Social media is a valuable tool for businesses and organizations. While game-changing in many ways, they are simply the latest in the evolution of tools that allow people to easily connect with one another. Ultimately, it’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of social media is to generate interest in your product.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Friendster, MySpace, Xanga, etc… Anyone who has internet is familiar with these sites. Some of these sites have faded (Friendster, Xanga, etc.), leaving decaying individual’s profile. Yet, the fact remains that social media is of essential importance to anyone hoping to expand their brand. So the question is “Should companies focus on one social media platform to ensure success?”

In a blink of an eye, something beyond your control might affect the way you reach your target audience, especially when you just rely everything in just one social media platform. Take for example – Facebook.

Whether you’re a fan of change or not, it’s coming quickly to the social media giant, Facebook. They basically just dropped a bombshell and instantly changed the way we communicate online with their new newsfeed, timelines, subscriptions and a myriad of other enhancements and updates. However, if you have a fan page, you might have noticed a drop off in the amount of interaction you are getting on it. Facebook said they want to make it easier for people to connect on the web. But we have yet to find out what good does the new changes bring to Facebook pages.

See, this is what we have to understand. If our brand just circles around Facebook and if it’s the only way we communicated with our clients because we haven’t diversified enough and use other platforms, these changes could have badly hurt our business. Email, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Google, SEM, SEO, phone calls, QR codes, texting and prints all need to be used in conjunction with one another to drive people to your home base, which is your self-hosted blog. That is the only thing that you control! And if Twitter goes away tomorrow and you use other mediums to communicate with your clients, you will not be badly hurt & crippled. You cannot afford to put all of your eggs in one basket.

The first step of a successful (and long term) social media plan is to spread your brand everywhere you can and the main goal is to drive people to your site and give them a ton of quality content that will keep them coming back. More than ever, it’s important that you have a web presence. Especially in a Real Estate business, since it’s is no longer a short term -transaction game, but a long term relationship building process, that would definitely be  strengthen by having a web presence. Your own website or a self hosted blog is the only thing that you have a 100% control over, so it is where your time needs to be spent first.

Here’s a pratical takeaway:  Google your personal name and your company’s name. What comes up? If you don’t see anything about yourself or your business, none of the other billions of people online will see it either and you know wha to do.

Facebook, YouTube and Google dominate in their categories. Canadians love our banks’ online banking websites, too! Meanwhile, MLS continues to dominate activity in Canada’s real estate industry.

The top 10 overall websites for traffic were: 1) Facebook (12.52 per cent of all traffic); 2) Google Canada (9.26 per cent) ; 3) Windows Live Mail (4.34 per cent); 4) YouTube (4.21 per cent); 5) MSN Canada (2.17 per cent); 6) Google (1.72 per cent); 7) Yahoo! Canada (1.30 per cent); Bing (1.27 per cent); 9) Yahoo! Mail Canada (1.16 per cent); 10) Sympatico.ca (0.96 per cent).

The top five search engines: 1) Google Canada (65.68 per cent); 2) Google (12.18 per cent); 3) Bing (9.03 per cent); 4) Ask (3.60 per cent); 5) Yahoo! Canada Search (2.79 per cent). It’s pretty clear that Google continues to dominate the Canadian search engine landscape, leaving all others in the dust. You know you’ve arrived when your brand name has become a verb.

The top five social media websites: 1) Facebook (64.52 per cent); 2) YouTube (21.72 per cent); 3) Twitter (0.98 per cent); 4) Meebo (0.79 per cent); 5) Badoo (0.78 per cent). Of the 15 other websites showing up on the Top 20 list, Google Plus is nowhere to be found. Note the complete dominance of Facebook and YouTube. Together, they account for a phenomenal 86.24 per cent of all social media website traffic in the country. Incredible!

Hitwise also ranks sites in banking, travel, real estate and entertainment.

The top five banking websites: 1) TD Canada Trust Online Banking (12.36 per cent); 2) Royal Bank of Canada Online Banking (11.30 per cent); 3) Desjardins Online Banking (8.52 per cent); 4) TD Canada Trust (7.50 per cent); 5) Royal Bank of Canada.

The top five travel websites: 1) Google Maps Canada (16.98 per cent); 2) Google Maps (4.46 per cent); 3) Take Off Eh! (3.99 per cent); 4) Expedia Canada (3.22 per cent); 5) Air Canada (2.20 per cent).

The top five real estate websites: 1) Realtor Canada – also known as MLS (25.81 per cent); 2) RE/MAX Quebec (5.31 per cent); 3) Duproprio.com (4.42 per cent); 4) ComFree.com (2.89 per cent); 5) Century 21 Canada Real Estate (2.49 per cent). Moncton-based Property Guys is in ninth place with 1.79 per cent of total visits.

The top five websites featuring entertainment personalities: 1) People Magazine (14.00 per cent); 2) TMZ.com (9.15 per cent); 3) PerezHilton.com (5.98 per cent); 4) Zimbio (5.79 per cent); 5) CelebEdge – Canada (3.51 per cent).

