Posts Tagged ‘Small Business’
March 24th, 2010 | 
Author: When you set up a Twitter account, you can pick the colors you want for your background and text and sidebars. However, it doesn’t allow for too much creativity. One service that is out there you can use is www.freetwitterdesigner.com. Below is a screenshot of my Twitter account showing the background I created using this service.
When you get to the site, it will prompt you to sign in with Twitter. Once signed in and authenticated, it will take you back to the website. From here, the first screen has you select the canvas you want for your background. Going with the plain white one will allow you to pick a different color if you wish. The next screen gives you all kinds of options to add text, shapes and images. You can also pick the colors for your sidebar, links and text. Play around, drag things around and move them where you want to see them. It shows your Twitter profile in the middle so you get an immediate idea of how this will look.
When you are done, simply click on Generate Image. The image can then be saved, or exported directly to Twitter. It’s easier just to export it directly to Twitter. Once you click the button, that’s it! It’s all taken care of for you. How easy is that!
Posted in 
Tags: 
So, you have created your own Facebook Fan Page and you have people taking a look and hoping to find out more about your business. Give them something to read when the land on your page. Although the wall can be full of great information you have been posting, it could also be full of comments and posts from your fans that you don’t have as much control over. Send them to the info tab instead!
You have four main sections on the info tab. The websites section can hold more than just one url. Put one on each line and add links for Twitter, LinkedIn, Kudzu and anywhere else you would like people to visit. Use the Company Overview, Mission and Products section to add more information and let people know about who you are as a company.
Not sure how to do this? Log into your account and go to your page. Click on the Edit Page link that shows up underneath your page image. From the next page, click on Edit from the Wall settings. From here you can determine default landing page. You can also determine the default view for the wall and which posts will show (only your Page posts, Just Fans, or both Fans and Page posts).
Feel free to share a link to your Facebook Page below. How do you have your Facebook Page set up to encourage peiople to become a fan?
If you have a blog, do you ever feel like you are writing articles and posting them out to the world, and never quite sure if anyone is reading them? Your knowledge is being shared, but it would be nice to know it’s actually being read right? Although there is no fool proof way to know how many people are subscribed to your feed, Feedburner is a great place to start.
Feedburner.com will take you over to Google. They moved over recently and now it’s even easier to manage everything all under one account. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to create an account. If you do have an account, go ahead and log in. You will be prompted to enter in your feed address. Then click the Next button.
The feed can then be named. It will also show you a new feed address. You can modify the url slightly if you want to, to make it more user friendly. Click Next. Then walk through the rest of the screens for more options and information you can set up.
Finally, next time you log in, you can take a look at the statistics for your feed. You can view stats for the current day, past few days, months and so on. You will be able to see how many people on average are viewing your feed.
From the Feedburner website, here is how it defines Subscribers and Reach.
Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.
How is it calculated?
FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.
Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.
What is Reach?
Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.
What does it tell you?
Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.
Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.
Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.
If you are a reader of this blog, you probably know by now that I am a lover of all things Google! There are so many free tools, applications and services they provide that really help out a small business owner. One such tool is the ability to set up a Google Profile. Now, lets say someone meets you at a networking event. Maybe you were out of cards (heaven forbid! 
) or some how the contact loses your business card. He might just remember your name though. So, if he goes out to Google and types in your name, do you think he could find you? If your company name is the same as your personal name, then he might be in luck. However, if like me, the company name is different, it could be a needle in a haystack, or could it?
If I go out to Google and type in “Megan Walker” (my own name), here is what comes up:
Forget about the search results for websites, there is also a section near the bottom that will highlight profiles. So, if the person I met doesn’t remember my company name, but remembered my own name, he can easily get to me that way. Below is how my profile will look to someone searching online. Notice on the right I have many different links set up. All of them will lead back to Purple Star Consulting, in various different ways.
If you don’t already have a profile, you can simply click here: www.google.com/profiles Setting up a profile is easy. You can choose how much information to share, upload a photograph, add links and more. Try to keep things consistent. If you use a photograph of yourself for your Twitter or Facebook account, use the same one here for easy recognition. Add links to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, your website and your blog page in particular.
Have fun, and get to it! Feel free to share your new profile link below. Mine is www.google.com/profiles/purplestarconsulting
On easy (and free) way to get people back to your own site is by visiting others. That’s right, spending time reading blog posts by other bloggers can be not only educational, but by posting comments you can show yourself to be knowledgeable. This in turn could find you with more of your own readers who are interested in what you have to say. Have you noticed on some blogs that some commenters have their photograph or an image next to their name? These are known as Avatars (not like the blue creatures on the recent film) and are quick and easy to set up. Go to the Gravatar website at: http://en.gravatar.com/
Gravatars are linked to an e-mail address. This should be the same e-mail address that you will use to post with on others blogs.
You will receive a confirmation e-mail to click on. Once you have done this, you will be able to walk through and select the photograph or image you would like to use.
Once you image is uploaded, you will then be prompted to set a rating for your Gravatar. Once done, that’s it! Next time you add a note to a blog that has the Gravatar’s activated, your image will show up next to your name and comments!
