In other words we no longer can do one without the other. They both go hand in hand. As such let’s take a look below at five tips for new blog owners on how best to include and use social media as part of an overall blog marketing arsenal.

1. Integrate From The Beginning – don’t wait till you’ve become established and popular. Add social media to your blog from day one. You never know who will be listening or who might pick up an interest in your site and want to connect with you via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Plus. So we consider it a smart move on your behalf to include social media on your blog right away from day one.

2. Make Your Content Easy To Share – there are lots of plugins, add-ons and widgets that allow you to place Google Plus, Twitter or Facebook on your blog. However some work better than others and some are more streamlined than others. Find the tool that works best for you and your specific blog design, colors, size and so on. Also it might be best not too add to many buttons and widgets – as a reader might get confused on which one to use. Make it easy, the easier the better. Never underestimate the power of EASY.

3. Use It Yourself – are you an active user of one (or more) of the social networks? We understand that each one is time consuming and therefore you might not be able to contribute regularly to each. In this case, it might be necessary to “cherry pick” and decide which one you prefer and will become an active member of. Whichever one you choose, go for it – at full throttle.

4. Keep Up With Changes – another constant in social media is the myriad of changes that take place. Facebook alone is known for their constant upgrades and changes. This can be hard to manage and or keep up with, however no one wants to be “behind the ball”. So in this case, one thing you can do is to subscribe to the various blogs and sites that keep up with the changes for you. Mashable comes to mind, they usually report on the various changes from the big three in social media.

5. Outsource, If No Time – if you simply do not have the time to incorporate social media for your blog at this time. Then it might be necessary to outsource the task. Look in the various job boards that have job listings in social media such as the Problogger Job Board. This one only charges $50 for a listing that last 30 days. A good deal since this is a job board visited daily by web professionals who are experienced and savvy with social media.

Using a blog today to promote a business has become commonplace and for good reason. It works. When used correctly and strategically it can bring you traffic, sales, clients, prospects, leads, etc. When combined with social media it can bring about untold wonders.

Guest article written by Missy Diaz who works for various clients including a website builder tool on the web.

Do you have trouble understanding Twitter? Whether you want to use it for marketing or social purposes, you still have to understand the language. Here is a list of the more popular terms to get you up to date.

Tweet – Your 140-character or less message. This is the backbone of the site.

Twitterism – Any word that is only used by the Twitter community. They are generally formed by putting the letters TW before a basic word, like Twaffic in place of traffic.

Twitterjacking – Where people hack other twitter accounts and pretend to be that person. Celebrities are particularly vulnerable to this.

Twitterer – Any user of the site. Also called Tweeple on occasion.

Twitterverse – The whole society of people who use the site. This includes both those using it for business and those just using it for social reasons. Also sometimes called the Twitosphere.

Twittersona – Someone’s Twitter persona.

Retweeting – Alerting those following you to another person’s tweet. You are basically quoting that person’s tweet and re-posting it on your account. Just make sure it’s clear you didn’t originate it. You must add RT at the beginning and then provide the user name of whoever you are quoting. For instance, if you are quoting LynnTerry, you would say RT @LynnTerry and then the message. If you don’t format it this way, you are actually claiming their tweet as your own. This is a violation of Twitter policies, and could get you in serious trouble.

Followfriday – This is where you provide the user names of people that your followers should follow themselves. You don’t necessarily have to include a reason. You format it #FF @the user name of whoever you are suggesting.

Twaffic – All the visitors you get from using Twitter.

Tweekend – When you devote an entire day of the weekend to using the site.

De-Follow - When you stop following someone. It’s a play of the standard “de-friend” term used by most social sites.

Hashtag – Tagging a specific tweet by placing the hash prior to the tag. For instance, you would put #pgatour if you were talking about the PGA Tour.

Mistweet – When you send one of your messages to someone you didn’t intend to.

Tweeps - Used to describe people following you that you also interact with on other social sites.

There are many more terms to learn, and this just gives you a rundown of the essentials. You will discover the rest as you start using the site more regularly.

Twitter can be a very effective marketing platform for your business. Did I miss any? Please post any other twitterisms you are familiar with in the comments.

