A Twitter party is an online gathering of individuals at a specific time, but from no specific place. Party attendees can join a Twitter party from the bedroom, living room, restaurant, bar or even airplane … anywhere with an Internet connection.

Twitter parties are hosted on the Twitter platform. The only thing you need to attend Twitter parties is a Twitter account. Don’t have an account? Sign up here.

Why do I need to have a Twitter party?

Twitter parties are used to support real-life events. Specifically, Twitter parties are used to support tent pole events within an organization. Tent pole events are those events on a calendar that you know are coming like Election Day, Valentine’s Day, movie premieres, book releases and product releases.

For example, a tent pole event for a record store might be the release of a new Justin Bieber album. The record store could have a party the evening of the release and give away a signed photo to one attendee.

Twitter parties are great, inexpensive ways to connect the excitement of a larger event to your business.

How do I have a Twitter party?

Here is a step-by-step guide on having a party of your very own:

1. Create an invitation by announcing your upcoming party in a new blog post. Be sure to include relevant information.

• WHEN: Nov. 1, 2011 – 8pm ET, 7pm CT, 6pm MT, 5pm PT
• WHO: Your Party Host @thesearchguru
• WHAT: Our SEO party on Twitter
• HOW TO JOIN: Follow #tsgparty or click this link on Nov. 1 at 8pm ET: http://Twitter.com/#!/search/%23tsgparty
• PRIZES: One free gift session award to one lucky attendee
• RSVP: By leaving a comment on this post belowShare with a friend! Tweet this:Learn how to Tweet like a Pro! Everything you ever wanted to know about Twitter on #tsgparty 11/1 8pm ET – RSVP here http://link.to/post

2. Promote your party by updating your Facebook and tweeting a link to the blog post.

3. Reach out to co-sponsors for prizes and offer to add their logos, offers or links to your original post.

4. Promote your party each time you successfully add a sponsor or prize. Also, thank your sponsors by including their @usernames in the tweet or Facebook account name in your Facebook updates.

5. Promote your party one day before the event, on the day of the event, 1hour prior to the event and 15 minutes before the scheduled start time.

6. When the party starts, acknowledge and thank each attendee for coming.

How do I join a Twitter party?

Learning how to join a Twitter party requires that you first be familiar with Twitter and hashtags.

Hashtags look like this: #hashtag. They are typically one to two words preceded by the pound sign. Twitter users developed this unique system to find each other when tweeting about the same thing.

For example, George Lucas and Jon Stewart recently appeared together at various speaking engagements about Star Wars. Seats to the event were first come, first served, so the line to get in to the venue began over 12 hours in advance and became quite long, quite quickly. Twitter users invented the hashtag #lucasline to talk to one other and pass the time with thoughts, stories and amusing comments.

Hashtags work in conjunction with search.Twitter.com. By going to Twitter’s search page and entering the #hashtag of the party you want to join, you can see the stream of tweets relating to the party.

When the party time arrives, join the conversation by searching for the party #hashtag and simply saying hello to the party organizer with an @reply. Congratulations! You’ve just joined your first party on Twitter.

Still wondering how to join a Twitter party or how Twitter parties can work for your business? Contact The Search Guru today or leave your question in the comments below.

Be sure to bookmark and share this post, as it contains a link to a huge list of social networking sites, along with links to hundreds more social media management tools.

Before we get into all of the details, though, I want to tell you about a fascinating, funny man that I recently met: the popcorn guy. It may help you feel better if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the social landscape of today.

The popcorn guy’s family has owned a popcorn business since 1947. That was the year that his father decided that, to make some extra money for the tight family budget, he would pop some corn in their Cleveland, Ohio basement and sell it at school festivals.

In 1948, the family rented 400 square feet of space; bought some penny candy; and operated a mom and pop candy and popcorn store. As the business grew, the family needed to rent 800 square feet of building space and then 1,600 square feet and so on and so forth. Eventually, the candy sales fell by the wayside, largely because they found out that they ate as much as they sold, but the family stuck to their mission of providing quality homemade popcorn with a personal touch.

Originally, they offered basic, great tasting homemade popcorn – and then popcorn balls; over the years, the family has added gourmet popcorn, caramel popcorn, chocolate caramel popcorn, cinnamon popcorn, cheese corn – both white cheese and yellow cheddar, mind you – and, oh yes, there’s kettle corn, too . . .

As the decades passed and their business continued to grow, they finally needed to automate some processes, but they insisted on maintaining their quality and preserving their friendly service.

