Improve Your Blogging Using Twitter Research

Let’s have a look at how you can use Twitter research to help with your blogging and other social media activities. Firstly, you can use the search at “http://search.twitter.com” to find the latest tweets on any topic you wish.

This can be a great way to keep track of new things happening on any topic. Each search has a feed that you can add to your favorite feed reader and automatically see all the new comments that have been made about that topic.

For example, if you wanted to know what was being tweeted about you then you create a search on this site and turn on the RSS feed to update your reader. This way you know what the world thinks about you.

A search (and associated RSS feed) on your name and your products is the least you should be doing to keep current.

In case you didn’t know if someone tweets with the word @yourname then you will see it in your timeline. On the other hand if the just use yourname you will never know about it if you are not following that person.

It is definitely nice to know when someone is saying something good about you but it is even more important to know if it is bad - this gives you the chance to put things right.

If you have done your research and have found out what the social world is talking about in your chosen arena you can use that knowledge to make your blogging very targeted.

These topics can now become topics for you to blog about and then you can mention that you have written about it to the same people by using some of the tools I mentioned in my previous article.

Of course, if you still can’t get ideas on what to write about then you can always ask questions of your followers and get them to not only give you topics of interest but also the answers so your work is rewriting what they have told you.

We have looked at the search tool and its RSS feed. You should also look seriously at a tool called “Socialoomph”. It has too many features to cover in detail here but it allows you to monitor Twitter for your chosen keywords and then tell you about it by email. This is like a Google Alert but for the social media world. Just as an aside - if you don’t have Google Alerts turned on for your name, your business name, your products then you should do it now.

By using “Socialoomph” it is possible to manage your social media environment from a single product. The tool integrates Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and all your blogs with features such as auto-following, scheduling of posts into the future and sending “hello” messages when people follow you.

Using these research tools you can monitor what is being said about the topics that interest you, the things you sell, your name, your company name and don’t forget your competition.

Twitter research should be used to to let you keep in touch with what conversations are taking place on the internet.

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Video Blogging - An Introduction

Blogging is moving on. It started out as being people writing their diary and has now evolved into a great business generation tool. Now, over the past couple of years the number of video blogs has grown significantly.

In the early days of the blog authors used to use pictures to make the posts more interesting and to sub-divide the text. With video it is even easier to get across the concepts and ideas the author is trying to explain.

Video Blog- Technical Requirements:
Technically, if you are going to use video for your blog, you will need:

* Extra storage - you need a lot more capacity for video that for words.

* A faster server - if you are creating a video blog then you don’t want the video to load slowly such that people cannot watch it.

* Extra software - most of the everyday blogging tools like Wordpress and Blogger have plugins available to
add video to your blog. However, you will also need something to let you make your videos in particular to edit
the results from the video camera.

* Camera - no surprise here - you need something to record with, and you may need a separate microphone as well. In the early days a fairly basic set up will work but as you get more sophisticated you will want better kit.

* Lights - you need to make sure your videos are well lit. If you can use natural light so much the better, but if necessary you may need to light the scene.

There are 2 areas for a video blog:

Firstly, you can use video to let potential customers see your products and services. So, no longer will you have to struggle to explain how a product works in simple, easy paragraphs now you can record a video to show them.

Today, with so many options for prospective customers to choose from the more they can see and know before they opt to buy the more likely they are to buy from you. To add even more weight to your message get some current customers to record short videos singing your praises.

Video blog entries of this product demo type should be as short as possible - the longer it is the more likely your viewers are to go elsewhere.

2. Thoughts and Ideas
It is common knowledge that when writing for your blog you need to keep the posts interesting, relevant and full of value to you your readers. Now, what is to stop you putting that same content into a video? Normally you would have written a post of about 500 words but now you can record a 3 minute value packed video.

Once you have recorded your video blog you need to distribute it to the video sites. You are used to sending out your written blog posts to the syndication site, well you do exactly the same with your video just too different places.

I hate to say it but there is one potential downside to video blogs - although it is becoming less and less of an issue - and that is the impact it has on the watchers pc. The video download and playback may cause performance issues on the computer and this does reflect on you even though it is not your fault.

You need to be aware that a video blog is becoming an essential tool in the marketing toolbox for every business to promote themselves so dont get left behind.

Learn more about keyword #1. Stop by Mike Helft’s site where you can find out all about keyword #2 and what it can do for you.