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How to Promote Your Business With LinkedIn

How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business

How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business

How Social Networking Grows Your Business

5 Minute Social Media Tactics for Businesses

Here are just some of the many popular social networking sites you can use to grow your business:

1.         MySpace.com

2.         Facebook

3.         Classmates

4.         StumbleUpon

5.         Flickr

6.         YouTube

7.         MyLife.com

8.         Buzznet

9.         Yahoo Buzz

10.       Del.icio.us

11.       Meetup

12.       Xing

13.       LinkedIn

14.       Orkut

15.       Digg

16.       Bebo

17.       Tagged

18.       DeviantART

19.       Twitter

20.       hi5 Networks

21.       CaringBridge

22.       BlackPlanet.com

23.       Gaia Online

24.       AddThis

25.       SodaHead.com

26.       Multiply

27.       Friendster

28.       Xomba

29.       Propeller

30.       MSN Groups

The benefits to using social networking to promote your business have a wide reach. You’ll not only connect with your audience on a new and more personal level, which is required in today’s competitive market, you’ll also reach a whole new group of people.  Couple that with the fact that social networking is extremely cost effective and your return on investment is like nothing else in your marketing toolbox.

•  Ask Questions – Asking a question helps engage your reader immediately.

• Arouse curiosity – Make them have to click through to find out what you’re talking about.

• Provide value – For example a “How to” statement demonstrates value and benefit.

2. Do Integrate Social Networking Into Your Company Website.

• Add a find me/follow me button. Most website and blogging platforms offer widgets, modules, or plugins that help you promote your social networking profiles

•  Add it to your signature. Do you have an email signature?  Do you send newsletters, autoresponders, and promotions?  Add your social networking link or name to your signature.

3. Do Choose the Right Social Networking Sites

With more than 200 mainstream social networking sites, and that’s not including all the forums, chat rooms and blogs, it can be difficult to decide which site is the right site to invest your time and energy in. Evaluate them based on:

• Popularity – How many active members does the site have?

•  User Statistics – Is your audience participating on this site?

•  Features – Does the site offer business promotion friendly features?

•  Your Profile Options – Are you able to build a profile to build brand awareness and promote your business?

4. Do Create a Social Networking Strategy. Before you begin comparing social networking sites, spend a few hours or days creating a plan. Write down:

•  Who your target audience is

•  What your social networking goals are

• What image you want to convey

•  What options you need to achieve your goals and create your ideal profile

5. Do Test and Track your efforts – Social networking is like any other marketing strategy. It’s important to have a goal, a plan and a system to measure and track. That way you can be sure you’re spending your time and marketing budget wisely.

6. Do Update frequently – Like blogging your social networking results are only as good as your efforts. You can also make use of tools like HootSuite that allow you to schedule your posts on Twitter and let you track several Twitter accounts at once.

7. Do remember to be professional. Talk with your audience as if they were customers because they are potential customers. They’re also potential partners and valuable resources. What impression do you want them to have of you?

8. Do Start small. It’s easy to overextend yourself and join too many social networking sites. Start with one or two, build great profiles and actively engaged followers before you begin marketing and promoting on another site

LinkedIn allows business owners to:

• Receive Recommendations – Other business owners can boost your profile by recommending you and your business.

• Create Groups – Like Facebook, you can create a group for your target audience to join. This gives you the ability to connect with and market directly to them.

• Utilize Applications – LinkedIn offers applications like Blog Link, Polls, and Reading Lists to help you enhance your profile and connect with others.

• Advertise your business on LinkedIn for more awareness, traffic and exposure.

LinkedIn is a fantastic opportunity to build your professional network. Along with Facebook and Twitter, and any other social networking tools you choose to use, promoting and growing your business just got easier.

Facebook is a rapidly growing and boasts 175 million users with about five million new users a week. This makes it a ripe opportunity toboost your business. And when it comes to Facebook, while you cannot create a customized profile page like Twitter, you can create fan pages, send mass messages to your fans and join groups.

The first step to promote your business with Facebook is to create a business profile. Facebook offers you the ability to separate your personal and professional social networking activities and offers a number of settings, which you can adjust to meet your needs. To set your privacy settings, visit http://www.facebook.com/privacy/

Next, just like Twitter, you’ll be connecting with people and also like Twitter, you can import your email list and connect with those people first. You can also search for friends using the Friend Finder feature and Facebook also suggests friends based on people you’ve connected with, items in your profile and groups you’ve joined.

