This is a guest post by Kit Pierce. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Facebook is introducing a new design to every profile in their network of 750 million people and counting. It’s called Timeline, and fortunately for business owners, the change will be more helpful than frustrating.

Starving artists, Smartphone repair shops, and car dealerships alike will benefit from Timeline’s introduction, particularly when it comes to marketing. Regardless of what your business is, Timeline contains new features you’ll be able to take advantage of.

Signage

Every Timeline profile begins with a banner that spans the entire width of the browser. It’s an image of your choice and it’s called the cover photo. Here you have a free billboard for promoting your latest sale, the hottest trend, or funniest ad in your campaign.

Put something in your cover photo that immediately grabs the attention of your audience–it’s the first thing your buyers and clients will see.

Content Presentation

After being lured in by the cover photo, whatever is immediately visible in the content of a page will be the next thing a customer looks at. Most people skim pages rather than read them, and Timeline’s layout does a great job of displaying updates that are eye-catching and relevant. It also makes it easier to find older posts than before.

If you post frequently, you’ll have a living, breathing profile, which prevents the consumer attrition that results when you leave a page dormant for any length of time. One more thing, you can and should mark the most important updates with a star, which lifts an update closer to the top of the profile and makes it easier to find.

Contact Information

We all use Google to find contact and address info when we need a lawyer or a bite to eat, but even the world’s best search engine occasionally produces questionable links. Instead of searching through some murky, ad-infested yellow pages site, a consumer can now head to your Timeline profile, where your contact information is right below the banner.

Your customers will easily find your address, email, and phone number at the top of the page. Take advantage of this area by keeping it updated and simple. Everyone Googling you will appreciate it!

The Timeline

Most businesses operate for years before gaining recognition. The namesake feature of the Timeline redesign gives you an easy way to record and display the ups and downs along your journey to the top. In the right hand corner of each profile, you can place a breakdown of all the years since the creation of your business. By clicking on an individual year, users can view photos and updates from that particular year.

Seize the opportunity to include some interesting material here. Apple, for example, has over a million Facebook Likes, and with Timeline, they can tell you who they selected as their eight biggest fans in 2010.

Popularity

Previously, a business profile sported a title and a button at the top for collecting Likes–nothing else. With the new layout, links for your YouTube channel, your blog, Twitter, additional content, and whatever else you use for the cause of marketing have been conveniently relocated to the top of the page.

Fill this area with all of your promotional tools. Here you can provide a link for a Fan of the Week page, exclusive downloadable content, or related videos and photos with visual appeal. There are dozens of ways you can use this space, but you have to be creative.

If you use Timeline the way it ought to be used, you’re going to get a lot of mileage out of the new layout. Just remember to use the right imaging for your audience, and to learn from the Timeline profiles of bigger companies. They can provide you with a lot of good ideas, even if you’re only selling fish bait. If you haven’t adopted the new layout yet, post some of the ways you plan on using the new Timeline below.

About the Author – Kit Pierce loves to read classic literature and blogs about human rights. In her spare time, she writes for attsavings. She’s interested in steampunk, likes watching funny cat videos, and enjoys discussions about philosophy.

Google+ (aka Google Plus and G+) is all the rage.  The Google+ social network is getting tested, talked about and turned on every day with new tips, tricks and tools.After you read more about Google+ and start using it, try some of the stuff listed below to help you get the most out of Google+.

1. Brand Your Website or Blog URL with Google+ – Thanks Chris Lang for sharing this one.  It’s a great way to brand your website or blog address so it forwards to your Google+ stream:

2. Use the Google Search Command – Thanks to Chris Brogan for reminding us how to use this Google search command to find interesting people on Google+ in niches or industries we’re interested in:

site:plus.google.com <WhatEverYou’reInterestedIn-WithoutTheAngledBrackets>

So for the term “marketing”, the search command would look like this: site:plus.google.com marketing

3. Improve Your Google+ Stream Display – If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, try G+me to collapse the Google+ stream into a real-time dashboard for a cleaner display:

4. Follow The Rules of The Road – Here’s some good discussion on Google+ Etiquette.

5. Become a Share Master – Here’s another Google Chrome extension called Extended Share for Google Plus that allows you to share what you’re posting to Google+ on your Facebook, LinkedIn, tumbler and Twitter accounts.

6. Meet New People – And another Chrome extension called Google Plus Directory that allow to meet new people, make new friend circles, and choose from over 200.000 Google Plus profiles.

