People from all age groups and walks of life are posting and interacting on Facebook. It is a great place to help build your business brand, increase awareness and drive traffic, yet many business owners just don’t know how to use Facebook effectively.

Just like in face-to-face interactions, you get only one chance to make a good first impression on Facebook. Here are some tips to help you.

Your Public Profile

One of the rules of Facebook is that you shouldn’t use your personal profile to market a business, as that is what Facebook Fan Pages are for; however, many people still use their public profile to market their business. The problem with this tactic is not that you are breaking Facebook rules, but rather that many people combine their personal and their business interactions.

They post personal information on the same wall that they publish business information. This doesn’t give your followers a consistent voice or brand and is confusing. And you probably don’t want a potential customer’s first impression to be something personal that you posted.

Too Much Information

Separating purposes for your Facebook profile is the first way to make a good impression. Create a separate business profile and a separate personal profile for interacting with friends and family.

On your business profile, make sure to keep it strictly business. Anything and everything you post online is there to stay. Post something personal or share too much information and you could offend people, turn people off, and lose potential customers. Make sure you are not sharing too much personal information with your business followers.

Instead, focus on providing the type of information your readers and prospects will find valuable. The more value you provide them, the better impression they will have of you. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t share personal information; however, it needs to be related to your business.

For example, “I just tried out a new cookie recipe. Received rave reviews from the PTA. Pictures and details are on my blog.” This is a great personal post for someone who owns a cooking website or blog. It is personal, but it also provides information and drives traffic to their website.

Stay Positive

Unfortunately, many people use Facebook as their personal complaint board. They complain about clients, about other marketers, and about situations. This isn’t a great way to make a first impression, nor is it a good way to keep followers interested. If you must vent, don’t vent online. Stay positive and you will always make a good first impression.

Facebook is an exceptional business building tool. Create a plan for using Facebook that includes a personal voice, brand, and content strategy. Before posting anything, ask yourself how it benefits your audience.

Two of the most important factors for any growing online business are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. But is one more important than the other and should you put more time and energy into one and not the other? Which can make a bigger difference on your bottom line? Let’s explore some of these questions.

SEO Is More Important for Raw Traffic

SEO will get you more traffic up front than social media will. Though social media is gaining more and more traction every day, it still doesn’t come close to what a number one ranking can do for your website in terms of raw traffic. On the other hand, top search rankings are hard to achieve; they can often take months, even years. They take a lot of time investment and often a lot of monetary investment as well. SEO is a longer-term strategy than social media. You might get more traffic overall than social media, but it takes more effort and has a randomness factor as well. You don’t know if it will work.

Social Media is More Important for Reputation

On the other hand, social media is free. It is easy to manage and doesn’t take months before you see results; however, you won’t see the same kind of traffic that you would get from a number one ranking search listing. Social media has a lot of side benefits that go beyond the raw traffic statistics. Prominent social media figures build a strong reputation in a space, which often increases their conversion rates because of their reputation. Likewise, they are more likely to get invited to speaking engagements, where many profitable business deals can be made. The key to good social media marketing is to consistently provide something your users want. If that’s a weekly how-to video, then make sure you provide that video every week, without fail.

The Real Answer: The Two Are Merging

Most SEO experts agree that search engines are taking many social media factors into account when ranking pages. In other words, instead of just looking at backlinks and PageRank, the search engines now look at your Facebook likes and reposts as well in order to help determine rankings. When it comes down to it, the secret to successful SEO and social media are really the same. Consistently provide good content, which is what people tend to pass on and what the search engines are looking for. One may be more or less effective for specific businesses, but if you focus ninety percent of your efforts on creating a great user experience and ten percent on marketing techniques, you will have a great chance of succeeding with both.

One is more important than the other in the sense that one may work better than the other for your business in the short term, but may not be in the sense that in the long run, they are more or less the same.

Though it has been around for a few years, Facebook marketing is still a relatively new playing field for marketers. It has phenomenal power for building a user base and a reputation, but also has many pitfalls. Let’s explore some of the most important Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook marketing.

1. Postings

DO: Post regularly. Post useful content, post personality-infused messages, and stay connected with your user base.

DON’T: Don’t spam. Don’t send just commercial messages; don’t always try to sell. Facebook is best suited for building connections. It is not very effective as a direct sales tool.

2. Type of Page

DO: Pick the right type of page. Facebook has personal profiles, fan pages, group pages and community pages. Read about each one and decide which is right for you. Each has different features and restrictions and the choice can’t be changed later, so do your due diligence before you start.

DON’T: Do not run your business off a personal Facebook account. For one you are limited on the number of friends. If you make a mistake that violates the terms of service, you also risk getting your personal account suspended.

3. Budget

DO: Start with a small budget. You don’t need to spend money to use Facebook marketing effectively. Create viral campaigns, use pages effectively and let your users do the work for you.

DON’T: Don’t spend a lot of money on Facebook Pay-Per-Click up front. Facebook has so much traffic that you could literally spend $1,000 in 60 seconds on its PPC platform. When you are just starting out, test small; as little as $20 a day until you can prove that your campaigns are making money.