And make the necessary changes. For example, you may only want friends to view photos and videos tagged with you in them.

The next step, which again will feel similar to Twitter, and most other social networking tools is to begin interacting and promoting your business with the tips and strategies we’ve already mentioned. Upload videos, announce promotions, share links to interesting and relevant sites, share your experiences and get involved.

What is unique to Facebook are the applications, fan pages and groups.

Promoting with Facebook Applications

Facebook offers a number of applications including creating and joining groups. Adding and joining groups is another way to connect with a very specific target audience. If, for example, you are a dog trainer and your market are new dog owners, you could create a group for puppy owners and share helpful tips, links and information with them. The group function allows you to also see the groups your friends and associates are participating in so you can make the decision about whether or not it’s a group you too want to participate in.

There are a large number of applications and with Facebook continually growing new applications will be added every day. A few great applications to consider include:

• Twitter – Allows you to publish your Twitter posts on Facebook.

• BlogNetwork – This application is a great way to publicize your blog and gain new followers.

• Advertising – Facebook allows you to advertise on their site and to also sell ad space on your profile/fan pages.

• Facebook Pages – A Facebook Page is a public profile that makes it possible for you to essentially create a business profile page right on the site. You can share products, sell ad space and market to your audience. You can also invite people to become a “Fan” (through PPC ads). Each fan is now someone you can market to directly by sending them messages, promotions, information, downloads and so on – much like you would an opt-in list.

• Mobile Facebook – allows you to use Facebook from your mobile phone. Great for sending on the fly messages but also good to remember that many people use this feature on their mobile phone and you can market to them specifically.

Facebook is an active, thriving and growing community and it’s not just for teenagers anymore. In fact, middle-aged men and women are one of the largest growing communities online and they’re a lucrative audience.

Your first step to use Twitter effectively to promote your business is to register and create an appropriate profile. That will include potentially creating a custom Twitter background and learning about all of the tools, applications and gadgets you can use to optimize Twitter as a marketing tool.

Creating Your Twitter Background

Because your Twitter Profile is something that will help brand and differentiate you, it’s important to spend some time making it represent you and your company. Twitter offers templates you can customize, you can utilize secondary software to create your Twitter background, and you can outsource the task to a graphic designer. Many graphic designers who specialize in web content are now offering custom Twitter backgrounds.

Custom Twitter backgrounds give you the power to present a strong first impression. It sets you apart from your competition, gives people a good idea of who you are and what you’re about and if you provide links to your website(s) it’ll send you traffic.

Once your profile has been created, it’s time to find your audience. Rest assured once you begin posting relevant, valuable and beneficial information and are interacting with Twitter users, you will get more followers. However, in the beginning, you may want to connect with key influencers. How do you find these key influencers?  Search!

Finding Friends and Followers – Twitter Search

Once your profile has been created, it’s time to find friends and followers, people to connect with. Twitter search is a great way to get started, however you can also download your email contacts and search for friends that way.

The Twitter search tools provide essentially two ways to find information and potential followers.

Basic Search – Is a keyword driven tool. Enter your keywords, click the search icon and your results show up on the left hand side. Take a look at the various people posting frequently on this topic to determine if they’re a key influencer. For example, if you own a crafting website, you may want to follow Martha Stewart on Twitter because her followers are most certainly interested in crafting too.

Advanced Twitter Search – Click the Advanced Twitter search button at the bottom of the page where you can search by multiple words, person, or hashtag #. (The # is a tool to create groups, which people can search by. Using the crafting example from earlier, you could post something about crafting and then end it with the #crafting hashtag.)

Interacting on Twitter and Promoting Your Business

Your next step is to begin interacting with your fellow Twitterers. Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?”  The trick is to make it relevant to your business and interesting and you have 140 characters to get it done.

Your tweets or posts are designed to accomplish two things, promote your business and connect with users. Sometimes you can accomplish both however other times you’ll want to focus on just connecting or just promoting. Yesterday, we mentioned several ways you can promote your business using social networking. We mentioned posting attention grabbing headlines and linking to your site, we also mentioned announcing promotions. You can even give away free content on Twitter. Here are a few tools to help you use Twitter to promote your business.

