You’d be hard-pressed to find someone these days that isn’t a part of at least one social network. You should use this to your advantage. By joining, finding free ways to push your website development, you can get valuable incoming traffic. Social networking is one of the easiest ways to stay connected to friends and family, near and far. Sharing pictures, stories and sending messages are popular pastimes. This activity has spread into the business world and is now seen as a valuable marketing tool. Joining a social network is free so there’s no reason not to give it a try. This is a much more effective way of communicating than e-mail.

Which sites should you use? The following sites have been found by business owners to be the most appropriate: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube and MySpace. The results from each site are different for every business so don’t be afraid to test and track which ones yield the best outcome for your business. You can get started quite easily by just indicating your e-mail address and password. Using sites like these, you can create a page that tells all about you and your business. Look for friends, family and business associates who are also connected so you can keep up with what is going on in their lives and businesses as well. Let’s look at a site like Facebook. It is highly popular and can be beneficial for both business and personal use. In business terms, post links to your website when you launch new products, spin the newsletters or to publicise sales.

If you blog, post links to your newest blog posts (or to guest blog posts you’re doing elsewhere around the blogosphere). Draw attention to contests, invited guest bloggers or other events. Do you have an online radio show? You can invite friends to listen to live podcasts to learn more about your business. On a site like YouTube, you can post videos and add the links to your Facebook profile, Twitter stream, etc. Invite friends to view and leave comments. The beauty of these social sites is that business contacts and friends can distribute your links to other people who may be interested in what you do, as well. Quite possibly viral marketing at its best!

As any professional will tell you, always remember when promoting your blog or website within social networking arenas that you must not do so blatantly. Relax and get to know the people you are trying to reach out to. Be careful, because they say that social networking can be addictive. You should set boundaries and be somewhat cautious, but if you grow your business, this can be addictive by itself. Just like so many other online marketing tools, the name of the game is relationships. You can build meaningful ones not only with friends and family, but with your target audience and business associates on all the social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook of course, and others. Try and comment on your friends’ posts and surf to their links. As an Internet marketing tool, social networking works both ways. It’s not a means to an end, but is a fun way to market and grow your business. Above all else, remember that it is free!

In recent years, Twitter has grown enormously and has become a huge social platform. Marketers have discovered lately that Twitter is an awesome medium which they can use to meet people who share their interests, promote their products, and make money. However, there are fundamental steps to take in order to realize a profit, as well as to steer clear of potential marketing gaffes.

If you are really frustrated about the low response you are getting from your Twitter campaigns, it’s time you look into your marketing practices. While Twitter can be a magnificent marketing tool, it is often used incorrectly by people who make mistakes that aren’t so obvious to them. To use your Twitter campaign to the best advantage, you have to keep using the correct marketing practices and avoid making the simple errors that we will cover in this article.

If you’re using Twitter for online marketing, you need to keep a little professional distance; your followers shouldn’t know all the little details about your life. This is a huge mistake many Internet marketers commit while on Twitter. It’s pretty likely that the people in your follower niche aren’t interested in your weekend activities. Keep your tweets on topic; they need to be useful to your followers, and if they’re not seeing any good from your tweets, keep them to yourself.

It is important to give your Twitter account a human touch, a human face but not at the expense of your reputation. You do not want to give your customers information about your personal life at any time, but you should keep them updated with tips, techniques and other beneficial information. You want to maintain a strong, professional persona that your customers will be inclined to turn to when they need help.

The biggest mistake people make when using Twitter for promotion is to use it send out spam, tweets that will be ignored by the Twitter community due to their nature. Conveying information in a brief, uncomplicated manner, tweets should be similar to a dinner conversation carried on at your evening meal. The majority of people who are logging on to Twitter are there to socialize and enjoy themselves with like-minded people. Encountering spam in the form of advertising efforts from individuals they have never heard of generates bad feelings towards the topic and the sender. The solution? Present yourself as a guest looking to enjoy their dinner time chat with them rather than blatantly sell to them. Your tweets should be nothing but helpful. Oc course, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a promotional aspect. Once you have shared sufficient quality concepts, you may market something. If most of your tweets are helpful ideas and suggestions, and you recommend a product here and there, you’re going to be off to a good start and the results will start adding up. Gentle persuasion from a guest come for dinner will always go further than a suit-and-briefcase salesman. Your Twitter account needs to have a human face. Nobody wants to hang out with a corporate logo; they want to interact with other flesh and blood people. If you keep it real and give people helpful information, they will buy your products and services.

Another major problem that Twitter marketers run into is not giving enough information about their product. If people can’t easily see who you are, they will ignore you. You have to have an interesting bio with a photo. The first interaction you have with your prospect shouldn’t go in vain just because they couldn’t make you out. But always remember to keep things light in your biography. Many people that advertise on Twitter take themselves far too seriously, and lose prospects as a result. People log on to Twitter to socialize and have fun. Their lives might already be too hectic, so you shouldn’t really add to that. When you Tweet, your messages should be entertaining but not to the point of being off-putting. That will make more people interested in what you have to offer. Just don’t be too dry and colorless.

All communities flourish through dialogue, and Twitter is no exception as a forum for all kinds of individuals. Therefore, there will be very little reaction if your plan is to intermittently sign in to Twitter and leave a marketing tweet before hastily signing out. For the best, long-term Twitter results, be very careful not to make this sort of error.