Now, you might be wondering what the heck this has to do with social media management tools – but there is a connection!

Today, the popcorn business takes up an astonishing 50,000 square feet of space to accommodate their sales across the country – and in Mexico, too. Not too long ago, the popcorn guy went international.

But, let’s imagine a different beginning of this business. Let’s pretend that the founder of this company realized that his family needed some extra cash, so he decided that he would pop some corn – but then someone said, “Just popcorn? Plain ol’ popcorn? What about candied popcorn and curried corn and . . . hey, what kind of oil will you use? Corn? Coconut?? Soy??? How are you packaging this popcorn? What’s your distribution method? How are you handling bulk orders? Interstate orders? Dealing with international shipping charges when the dollar is weak? When it’s not so weak? Then, what about –”

By this point, the guy dreaming of a popcorn business almost certainly would have decided that being a Fuller Brush salesman wouldn’t be such a bad part time job, after all. Wouldn’t you?

There’s a lesson to be learned – that it’s okay to start from the beginning and grow from there. Sure, sound business pre-planning is important and there will be lots of business decisions that will need to be made along the way, but you can’t chart out the entire first sixty years of your business before you pop your first kernel. This sixty-year business plan may look good on paper, but it doesn’t really work that way in real life. Today, the popcorn guy is using a multitude of technologies that didn’t even exist that long ago – just as, in the future, you’ll be using social media tools that haven’t even been thought of today.

Don’t feel ashamed that you don’t know how to use ALL of the many social media tools out there today; it’s overwhelming to even envision them all. Here is a huge but possibly still incomplete list of social networking sites – and that list is probably growing even more as this blog post is being written. And, as more networks are added, the tools needed to manage them will grow exponentially; so it makes perfect sense to try social media tools one at a time, keeping what you like and discarding the rest.

By going through a logical growth process with your social media, you, like the popcorn family, can streamline some of your processes while maintaining a personal touch and unquenchable quality.

Recommended social media management tools: you don’t need to reinvent the wheel; use these lists to choose what makes sense for your business.

• 12 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros
• 22 Hot New Social Media Tools Worth Exploring
• Social Media Tools for Small Business
• The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today
• The best free social media tracking tools you should know about
• 11 Twitter and Social Media Tools to Try in 2011
• 12 Social Media Tools for Publicity
• The 5 most useful social media tools from the past week
• A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions
• 12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed
• Top 5 Social Media Tools Companies Use
• 48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
• 60 Social Media Tools and Platforms You May Have Missed
• 7 Essential Business Social Media Tools
• 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools
• 4 Social Media Tools for Your Small Business
• The Ultimate List of Free Social Media Tools
• 11 Social Media Tools that Put Entrepreneurs on the Right Strategic Path
• 15 Free Ways Journalists Use Social Media Tools to Track Topics
• 10 Great Social Media Tools for Businesses
• 7 Amazing Social Media Tools
• 27 Twitter Tools to Help You Find and Manage Followers

Be sure to come back often to this blog; upcoming posts include a look at both the advantages of social networking and some arguments against social networking.

Earlier, we blogged about how to measure social media, as:

• an online reputation management tool
• a method to position your company as an online thought leader

Now, the focus will be on how to measure social media as a source of:

• website traffic
• online sales leads
• conversions
• sales

When setting business goals, it makes sense to set benchmarks and that applies when setting social media goals, as well.

When you participate in social media, whether it’s on Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube – or one of the many smaller networks – one of your goals will most likely be to drive increased amounts of traffic to your website, which also serves as your storefront.

To quantify your levels of success with this goal:

• regularly check and mark down the amounts of traffic that come from each source of social media site – both unique traffic and returning traffic; seeing unique traffic means that you are expanding your reach, while returning traffic means that you are deepening engagement with someone
• note which pages they are visiting
• monitor the bounce rate of this traffic
• measure the number of page views of these site visitors

You may want to become even more specific if one or more influencers are sending traffic your way. How much, for example, did your Facebook traffic increase shortly after Influencer X wrote a glowing post about your products and/or services? What was the bounce rate of this traffic? How many pages, on average, did they view?

Having just one powerful influencer promoting your products may be as valuable as – or more valuable than – one hundred or even one thousand followers who have smaller spheres of influence.

Traffic is great, but online sales leads are even better!

You may capture sales leads when someone:

• fills out a form asking for more information
• signs up for an e-newsletter, a webinar, a white paper and the like
• downloads an e-book

You could consider each of these actions as an online conversion, albeit a micro-conversion. Each time that the traffic comes from a social media source, track that data.