7. Presenting Google+ – Need to do a Google+ presentation or just want a template that resembles Google+ theme?  Here it is.

8. Read All About It – The Google+ Startup Guide by Saidur (“Cy”) Hossain.

9. Read the ToS – An artist’s rendering of the Google+ Terms of Service, illustrated.

10. Do I Annoy You? – An article on How to Hide From Annoying People on Google+.

11. Show My Circles – Another Google Chrome extension, called Plus Minus, lets you select which Google Circles show up in your Google+ Stream.  It also allows you to easily mark individual or all posts as read, offers a wide-screen view so you can see more content without scrolling, and loads more posts automatically as you scroll down.  Sweet.

12. Make It Flow – This Google Chrome extension called Usability Boost for Google Plus will help you visualize the flow of information on Google Plus.

13. Over To You – Now it’s your turn.  What have you found cool, necessary or just plain fun for Google+?  Add your suggestion in the comments below.

Okay, I’ll add one more.  To keep an eye on the new Google Chrome extensions, apps, themes, etc. for Google+, visit the Chrome Web Store and search on Google+, G+, or ”Google Plus”.

Also, here’s one one more, the Google+ WordPress Plugin that displays your “googleCard” in your WordPress sidebar.

That’s it.  Circle Me on Google+.  I’ll be lookin’ for ya’.

Here are seven twitter tips, tricks and tools you can use to help with your twittering.

1. Custom Twitter Feed – Not so much a tool, but a tutorial on How To Make A Custom Twitter Feed For Your Website.  This article walks you through the css, javascript and html code you can use and customize to create your own look and feel for your twitter feed.

2. Socialping – “Serious Twitter monitoring, for serious people and serious companies” is the tagline for Socialping.

“Socialping is a powerful solution for monitoring, receiving instant notifications, and responding to anything that matters to you on Twitter.”

3. post.ly – “The dead simple way to post everything everywhere.”

post.ly is from the fine folks at posterous.  “post.ly is your one stop shop for posting everything to Twitter (and beyond).”

Not only can you tweet, you can attach a file to your tweet.  Your post goes to your posterous blog as well as other social networking services such as twitter and facebook.

You can add more than a 140 characters of text to your post as well.

4. Epics3 – Epics3 is a way to share photos on twitter while making money with Google Adsense using your GA account.  You can also link Epics3 to your Amazon S3 storage for your photos that are used with Epics3.  Check it out.

5. Seesmic Look – Seesmic Look is the new twitter client from Seesmic that’s been optimized for Windows 7.  Look has an amazing UI that makes it fun to use.  It offers the typical twitter actions like sending a tweet, searching, trending topics, as well as twitter lists.  You can set your view to display a typical twitter timeline as well as a playback mode that fades messages in and out.

6. Twitter during Office Hours – In his article How to Use Twitter During Office Hours, Amit of Digital Inspiration discusses the different ways you can get your tweets out when you’re not allowed to tweet during office hours and how to use twitter without letting anyone know. Find out what tool will allow you to get tweets directly into your Outook inbox.

7. SocialVisor – SocialVisor runs as a twitter and facebook ticker across the top of your screen.  Dubbed as “The Twitter and Facebook application for people who have a life”, SocialVisor allows you to view conversations as threaded chats, create groups that combine your twitter and facebook friends, and other tasks.

Have fun!!

If you’re a business and haven’t integrated social media with your business, here are 10 steps to get you going.  You don’t have to do all of them. Grab a couple and get going.

1. Start a Blog – What do you do with a blog?  Your company blog should focus on the company’s expertise and knowledge and how that can help potential customers even at the blog post level.  Don’t just outline what you can do for them IF they become clients or customers, do it NOW in a blog post.  Give them something that will help them now.  Post to the blog on a regular basis if possibly.  Let people know you’re alive.

If a potential customer comes to your company’s blog, you want up-to-date blog posts.  Decide realistically how often someone can blog about your business.  An informative, knowledge-rich blog post once a week or two can go a long way.  I recommend 300-600 words if appropriate for your business.  Heck, give them your editorial schedule if applicable.  That way they’ll look forward to it.

2. Blog Posts – What type of blog posts to include on your business blog? Informative information about your product or service.  Not a diatribe that talks around your product or service but something that conveys your expertise.

What would you like to read about a product or service you’re about to invest in? Yea, we all like to visit a business website for a quick overview of what your business is about, but a “live” blog tells us your heart is beating.

Does it make sense in your business to provide case studies? How about lists that can help potential customers right away when they visit your blog: “10 steps you can take now to improve your _____.”

