20 Must-Have Twitter Tools for Online Business

Lately I’ve written a few very popular articles on Darren Rowse’s TwiTip featuring not just one – but TWO Top 10 lists of popular Twitter applications and plugins.  Many of them are tailored specifically to Twitter “power users” but some of them are simply handy to have and others are just plain fun.

For example, do you have a particularly annoying follower that you don’t want to block, but don’t want to see fill up your screen with tweets either?  Then you’ll want to check out TweetSnooze.  Using Twitter and want to be reminded to do something in 10 minutes?  Twitter Timer can help.  You’ll also find a handful of solid applications you can use to schedule, track and follow-up with your tweets easily. 

Add any or all of these tools to your Twitter arsenal and see how much more productive you become!

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4 Must-Have Social Marketing Blog Shortcuts to Help Spread the Word

You’ve just written an amazing blog post, uncovered an incredible new tool or piece of software and now you want to tell the world about it. The problem is, you don’t want to come off as too self-promotional. Nobody likes a “social marketer” who just markets themselves.

So how do you make it easier for your followers, groups and friends to share your message? You integrate it with your blog posts and vice versa! Here are the easiest blog tools to make sure you’re maximizing your social networking efforts by making it easy for people to share your posts in just a few clicks.

1. Twitter Tools -  Alex King’s helpful Twitter Tools plugin will integrate your blog posts with Twitter and optionally let you create digests every day or week of your tweets and/or posts. Easy to install and start using – this is a Twitter blog plugin that you won’t want to be without!

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4 Simple Ways to Make Your Message Go Viral

“Viral marketing” is all about creating something people will want to pass along – whether it’s a product, video, interview or photo.  The more people share the piece with their friends, who in turn send it to their friends, the larger audience you can potentially reach.

So what makes a message go viral?  What’s the difference between a neat video that gets watched and closed, and one that has to be sent on?  Here are a few insights on why people pass things along – and how you can use them to your online marketing advantage.

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Are You Muddying the Waters of Your Social Networking Plan?

Skittles had an innovative idea — replace their homepage  with their Twitter page, Wikipedia entry, YouTube page and Flickr photo stream among other things.  For many people, this helped show that Skittles “got it” when it came to social networking.  Showcase what people are saying about your brand in a unique way and you’ll be rewarded by even more buzz, not to mention ratchet up a few spots on the “cool scale”. 

But is it smart for every brand to follow socialites across all of the many networks and participate like they’re “one of them”?  The days of chasing down bloggers and wooing social networkers with ads and constant Facebook invites  are over and peoples’ patience is wearing thin. 

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Around the Web in Social Bookmarking

Here are some of this week’s most popular blog posts around the web on Social Bookmarking:

30+ Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog More Social

SociBook – Adds over 60 social bookmarking sites to your site by simply clicking on the name of each you want.SocioFluid – While it does what many other plugins do by adding social bookmarking icons to the bottom of your posts, … Read more

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