4. Photos

DO: Have professional photos taken. If you’re running a business on Facebook, you need to have photos that make you look great.

DON’T: Don’t post photos that are too casual. Suggestive photos, nightlife photos, etc. should all be avoided.

5. Being Personal

DO: Respond personally to user comments and messages. Yes, it takes a lot of work, but the idea is to connect with people. That’s where the power of Facebook lies. Take the time to talk to your users. It will make a huge difference.

DON’T: Don’t just be an impersonal brand. Though big brands do advertise on Facebook, the real power of the platform comes in connecting with real people.

6. Information

DO: Fill out as much information as you can. In your bio pages and your info pages, your contact information, etc. should all be completed in detail.

DON’T: Don’t let the pages get old. Marketers often complete their information once and don’t change it, even if the information changes. Make sure you check your information and update it regularly, about once a month.

These are some of the most common Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook marketing. Remember that building a fan base on Facebook does take time, but once you get going, it can spread virally very quickly.

There are many Twitter tools available to you as an entrepreneur to promote yourself and your business. From tracking your influence to market research, from mobile phones to alternate interfaces, it is all available and, best of all, many of these tools are free. Here are five free tools you can use to help build your online business:

TwitterMail – Use Email to Post Tweets

TwitterMail is especially useful for people who have phones that can send email, but don’t have an application for Twitter. Basically, TwitterMail allows you to send an email to post to your Twitter account. You can specify when it will be posted. This can also be a very useful tool for posting to Twitter from an HTML form, a PHP script or any other email generated on your server. It is much simpler than learning the Twitter API.

Twitscoop – An Alternative Twitter Interface, with a Unique Cloud

Twitscoop allows you to send tweets, receive tweets and manage friend requests without ever having to leave the page. Unlike Twitter, where you are constantly loading and reloading, Twitscoop saves you time by never needing to reload. In other words, it’s a faster alternative Twitter interface. In addition, Twitscoop also features a unique Twitter cloud that can help you keep track of all the most talked-about topics in the Twittersphere.

Retweet Rank – How Many Retweets Are You Getting?

When you send out a tweet, how many people in turn tweet that out to their friends? How does your “retweet power” measure against other Twitter users? Retweet Rank can tell you. You don’t need an account; all you need to do is go to their website and type in your username.

Twitter Grader – How Influential Are You?

Want to know how you stack up against other Twitter users overall? Twitter Grader can show you. In addition to stacking you up against other Twitter users, it will also offer brief suggestions for improving your Twitter account.

Qwitter – Know Who Unfollowed You

Ever wondered who clicked the Unfollow button? Ever wonder how many unfollows you are getting? Just because your follower count is going up doesn’t mean people aren’t unfollowing; you could also be getting more new followers. Qwitter will send you a daily email showing you exactly who unfollowed you. This can be enormously useful both from a personal perspective (knowing if someone influential is losing interest), as well as from a statistical perspective (finding out your average follower retention rate).

These are a few free yet useful tools available to online entrepreneurs. It won’t cost you anything to give them a try and can save you hours in the future.

When Twitter was first taking off, it was believed to be a tool mostly for consumers. Today, however, business executives are becoming more and more aware of Twitter as a tool to build business-to-business (B2B) sales. Twitter isn’t just important for interacting with consumers. It’s also crucial for interacting with brands, potential clients and competitors.

Here are a few big ways Twitter can impact your B2B sales.

Actively Projecting Your Brand

Your brand doesn’t have to be a passive thing. Twitter is perhaps the only avenue where blasting out your brand regularly is not only accepted, but encouraged. You can’t email your potential clients every day without repercussions, but you can tweet every day, keeping your brand in front of potential clients, while actually building rather than burning goodwill.

Networking Your Way to New Contacts

If there is someone in your space that you want to meet, Twitter can be a great way to get around the red tape. It can be very hard to meet someone in a crowded seminar or to get through their secretary, but if you have their Twitter handle, you can start to build a connection on the social network that can then develop into an offline connection.

Start by following them. Retweet their tweets and @reply to any requests from them with helpful resources. Get on their radar and eventually, when an opportunity arises to introduce yourself, do so and they will likely know who you are.

Find Their Pain Points

Twitter can be a powerful way of keeping track of exactly what is going on in an industry. You can use it to figure out what your clients are up to, what your competitors are up to and what your clients’ competitors are up to.

Let’s say a competitor of a big potential client launches a new product. It stands a good chance of taking a big chunk out of your client’s business. That could be a stellar opportunity for you to come in and offer to help. It may or may not result in immediate business, but that offer for help will definitely turn into goodwill that can later turn into business.

Use Twitter to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and identify the pain points of potential clients.

Tapping into B2B Events

B2B events will often have their own Twitter feeds, which can be a very powerful way to participate with your ideal target market. For example, let’s say Convention A is having all their participants tweet to #conventionachat.

By participating actively on #conventionachat, you can build up a brand for yourself among potential leads at an event. Start doing this a few weeks before the event. By the time the actual event rolls around, a lot of people there will already know who you are.

These are a few ways that Twitter can affect your B2B sales. Twitter isn’t just a tool for consumers, but can be a powerful tool for building goodwill and gathering intelligence for making B2B sales.