3. Who should Blog? – Who should write the blog posts in your company?  How about the people who work in the business and are excited about what they do and what the company does?  Can you provide an incentive for employees who write blog posts for the company like going home early to write a blog post?  Closer parking to the front door?  Jeans day, or two or three?  Find the champions of the biz, the “Go Doers”.

4. The Company Newsletter – Sure you’ve got a newsletter or everyday news that you update on part of your website, but how about cutting it up into 140 characters or less and get it out using Twitter.  Can you cut up your newsletter into small 140 character chunks of news that you can sprinkle out over twitter every 2-3 or 3-6 hours during the day.  Post to twitter a total of 12 times a day or 8 or 6, whatever makes sense for you.

Use HootSuite to enter all or some of your tweets for the day with links back to an appropriate page on your blog or website for more information about a specific tweet.  Use HootSuite’s scheduler to send them out over the course of the day.  Don’t spam by selling and selling and selling.

5. Twitter – Talking about twitter, create one account to get started and then over time consider adding more twitter accounts if you can manage them.  Ask the question, “Can we split the focus using multiple twitter accounts and how would that help us?”

Let’s say you have a business twitter account with general information and news, and a second account that just tweets the deals of the day, assuming you’re in an industry that has products for sale, etc.  Can you take that model and apply it to your business.

However, if you’re using twitter, try to remain active with one account before splitting it up into multiple twitter accounts.  Can you provide tweets 1-3 times a day?  I would set no less than 3 tweets spanned over your typical work day (8-5) to start.  Don’t tweet multiple tweets at the same time.  Ask your twitter followers to retweet by simpling saying, “Please Retweet.”  Don’t over do it though.  Make sure it makes sense.  Also, leave 10-15 characters out of the maximum 140 characters for retweeting.

Just like the blog posts, are there employees who are champions for the company that can setup the tweets for an incentive.  Also, do you email employees about contests and winners of those contests?  Let’s say you’re a sponsor of a local sports team and you’re giving away tickets to those games.  Get that news out of the company and congratulate the people who won the tickets out on twitter as well.  This is one way that lets people outside your company know what you’re doing for employees.  But don’t be fake about it, be real, there are real people watching and listening.

6. Videos – Can you create videos under 5 minutes to help your potential customers?  You can use Screenr for free to record less than 5 minute videos that you can then upload to YouTube.  While on YouTube, create a Channel that people can subscribe to and put a link on your blog that points to your YouTube channel, encouraging visitors to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

When you upload your video to YouTube, make sure you put a link to your blog or relevant article back to your blog or website in the description area of the video.  Pick meaningful tags as well but don’t over do it.  Check out what other companies in your field are doing on YouTube and use that as an example.

7. Social Networking – Are some messages too short for email inside your company?  Can departments become more effecient if they use a tool kind of like twitter to communicate but not instant messaging?  If you have your own email domain, for example yourcompany.com, then consider joining your email domain to Yammer.  Yammer is just like twitter except it’s for inside the company only.  It uses your email domain to keep messages inside your company.

8. Research – Watch your brand.  Investigate your competitors.  Research what people are talking about that relates to your product or service.  Social media services like twitter allow you to search on specific words and phrases to alert you of any discussion that you’re interested in.  Use Google Alerts so you get emails or subscribe to those alerts in an RSS reader.

Subscribe to key blogs in your industry by using Google Reader.  You can read through the news in your industry quickly with an RSS reader like Google Reader.

9. Facebook – Facebook pages are all the rage.  Don’t just create a “normal” facebook account and think you’re done.  Create a page that includes some of the built-in facebook apps like videos, links, a full-fledged welcome screen, link your blog posts to your facebook page, discussions if appropriate, photos, notes polls, etc.

10. Time – Yes, it all takes time so don’t forget your main product or service.  That comes first.  Make your product or service killer and people will flock to it and tell other people about it.  No social media campaign will make mediocrity better.  There are ways to tweak your social media time and I’ll be exploring them here so make sure you subscribe.

Here are 5 twitter tool resources you can use to help enhance your twitter endeavors.

1. Twitter to FeedBurner

Not so much a tool but a find by Amit over at Digital Inspiration is the fact that you can now link your twitter account with your FeedBurner.

If you’re a blogger and use FeedBurner, head over to your FeedBurner account and select the Publicize tab at the top, then the Socialize link on the left to set some of the details on how FeedBurner should handle your blog posts to twitter, then activate the feature.