Of course, someone may have come to your site the first time via Twitter or Google Plus or some other social network. Then, they may have returned through a more direct route when they were ready to sign up for your monthly e-newsletter. If you notice that someone you first met on a social media site becomes a customer, mark it down, even if it’s just anecdotal. That could make a great case study.

Finally, when setting business goals, the most important of them center on sales, revenue, profit and return on investment.

Track the stats described in this post. How many customers found your site through social media venues? How much did they spend? How did that contribute to your profit and ROI?

As your social media success stories rise in number, determine how to strategically boost your social media efforts where they are most productive and lucrative.

Finally, there is the matter of overall social return on investment. How is that calculated?

In order to know your return on investment, you need to know the cost of the resources you’ve invested (time and money) into developing your social media campaign and participating in the networks used by your business. Assign a dollar amount to correspond with an hour’s worth of social media engagement and calculate a total cost. What have you earned in sales through social media? For every dollar in expenses, what is the amount earned? This will give you a benchmark figure.

When determining social return on investment, though, it’s also important to consider softer, fuzzier metrics. Let’s say that your ROI, in hard cold figures, isn’t quite what you wanted. But, if:

• you’re engaging much more frequently with prospects and customers
• buzz about your company is steady increasing and/or become more positive
• micro-conversions are on the upswing

Then it’s also important to figure in those successes when assessing the value of your social media campaign.

Social media ROI and metrics: find out how to track success in your online reputation management /thought leader campaign.

It isn’t unusual for a business to jump on the social media bandwagon without really knowing what to expect. After all, it’s often said that “everyone” needs to be on (fill in the blank with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube and so forth) and you aren’t to be blamed if you’ve taken the leap without knowing how you’re going to measure social media impact.

According to the 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education report, a report referenced by Brian Solis, 84% of professionals who participate in social media do not measure for return on investment. Here’s the flaw with that. It’s hard to tweak and improve what you don’t quantify – which means that, if you take on the challenge to effectively measure social media efforts, you’ll move ahead of a significant portion of businesses – most likely including some of your competitors.

Once you make the commitment to measure, though, your question probably is – now what?

Well, before you try to measure social media efforts, it’s important to turn your expectations, which may be somewhat vague, into concrete goals.

For now, even though increased leads, conversions and sales will probably end up at the top of your list when setting business goals, let’s start with more straightforward examples of how to measure the success of social media campaigns. (Don’t worry; we’ll cover how to measure website traffic, leads, conversions, sales and so forth in depth in our follow up post!)

Let’s say that, as our first example, you have struggled with unfair negative comments being posted online about your company – and that frustrates you and hurts your bottom line. If so, then setting business goals to improve your online reputation through social media efforts makes good sense. You could quantify that goal by saying that you want to reduce the number of negative comments in the top ten search engine results pages by 50% – and then perhaps by 100%.

When setting business goals in the area of online reputation management, you can measure social media success by calculating a baseline number of negative comments and then regularly checking your progress after you promote great content and engage personally with prospects and customers through social media channels.

Are you also seeing an increase in positive mentions of your brand? Quantify that, as well. In fact, you may want to create four categories for your data: positive, negative, neutral and mixed comments; mixed may include comments where someone praises your product quality but complains about shipping time.

Also do a backlinks check to see if the number of hyperlinked references to your site is growing. What kind of text do you find when you conduct your backlinks check? Positive? Negative? Mixed? No matter which, be sure to quantify!

When setting business goals for the year, perhaps your executive team agreed that becoming a respected thought leader online was important.

In this somewhat related goal, it’s important to increase the size of your network. After all, the more people that you have as your audience, the more likely it is that you can build momentum to become viral with your contents.

So, what can you offer to cause more people to like your Facebook page, follow your Twitter account, network with you on LinkedIn and add you to their Google Plus circles?

Measure how much each of your networks increases in size – but also measure how often people engage with you. How many likes do your Facebook statuses get? How much are they increasing? How many comments were you getting when you first started posting on Facebook? How many are you getting now?

How many times do people retweet what you’ve tweeted? Do these retweets get passed along by followers of your followers?

How many times have Google Plus posts, let’s say written by your CEO, received +1 kudos? How many of those posts get shared?

Let’s say that you’re highlighting your blog postsin social media venues. What’s happening, numerically speaking, for your company? Is the number of blog comments increasing? Are people talking about your content at del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon?