It’s critical to remember that Twitter is a community and that you have to continue to participate on a regular basis if you expect to see positive results from your marketing efforts. That’s something a lot of marketers forget. Without giving, you can’t expect to receive. And as with most Twitter marketing mistakes, this, too, is easy to avoid. To best become a real part of the Twitter community, you should follow others in your intended niche and respond to the tweets they send in your direction. When you take part, the community will work for you. If you only tweet “one way” and don’t respond to the tweets that others send out, you can figure that your efforts are going to see very little return. It’s a very simple concept – if you want to use Twitter to market with, you have to create a receptive audience of regular followers. To be able to attract those followers you’ll need to offer value through helpful information in your tweets that people will want to read. These people will make you happy in your business endeavors if they receive a contribution. In general, if you use a little common sense, it will easy for you to avoid most marketing mistakes you could make using Twitter.

I hope many of you have heard of Likaholix. I did a post Likaholix: It’s about what you like (10 Beta Invites and Win Amazon Kindles) on it in March. Likaholix has been growing since then.

What is Likaholix?

You can think of it as a simple bookmarking site but it is just more then that. It is place where you share your likes. See what other likes and comment on them. Its way to show the world what you like. I have been a member of it since then and quite enjoyed it. I am not very active but its fun.

Why should I give a Damn about it? 

I got my invitation from it from ProBlogger – Darren Rowse who is still a very active member there. There are many popular people like Chris Pirillo, Dave Mcclure, iJustine, Jennifer Van Grove etc there. I know Chris Pirillo. He doesn’t get involved in any stuff if it is not useful.

Should I join?

Definitely, its fun and how you use it to your profit is up to you. Get known in the community. Likaholix is a very active community and growing bigger and bigger. It is not accessible to every one. To maintain their quality it is still invitation based. And also they conduct small contest every month where you can win many cash prizes. Currently 22 contest are still live.

So how to join if it is Invitation only?

Thats why I am here. I am going to share my personal Invite Link with you all. When you sign-up through a invite link, it means you will get accepted to join. Ok enough of chit-chat, here is the Inviation for Likaholix.

Whats in the current news. Its Twitter again. Lately Twitter is doing a lot of stuffs . And this time they released two new features. Just few days ago it enabled its users to report Spam Twitter Accounts. I normally used to block spammers but now I can also report about them. Previously if you wanted to report a Spam Account you had to DM and follow the Twitter Spam Watch Account. That was too much of bother but with release of this new feature we can stop the spammers. I believe this is a very useful feature. Whats your say?

In addition to the above feature, Twitter released one more feature called Twitter List. Its a very simple yet powerful feature. Now you can make a list out of people you follow on Twitter. You can group people as you wish. For example you can make a list of all blogger you know on Twitter. You can see the tweets from them when you visit the list. Imagine you make a list of close friends. You will never miss their tweets in the mess of other tweets.

If you have ever used Tweet Deck, then you will be knowing about the grouping feature in it. Twitter List Feature is basically the same thing with an addition of people being able able to see and follow your list. Setting up a list is very simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the “Create a new list” button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. Private list can only be seen by you.

On the right hand column of your Twitter homepage, you will see a new “lists” area under your bio. Clicking on this will take you to your list overview page where you can manage your own lists, as well as see other user’s public lists that you are a part of. Also, on user profile pages you will see that the users’ lists are now listed under the “Favorites” area in the right hand toolbar.

There is one thing to note, the list you make are not totally public. To view any list you need to be loged into your Twitter account. I do not know why this restriction was made. We will know more in future. I have already started building some lists. Currently they are private but some public list from me will come soon too. What do you think about this feature? Is it of any use to you?

Twitter is just not about getting more and more Twitter Followers but about building relationship with people. For this you need to find good and nice people whom you can follow and talk to. Twitter is a place where people love to share their life and many more things.

Finding good people is not easy. Human have this peculiar nature of finding faults in others people that they do not want to trust others. But you need to suppress this nature of yours and follow some people and then build relationship with them. Now you may be thinking where to find people to follow on Twitter.

Well I have compiled a few sources for you. They are below.

1. Twitter – You want to follow people on Twitter, so its a obvious source, isn’t it? To Find people you need to click the Find People link on Twitter (after signing in). You can find people by name,username etc. You can also try suggested users (not recommended) or find your friends on other networks like Gmail,Yahoo etc.
2. Twitter Holic – Twitter Holic is a service which ranks Twitter Users according to Twitter Followers. They have list of Top 1000 Twitter Users. I do not recommend following most of the Top 200s but there are some popular and nice Twitter there. Look once through the List you will find nice people. It may take time but will do good in long run.
3. We Follow – We Follow is a Twitter Directory where you can list yourself. All registered Twitter Users define their profiles with few tags. You can find people using this tags. For example if you want to see Twitter users who are bloggers, then see for blogger tag. This way you can find like minded people. There are many tags available.
4. Just Tweet It – Just Tweet It is also a Twitter Directory but it is manually maintained. Here also users list themselves using tags or rather categories. This directory is not very large, so finding people won’t be difficult. This will also help in finding like minded people.
5. Twellow – Twellow is probably the largest Twitter Directory and most well maintained. In this directory twitter users have extended Bio information and their profiles is tags using different keywords. You can use it to unfollow people but it is best used to find people who may have same interest as yours.

Now that I have given you 5 sources where you can find people whom you can Follow on Twitter, you should get to work. Follow some people build relationship. Increase you impact on Twitter. For starter, start by following me @GreatestReviews

How do you find people to follow on Twitter? What sources you use? Have you tried any of the above to find people you can follow?