2. Mr. Milestone

Mr. Milestone is a feature of the Twitter Tag Project.  You follow Mr. Milestone and it will tweet your follower milestones on twitter.  It will tweet for every 100 followers you gain and then starting at your 1,000th follower it will tweet every 1,000th after that.

3. Twitter Backgrounds

Love these free twitter backgrounds you can get over at Nicholas Patten’s blog.  They serve as wallpaper as well.

Also, check out The 35 Coolest Twitter Backgrounds over at Design Superhero.  Now all we need is an auto-twitter-background-rotator to keep our followers coming back to see what new background we’ve got displayed.

4. Tracking Twitter

Check out 10 Twitter Tools To Help You Track And Perform Better over on the SocialMouths blog.

Tools in the article that I haven’t seen include SocialMention, a tool which gathers data from all social sites and not just Twitter to analyze your twitter presence.

5. Tweet Schedulers

Over on TwiTip there’s a list of 11 Websites to Schedule Your Tweets Online for Free.  I’ve talked about HootSuite before and I use it to schedule some of my tweets but as this article lists, there are more tweet schedulers out there.

One note on HootSuite, you can now include twitter lists so you can keep a column or two in view, dedicated to your twitter lists.  Pretty cool.  Have fun!!

Social Media Marketer and Viral Marketing Scientist Dan Zarrella wrote an eBook called The Science of ReTweets.

Here are 15 Takeaways from The Science of ReTweets to help you with your Twitter ReTweets.

1. Viral Ideas

“We can now compare millions of viral ideas to uncover the building blocks of contagiousness.”

“”Re-Tweets may seem like a small idea.  But the small idea is the first real window into how ideas spread from person to person.”

2. More Followers bring More ReTweets

Maybe not.  The data shows that while users with more followers will get more ReTweets, some users are able to get lots of ReTweets without lots of followers; their content must be more contagious.

3. Links

If you provide a link in a tweet, chances are higher that it will be shared, ReTweeted.

4. URL Shorteners

Tweets that contained links using the URL Shorteners bit.ly, ow.ly and is.gd were all more ReTweetable than the older, longer, tinyurl.

5. Words & Phrases

The Science of ReTweets lists 20 Most ReTweetable Words & Phrases.  You’ll have to download the eBook to find out what they are.  But, it was concluded that one phrase, “New Blog Post” is the common prefix used when a person Tweets about a new blog post.  It tells us that Tweeting your blog post is a very smart thing to do.

If you head over to Twitter Search and type in “New Blog Post” filter:links or “Blog Post” filter:links you’ll see a constant stream of “New Blog Post” Tweets arrive on the twitter search results page.

6. Least ReTweetable Words

There’s also a list of Least of 20 Least ReTweetable Words.  Use these words, and your likely to get less ReTweets.

7. Nine More Stats

1. It was discovered that Tweets with a bit more syllables were ReTweeted more than less-complex (less syllables) Tweets.
2. ReTweets required 6.13 years of schooling.  
3. Novelty or “Newness” is important to ReTweeting.
4. Noun and 3rd-person heaviness of ReTweets, indicating a subject matter and headline type nature.
5. ReTweets contained more punctuation than non-ReTweets.
6. Hyphens, periods and colons are the most ReTweetable punctuation.
7. Positive Tweets are more ReTweetable than negative ones.  Positive Tweets include Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities.  Negative Tweets include Tweets about emotions, sensations, sear words and self-reference.
8. Want to know when the best time to get ReTweeted is?  Download the eBook (page 20).
9. Want to know what days are the most ReTweetable?  Download the eBook (page 21).

Dan Zarrella also has a book out called The Social Media Marketing Book.

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Want to make money online with your twitter stream or any other social media stream?  In-Stream advertising is the answer, or is it?

What is In-Stream Advertising?

Using twitter for this example, In-Stream Advertising is placing ads in your twitter stream to promote someone else’s product or service.

Now some folks might say, “NEVER!!  I would never subject my twitter followers to advertising in my twitter stream.”  And that’s certainly fine.

How Does it Work?

Two ways (for this article):

1. Sponsored Tweets – Sign up for a Sponsored tweets and they will analyze your twitter account and recommend how much you could make per tweet.

2. Ad.ly – Sign up for an Ad.ly account and they’ll analyze your twitter account and recommend how much you could make per week.

How Much Can I Make?

Well, if you read ShoeMoney’s How To Make 15,000.00 In 1 Month Just By Tweeting and Do Not Miss The Ad.ly Boat, you’ll discover the potential.

