If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you’re missing out.

A recent study by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group, called the ENGAGEMENTdb study, ranks the “world’s most valuable brands based on how they leverage social media to interact with customers.” Able to measure and monitor brand engagement, ENGAGEMENTdb is the first of its kind. Essentially, Wetpaint and Altimeter Group are measuring social media’s financial value. For example, how does a Twitter account actually pay off — or does it even pay off at all?

So the study took the world’s 100 most valuable brands (as measured by BusinessWeek/Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008″ rankings) and looked at their social media use — how well the brands are engaging their consumers and how that affects their revenue and profit. What the study found was that those 100 brands are “experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement.”

What exactly does that mean? Simply put, companies engaging in social media are more financially successful.

At Get Page One, we’re firm believers in the power of social media marketing. But you can’t just sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and hope for it to pay off. You have to work hard at it and be consistent in the way you use it — you can’t just sign up and leave. Successful social media marketing involves signing up for social media accounts and actually being social — interacting with other users, regularly updating and participating.

Engage in social media, be consistent and see it literally pay off.

When taking your first steps towards using Twitter as an online marketing tool, it’s important to have good Twitter etiquette. The bottom line is that Twitter is all about interacting with other users and building trust. If you use your account to do nothing but talk about and link to your business, you will be seen as a spammer. But if you engage in conversations and use the service as a real person — the voice of your company — you will build trust and earn respect.

How to Use Twitter: DON’T…

• Don’t just post links to your website. You’ll sound like a robot and people will think you’re a spammer.
• Don’t only talk about your company.
• Don’t tell every detail of your day or give too much information.
• Don’t use foul language or insult competitors or Twitter users who have said something negative about you or to you.
• Don’t post links to anything NSFW (not suitable for work).
• Don’t ignore people who @reply to you.
• Don’t ignore @replies.
• Don’t forget to use search.twitter.com to look for mentions of your company or name
• Don’t use search.twitter.com to look for people talking about your industry and spam them with an @reply.
• Don’t follow many more people than are following you — keep a good ratio. Use friendorfollow.com to find out who isn’t following you back. (If you’re following lots of people and not many are following you, this makes your account look spammy.)
• Don’t use a tool to send new followers an automated Direct Message.
• Don’t follow a bunch of people at once, especially right when you sign up. Build up your profile slowly. It takes time and patience.
• Don’t get political unless it’s a major part of who you are or who your company is. Potential customers or clients could make the decision not to use your services based on any political statements you make.

How to Use Twitter: DO…

• Make sure you have an avatar.
• Use search.twitter.com or Twitterhawk to look for mentions of your company or name.
• Add people who have mentioned your company or name on Twitter, then send them an @reply that says something like “Thanks for the mention!”
• Post links to your new blog posts and other news, but keep it to a minimum.
• Post at least once per day. Space your posts out — don’t just post one after the other.
• Interact with people who are following you. Build up a rapport.
• Keep your posts to under 140 characters — don’t post twice in a row because you have so much to say about one thing.
• Use your Bio to let people know who you are and why you’re here.
• Fill out the homepage URL field in your profile with your website.
• Retweet (RT) links and Tweets you find interesting and relevant to your industry. The user you RT’d will appreciate it — this is the highest form of Twitter flattery.
• Think before you Tweet. If you mess up, many of your followers will have software that automatically downloads posts, and they will still be able to read your deleted post.
• Use Direct Messages when you need to send someone a private message.
• Use tinyurl.com or is.gd to shorten long links.
• Be interesting.
• Most importantly–Have fun with it!

Happy Tweeting!

By now, you’ve likely heard at least something about Twitter, the social networking website where users can “tweet” 140 characters at a time. People use Twitter for all kinds of stuff — keeping in touch with friends, finding out what’s going on at a particular place, joining conversations and, most important to this blog post, marketing.

How does a website where people seem to just be writing about everyday personal things — “What a beautiful day!” “Just saw a superlative movie!” “I’m eating food at a restaurant!” — have the potential to be a marketing platform? you may wonder.

Look closely at Twitter. Spend some time looking around at what people are saying, or, even better, type in a keyword at search.twitter.com. When you do that, you’ll start to notice something: Twitter has a ton of potential when it comes to marketing your business.

And businesses are no stranger to using Twitter as a marketing platform. Just look at Skittles — for one day a couple of weeks ago, going to Skittles.com brought up a search for “#skittles” on search.twitter.com, so any time a Twitter user mentioned Skittles, it’d show up in the search feed. Needless to say, a few jokers took the opportunity to write inappropriate remarks about the brand, but for the most part the chatter was positive. Skittles got exactly what they wanted: for people to talk about Skittles! And, hey, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now, so it clearly worked.

Countless other companies are already on Twitter, as they’ve quickly realized its social media marketing potential. Companies like Whole Foods, General Motors, Comcast and JetBlue use Twitter to actually interact with their customers, and they even provide customer service through it. That’s a brilliant way to use Twitter, since it seems customers truly appreciate when a human from a business actually takes the time to speak to them. A personal reply online seems so little and basic, but imagine how well this kind of customer service resonates with people.

It’s incredibly easy to make Twitter one-way and just send out self-promotional tweets, a mistake that countless businesses are making right now. Doing it that way is not only lazy, it’s a missed opportunity. Making it two-way (where you are actively replying to other users and engaging in conversation) is exactly how Twitter is meant to be used. Interaction is essential if you’re going to effectively use Twitter as a marketing platform.

Twitter is Down. I’m getting a 500 internal server on Twitter, and my twitter finger is starting to twitch. I’m not really sure what to do now … just sort of sitting here staring at the screen … Do I call the police? The National Guard? Barack Obama?

Twitter Having a Ruby on Rails Scalability Problem?

Theories abound around here of why Twitter is down, though the prevailing one is that it’s Ruby, and that from our Ruby on Rails programmer. There is an inherent Ruby on Rails scalability problem, and it’s causing me, and millions more jittery twitters some unease.

“Twitter is Down” Timekiller

Ok, since Twitter is down, and you might have some time to kill, why not comment here on one of these questions:

1. Why is Twitter down?
2. What do you do when you can’t Tweet?
3. What horrible worldwide implications will the Twitter outage have?
4. What will we do if Twitter never comes back up?

… what’s that? Twitter’s back up now? um … ok, gotta’ go now, you can catch me on my Twitter about SEO, but you feel free to hang around here and answer the poll