• Twitter Groups gives you the ability to join and create groups to motivate a following. It’s a great tool for creating sub-niches within your audience.

• Social Too is a site that automates following those who follow you.  It also filters spammers and has a survey function. Additionally, you can automate a custom message to thank all those who follow you along with a link to your website or a giveaway.

• Magpie is an advertising tool, which helps identify key influencers for your product or service, and then use them to spread the word about what it is you have to offer. You create your own ad campaign with your choice of message and keywords.

•  Twitter mobile. There are also a large number of widgets and plug-ins, which make Twitter accessible from just about anywhere including your Blackberry, iPhone, Gmail, post them on your blog for cross promotion and so on. You can find a number of these applications by clicking on the apps button at the bottom of each page.

Twitter can also be linked to Facebook so all of your Tweets show up as Facebook posts, thus helping you optimize your efforts.

There’s no doubt, social networking gives you access to your audience but what else can you accomplish with this tool?

Social gives business owners the ability to:

• Build an online presence
• Increase website traffic
• Boost SEO
• Establish credibility
• Connect with your audience
• Glean valuable information to grow your business

Whether your online business is just starting out, or you’re a large corporation, adding social networking to your marketing strategy will help you promote and grow your business.

Options to Use Social Networking to Promote Your Business

There are a number of ways you can use social networking to promote your business. Let’s take a look at the most popular and powerful.

• Drive Traffic to Your Blog or Website - Post a curiosity generating or attention grabbing headline and include a link to your website.
• Promote – Launching a new product? Announce it via social networking sites. Offering a huge holiday discount? Let people know.
• Share Lessons and Experiences – Social networking is about connecting. If you have something relevant to your industry to share, share it. Start conversations and partake in them.
• Share Pictures, Audio and Video – Many social networking sites embrace visual forms of posting as well. YouTube of course is a video social networking site but even Facebook lets you link to and post audio and video messages. And Twitter developers have created picture and video sharing applications.
• Share Information – Post interesting and relevant statistics, quotes, or headlines and start a conversation. When appropriate, link to your company website.
• Advertise – Many social networking sites also sell advertising space.

Building up an online presence is an ongoing process, one that requires consistent maintenance and patience. However, just because it does take some time to achieve your presence doesn’t mean to say that every single tactic and strategy you employ will take up your entire day. In fact, here are a number of social media tactics that take no more than 5 minutes each!

Tweet

Twitter has a 140 character limit, so there’s no space for essays. Of course, condensing your message down into 140 characters might take a few minutes to do, but a regular Tweet relating to your niche area, wider industry or some of your own specific business/website news can keep people informed. Make use of hash tags (for example #blogging) so that people seeking Twitter users who regularly update on a particular topic area can easily locate and follow you. Follow people in your niche and respond to their Tweets. It’s a quick thing to do but is essentially a micro-networking strategy.

Blog Comment

Find websites and blogs in a similar niche to your business. Read and comment on posts. Again, this is quick but is a great means of networking and getting your voice heard within your niche. Becoming familiar with other people operating in a similar area to you could lead to contacts and exposure opportunities.

Update your Profiles

If you don’t already have Facebook/LinkedIn profiles (or other social media website profiles) you should. Spending a few minutes each week making sure it’s up to date is time well spent. Bear in mind that anyone seeking more information about you or your business may well start with a search around Facebook or similar sites.

Check your Online Reputation

Google yourself or your brand name (or both)! Keep an eye on what’s in the top twenty or so results. If anyone mentions you on a forum or a blog and this comes up, get in on the conversation, whether positive or negative. If it’s negative, you can respond and handle the situation. If it’s positive you have the opportunity to thank people for mentioning your name and accomplishments.

Forums

A less spoken form of social media these days, the forum, has been somewhat overshadowed by Facebook and Twitter. But they’re still well used and very convenient discussion platforms from which to voice your opinion on an area you are knowledgeable in. If you come across forums relating to you niche, why not register and start taking part? A comment here or there takes just few minutes but gives you the opportunity to prove yourself an authority on your niche area.

There’s no such thing as overnight results where social media is concerned. It’s a long term process of building up a profile for yourself. But once you have done so, it really is an invaluable asset which will undoubtedly lead to some incredibly useful contacts and potentially to sales too.