Case Study

Here’s one user’s way of doing it who is not a celebrity at anything, a normal Joe who works 9-5, but also made a bit on sending out tweets as advertisements.

1. Join a service that automatically finds followers who will follow you back.  This is a big step in and of itself.  With this step, you’ll have to realize that you might end up with some people you might not be seeking to follow you, like spammers.  So with this first step, you give up the, “I’m only going to follow quality people and only allow quality people to follow me.”
2. Let that grow automatically for six months.  You should get to about 15,000 followers after six months.
3. Set up this twitter account to send out tweets from an RSS feed on a specific topic (niche) every 3 hours or 6 hours.  At this point, you’ll have a twitter account growing automatically, sending out specific (niche) information in each tweet.
4. Try to interact with people in a normal, personal way by conversing with real people and re-tweeting tweets that you like and maybe occasionally related to your niche.  At this point you have some auto-tweeting going on while you’re away from twitter, you have real interaction with real people when you’re available to tweet and you’re promoting other tweets that you find helpful and interesting by re-tweeting.
5. Join Sponsored Tweets.  If you’re around 15,000 followers, you might end up making around $20.00 a tweet.  If you get publishers to send you their tweets to tweet, maybe 1 tweet every 2-3 days, you’ll make a $100.00 around a months time.

The Outcome

Follow these steps and you won’t lose any followers because you’re using a service that automatically finds followers for you, whether you lose some followers because of the ads or not.

“I Don’t Know About This”

Now, this isn’t the way twitter was intended to be used.  It’s rather a cold way to go about growing twitter followers. But, it might work.  Or it might fizzle out from a paid tweets point of view.  Why?

There is a measurement around the quality of tweets and interaction you have with your followers.  A great tool to analyze yourself and others is Twitalyzer.  Twitalyzer will show you categories like Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity, and Clout to help you improve your tweeting.

There are some great conversations around ads in your twitter stream and you can start with Robert Scoble’s More thoughts on in-Tweet advertising and the accompanying comments and links to other articles about In-Stream Advertising.

Also, don’t forget about a simple twitter search on in-stream.

Twitter lists are here and everyone’s talkin’ about ‘em, and figuring out how to use ‘em.  The folks over at twitter are putting the finishing touches on lists and giving access to a lot more people.

You can create two types of lists: Public and Private.  I’ll explain both and offer ways to use them.

1. Public Lists

To get started using twitter lists, make sure you have the ability to create lists.  You’ll know you can create lists if you see the following screen when you login to twitter’s home page.  You’ll also see a New list link on the right side of the page.

Click image for larger view

Click Create a new list and name it whatever you want (25 characters maximum).  Start adding people you follow or people who follow you, or anyone else you find on twitter.  You don’t have to follow someone on twitter to add them to a list.  Likewise, they don’t have to be following you to add them to a list.

People and Categories

One way to start using lists is to place people in categories that are meaningful to you.  So, as suggested by the screen shot above, put family members in a family list, co-workers in a co-workers list, etc.  Pretty straight forward.

Feel free to be creative with your lists.  You don’t have to try and label people how they want to be labeled.  If Johnny wants to be known as an SEO expert and Suzy wants to be know as a Social Media expert, you don’t have to create lists just for those categories of people.

So if you want to put a bunch of bloggers who blog about blogging, seo and social media experts into one list called “incredible-people”, go ahead.  You can put one person in multiple lists.  So if you want to put Johnny in your “incredible-people” list and your “seo” list, go ahead.

Excluding People

List can be exclusionary.  Someone might think they should be in that “TopTweeples” list on that “Big Popular Website”.  I say, twitter is already exclusinoary.  You follow someone you hope will follow you and they don’t.  Oh well.

Reputation Management

How would you like to show up on a list called stupid-people, or something worse?  Not too cool.  What to do?  You can block the person who put you on that list and you’ll be removed from the list.  Voila!!

Time will tell how reputation management issues play out.

2. Private Lists

Private lists are just like public lists except you’re the only one who can view the list.  Not only that, the people you put on private lists won’t even know they’re on them.

If you think someone might block you for whatever reason, don’t follow them, put them on a private list.  Because if they block you after the fact, you won’t be able to follow them or put them on a list.

However, if someone has blocked you and you still want to follow their tweets, there is a way.  Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you that tip.

Want another tip on using twitter lists?  Again, if you subscribe to my newsletter, I’ll send you one more tip that I’m using to keep up with my favorite lists.