting something that makes me think twice, I won’t post it at all. Facebook sometimes makes it too easy to embarrass yourself. Most of my clients have fairly unlimited access to my profile (ok, they don’t need to know my relationship status) and I intend on keeping it that way. If a client wants to learn more about me, excellent. It will only strengthen our ties.

Facebook also gives you the opportunity to interact with a client on a different level. You can post to their wall on their birthday, send them a thank you message, share a link and just generally be their friend. I think that’s pretty good for business.

Now, during this writing I did not mention fan pages. I’m only speaking of your individual profile. Fan pages are great tools for companies that want to have a presence on Facebook. That’s a fact. But compared to your own personal profile I find them to be impersonal, too restrained and sometimes really boring. People want to be friends with you, not your company (hence the “fan” terminology which is a weaker relationship).

If up to this point you haven’t used Facebook to connect with clients, maybe now is the time to reconsider. Streamline your profile in preparation for making these connections and start reaching out. Some clients may actively friend request you, or if you bump into a client in person (imagine that), you can mention Facebook during the conversation. At least spend a little time researching to see if your clients are on Facebook, and if they have an open profile, see what they’re like.

I close this article with a few Facebook hints and tips:

• Prepare your Facebook profile to start handling client friends. That means you may want to remove any lewd photos or comments. Why keep those anyway?
• De-friend any odd connections you have. Who knows, that weirdo whose friend request you stupidly accepted may start posting strange voodoo spells on your wall.
• Remove or hide your political stuff.
• For the love of pie, do not post obnoxious, trivial or flat-out weird status updates. At all.
• Don’t post status updates every 10 minutes. You’re not that cool.
• Monitor with extreme enthusiasm anyone who posts responses to your status updates or posted items. I’ve seen some really disturbing responses posted to other people’s items. Respond to or remove that stuff.
• Do not ever, I repeat, ever complain about any clients or business-related items.
• Do not setup a separate business profile on Facebook. Don’t be lazy.
• Do not let clients see photos of what other people have tagged you in. Ever. I once had a client’s ass tagged and it showed up in my news feed.
• Do add your web site links, RSS feeds, business information and other useful stuff to your profile.
• Do not become a spammer and post business offers or hassle clients.
• Definitely do not mention any business-related issues to specific clients via Facebook unless they bring it up first. If they do, suggest you move the conversation off of Facebook. I remember one person used someone’s wall to setup a business meeting. Not very professional.
• Do create an album of your community work or photos of you doing charitable work. People love people who help others out.
• Lastly, maintain your profile. Don’t become a ghost or a lurker. Engage and interact.

When someone types your name into Google, what do they find? Unfortunately, if your name is John Smith or Jane Doe, you’re pretty much out of luck. But if your name is a little less common, do you appear in the search results? Do you dominate the results?

If not, you could run into a branding problem. Branding is something you want to control. When someone searches for you, you need to come up first — and you need to come up in a result that you control.

Personal branding is something I’ve been working on. Here are my Google search results as of today:

Not awesome, but not bad either. I’d really like to get that top spot.

How do you go about securing your personal brand? Here are a few ways:

• Setup a Facebook account and don’t let it sit dormant.
• Setup a LinkedIn account and use it.
• Setup a Twitter account with your name as the username. Don’t let the account sit dry.
• Get on Flickr (something I’ve neglected since I’m camera shy).
• Set up a Google Profile (that’s my last result in the image above). Remember to use your name in the URL.
• Setup an Amazon account and review things.
• Establish your own personal web site. Get www.myname.com if you can.
• Do basic search engine optimization on your personal web site. Build it up and get people to link to it. That will help boost your rankings in search engines (that’s why my Bubble Frames entry appears in the results — it was linked to from another site).
• Be the first to setup accounts at new social networking sites. Secure your name.

Those are some basic tips to get you started. The hard part is maintaining your brand. Keep your social networking profiles and personal web site constantly active.

The reason is because Facebook is a closed social network. Both you and the other party must agree to be "friends" in order to exist in the same social network.

From a company’s standpoint, you just can’t gain access to a prospect’s social network. They don’t know you and they don’t have any reason to allow your interaction into their network.

So, for prospecting, Facebook is tough. You can advertise, of course, but I expect that to produce dismal results. No — the real power in Facebook is building brand loyalty. It’s seeking out your clients and inviting them to become a fan of your company or organization.

This is powerful for a number of reasons:

• If your clients love your company, they’ll become a fan. That’s a good measure of success.
• You can reach out to more than just clients — build your brand in front of partners, vendors and other people within your own personal network. Extend your relationships.
• As fans, clients get a view of your company from a less corporate spotlight. This is huge in strengthening relationships.
• People like buying from people they can trust.
• You have an instant audience for anything you want to share.
• You have the ability to gather instant feedback on what you share.

In the end, companies on Facebook should strive to become friends with their clients. If you treat Facebook as another means to get meaningless offers or junk in front of people, you’re finished. That’s not the point of Facebook.

Don’t sell. Build relationships.

Wrong.

Too many people view social media as an end-all solution for pushing their web presence to the next level. They think if they establish a Facebook account or sign up for Twitter then they’re good to go. People will find my organization, become a fan and follow everything I say — right?

The disconnect with social media is that it’s very audience-driven. Specific people use specific channels for specific reasons. That isn’t hard to figure out. What is hard to figure out is what your audience uses. Is your target market comprised of the old or young, tech savvy or computer illiterate, decision-makers or underlings, and so forth.

Knowing who your audience is and what they read is essential to crafting a social media strategy. When talking with my client, she suddenly realized that their audience probably doesn’t use Facebook. Ok. Then what kind of content do they consume?

We came to the conclusion that her audience was resource-driven. They want to read, research and learn about the industry. What are some of the best vehicles to get this content out? We talked about blogs, press releases and video.

Social media isn’t all about the tools. And Facebook, Twitter and blogs are just that: tools. The real challenge is picking the right tool for the job and using it correctly.