By analyzing these types of numbers, along with monitoring what’s being said about your company online, you can quantify how much ground you are gaining in your quest to become a respected thought leader on the internet.

Check back often for more posts about social media ROI and metrics, including how to capture data about website traffic, leads, conversions and sales.

You’ve probably heard people talking about Google Plus and you may have wondered whether or not this development is important to your business. The reality is that, when you hear that term, people could be chatting about any one of three different (although closely related) things, including the:

1. Google Plus button located by each result in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and/or next to PPC ads
2. Google Plus button appearing on a website
3. Google Plus social media site, which is currently in Beta (invitation only)

Although no one knows all of the ramifications just yet, Google representatives have stated that they expect Google Plus signals to influence ranking, which makes this an important development for virtually all business websites.

According to Google’s David Byttow, “We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time.”

Google Plus project: what are those buttons by the search engine results pages and/or by the pay per click ads?

These buttons automatically appear by results in the SERPs and by the PPC ads, without anyone needing to do anything. To see these buttons, a person needs to be signed into his or her Google account.

If a person clicks on a +1 button in the SERPs and/or by ads, it means that he/she likes the URL specifically listed. That person will be able to see how many +1 recommendations have been made by his or her network for a particular URL, with a network being defined as:

• Gmail/Google Talk Chat list
• My Contacts group in Google Contacts
• People they’re following in Google Reader and Google Buzz (and, presumably, in the Google Plus social site network)

The +1 button for a site will also appear in the Google profile of the person who clicked upon it, so that he/she can keep track of which URLs he/she has recommended.

Note that, when a person clicks on a +1 button, he or she is indicating a liking of a particular ULR, not the entire site. Clicking the +1 button on any one page, then, including the home page, is not enough to indicate a liking of the entire site.

Google Plus project: how do +1 buttons get onto websites and is it a good idea for my site?

You can add the Google+ button on your sites by adding this piece of code. Some have noted that the Google +1 button opens too slowly. In response, Google has boosted the speed of the code by three times; if you’ve already installed the code, the speed is automatically boosted without your needing to do anything extra.

Google has also come up with a speedier version of the code, giving sites the option of which version to use. If you choose the newer code, make sure that you select the asynchronous option.

There are benefits to adding this code, including:

• People will most likely want to see a page before decide whether or not to click the +1 button. Putting the button on the site itself makes it much easier to get the click, when the other option means that people would need to return to the SERPs to click on the button.
• Google has indicated that +1 is becoming part of its algorithm, which means that clicks will play a role in better rankings.
• Google also stated that adding +1 buttons to your pages can help your ads/site stand out. “By giving your visitors more chances to +1 your pages, your search ads and organic results might appear with +1 annotations more often. This could lead to more–and better qualified–traffic to your site.”

Google recommends you use the button where you think it will be most effective in terms of placement around your content; the company suggests, though, that the most effective spot is typically above the fold, near the title of the page, close to other sharing links. Google also says it can be effective if you put the +1 button at the end of an article as well as at the beginning.

What is Google Plus social networking? Should your business become involved?

At a high level, Google Plus is similar to Facebook. At the present time, someone who wants to participate needs a Google Plus invitation from someone currently participating. Right now, only individuals can set up a page (no businesses, organizations and so forth), although Google plans to start experimenting with beta versions of corporate pages.

In the meantime, perhaps you can set up a personal account to start exploring. Need a Google Plus invitation? Leave a blog comment with your email address letting us know.

In Google Plus, you’ll find:

• a “stream,” which is similar to the wall on a Facebook page
• circles, where you can sort your network into groups (business circle, family circle and so forth), which would be a tremendous help in target marketing. You could break down your circles, as just one example, into small business, medium business, large business and so forth. When posting a piece of content, you can make it public, share it with all of your circles or choose which circles will see the content, allowing you to more carefully target who sees what.
• hangouts, where up to 10 people can go into a live video conference chat room for meetings/conversations
• sparks, where a person can search on interests (marketing, tech, origami, reggae music) and receive relevant info through a feed

You can also upload photos and videos.

There is a +1 button after each piece of content; clicking it is similar to clicking “like” on Facebook.

There is a share button after each piece of content; clicking it is similar to retweeting, except that you can choose to share it with everyone, everyone in your circles or people in certain circles of yours.

Keep checking back at The Search Guru blog for more news about the Google Plus project and how it affects YOUR business!

Each social media campaign is unique, because each business is unique. Still, social media best practices can be used as benchmarks when crafting any campaign.

These social media best practices include:

1. Clearly establish your company goals; they might include to:

• increase website traffic
• engage directly with customers and prospects
• gain valuable sales leads
• obtain new customers
• help content go viral to boost inbound links

2. Determine your target audiences and focus on them; in social media, appealing to your prospects and customers comes before promoting the brand.

3. Choose social media venues that will allow you to engage with your target audiences; typically, a business would want to start out with the top social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube) and then expand as it makes sense.

4. Dedicate time to engaging in conversation at these sites, understanding that you need patience as you build your presence. This involves active listening and posting questions and facts of interest to your target markets.

5. Participate on other peoples’/companies’ social media pages/accounts, as well.

6. Be clear and professional.

7. Be respectful and civil.

8. Be transparent about who you are.

9. Be organized, yet flexible. For example, an editorial calendar can be very helpful but, because you can’t predict when breaking news will be relevant to your business – and/or when someone might post to your Facebook wall – you need flexibility, as well.

10. Share information and encourage further sharing.

11. Include links to your website whenever appropriate.

12. Use keyphrases in your posts/tweets when appropriate to establish relevancy.

13. Consider negative comments to be an opportunity to engage with prospects and customers and to resolve issues satisfactorily.

14. Track success rates of your strategy and tweak, as needed, keeping your original objectives in mind. Should you be expanding your social reach? Scaling back and focusing on what is bringing you the greatest returns? Should you be starting more conversations? Responding to more? What relationships have you formed because of your social media campaign?

Watch future blog posts that expand upon these best practices.

Bonus info: here is an outstanding social media best practices resource by ASNE that shares valuable information about relevant ethical issues.

Do you need help to increase website traffic? To build a presence on the top social media sites?

Contact The Search Guru today for your FREE 30-minute consultation so that you can increase website traffic and achieve other social media goals!

No list can be comprehensive. What do you think should be added to our list of social media best practices?

Here’s what is so valuable about Facebook: You determine who you want your ad to show up for based on choosing parameters that people include in their Facebook profile information. Talk about target marketing!

When you set up your Facebook advertising, you can choose from the following target marketing options:

• Geographic Targeting (by state, city or nationwide) – Ad will show only to those people who list themselves as residents of the city/area you specify
• Age Ranges – Ad will show only to those people in the age range you specify
• Birthday – Yes or No option – Ad will show only to those people whose birthday corresponds to the day the ad is running
• Sex – Male or Female
• Keywords – Targets ads to keywords that exist in people’s profiles
• Education Level – Specify what kind of degree they have, if any
• Workplace – To target employees of a specific company
• Relationship – You can target only people in a certain kind of a relationship, i.e.: single, engaged, married
• Interested In – Men or Women
• Language – Target users that speak a language other than English

Adding Facebook to your social marketing strategies is a nice complement to your paid search campaigns.

That’s because you’re reaching other qualified customers that might not necessarily be searching for what you offer. You can pick as many or as few attributes as you like. Choosing more will make your potential audience smaller, but likely more qualified.

The other great part of your Facebook PPC advertising is that, because you can have such a specific user in mind, you can find a great image to grab their attention. Unlike search engine PPC campaigns, Facebook allows you to upload a small image that runs along with your ad, enhancing the social media strategy aspect of the ad itself.

The next time you start to think about your paid search campaign and your social marketing strategies, think of Facebook advertising as a very useful bridge that can unite both efforts!

Facebook is one of the more frequently used social marketing strategies, but did you know about their paid advertising options when it comes to reaching your target demographic? Facebook gives you different options for reaching your intended audience than a search engine does – and it offers options on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, as well.

How Facebook target marketing is different

If you run a PPC campaign on a search engine, you specify the keyword searches for which you want your ad to appear. Facebook obviously isn’t a search engine, so you choose your targeting differently. The beauty of Facebook advertising is you have a whole different set of tools to reach people who might not be searching for your service in a search engine, but would still be good candidates for what you offer.

You know how a Facebook page has all of that information you opt to share? It has your geographic area, whether you’re male or female, your age (if you’ve filled in your birth date), your relationship status, and a lot of free-form fields to list your particular interests.

All of that information allows Facebook to segment your profile, and let advertisers take advantage of it! If you want to find engaged men in the state of Florida and have your ad only show to them, guess what? You can!

To segment or not to segment your target marketing

In our next blog post, we’ll review the options available in your Facebook PPC campaign, and we’ll provide some guidance on how to get started with an effective set-up!