And finally, here are the top 10 search terms (written exactly as they are being searched for) for the week ending August 6: 1) facebook (5.42 per cent); 2) youtube (1.91 per cent); 3) facebook login (1.64 per cent); 4) kijiji (0.39 per cent); 5) www.facebook.com (0.31 per cent); 6) facebook.com (0.26 per cent); 7) plenty of fish (0.25 per cent); 8) google (0.25 per cent); 9) you tube (0.23 per cent); 10) fb (0.17 per cent).

Of all the terms searched for in Canadian cyberspace, Facebook-related searches account for five, while YouTube accounts for two – meaning that seven of the Top 10 searches only involve two websites. That’s pretty impressive, if you ask me! And again, Google Plus isn’t even on the radar.

° Brian Cormier is a writer, blogger and communications consultant. Social Media Matters appears every Friday. E-mail:brian@briancormier.com. Website: www.briancormier.com. Twitter: @BrianCormier. Facebook: facebook.com/briancormierreaders

There are a lot of great tracking tools available but one that I’ve been checking out is Monitter. There is a lot to like about Monitter and I could see it being very useful for business.

Monitter is a tracking tool for Twitter that enables you to enter multiple keywords that you want to monitor and then to watch any tweets that mention these words in real time. So if you’re a real estate agent for example, you can enter the keywords, “House for Sale”, “Selling A House” or “Looking for a Real Estate Agent”. This will give you the live streaming of tweets that contain those keywords & quickly respond & maybe if you’re lucky & resourceful enough to find their contact number or email,  you can give the one who posted the tweet a call or an email and who knows you can get a buyer or a seller  just that simple.

Other great thing about Monitter is you can refine your search and monitor by location. You can add a location and specify a distance from that location that you want to monitor tweets from, so you can really target your search to specific areas that your business covers.

Overall I think this is a very useful tool. Particularly for growing your twitter network and finding the right people for your business at literally the right time. Plus it’s very easy to use, you can simply connect it to your existing twitter account.

Businesses everywhere are beginning to use Twitter to interact with customers & clients. Invite your clients to use Twitter.  They can follow you and you can follow them. You can all exchange information and ideas. You could notify them of your new listings, open houses, share links you think they might enjoy or find informative. Basically, you can build your very own Twitter real estate community.

The key is to just give Twitter a try. It is free. You only need to set up your account, find some people to follow, write some tweets for a few weeks, and see how things go. As you start having some fun with it and get involved in the community, you are sure to uncover new opportunities to use the service to help your business. (Twitip is a site you can visit to get a lot of useful information about Twitter)

What makes it more amazing is that Twitter has dozens of 3rd party applications. One of them applications that I find very useful is Twitter Counter.  Twitter Counter provides statistics of Twitter usage which includes your number of tweets & retweets, how many followers you have (graphed out by week, month, 3 months or 6 months) and it also gives you a prediction of how many followers you’ll gain in a certain timeframe based on past performance. It’s so easy to use and you can just get your Twitter stats via email.

In marketing, you can never have enough statistics. This can definitely help you work toward your goals and assess progress with your social media efforts.

We’re on the last day so we’re going to show real ninja moves today.  So buckle your seat blast and let’s get this show on the road!!

Day 5 – Advanced

This lesson will cover a number of advanced tools you can use to enhance your Twitter experience

• Power Twitter demo
• Scheduling Tweets for later dates/times
• Twitter Grader demo
• Using RSS Feeds to automate relevant Tweets

Day 5 Video 1 – Power Twitter

Day 5 Video 2 – Scheduling Tweets

Day 5 Video 3 – New Followers View

Day 5 Video 4 – RSS Feeds To Twitter

You’re almost done!  I hope you’re practising what you’ve learned.  Today’s a big day, we’ll be covering Twitter search, understanding search and feeds can be they heart of lead generation so take good notes and use your imagination for each technique.

Day 4 – Searching

• This lesson will cover both basic and advanced search features in Twitter
• Using search.twitter.com
• Using search results as feeds for alerts and lead generation
• How to use Twitter to do market research
• How to leverage trending topics
• Search tips – how to know which keywords to search for

Video 1 Day 4 – Search Basics

Video 2 Day 4 – Trending Topics

Video 3 Day 4 – What To Search For

Video 4 Day 4 – Search Feeds

Previous Lessons:

Day 1 – Introduction and Account Setup

Day 2 – Following

Day 3 – Tweeting

You’ve made it to Day 3 and you are more than half way through your 5 days to mastering Twitter!  Let’s get started.

Day 3 – Tweeting

This lesson will cover all the various styles and scenarios for sending Tweets

• Making statements as Tweets
• @ Replies and Re-Tweeting
• Tweets with promotional links to your stuff
• Tweets with links promoting others in your network
• Tweets with cool/interesting stuff
• How to write Tweets that get noticed

Day 3 – Video 1 – Tweeting Basics.

Day 3 – Video 2 – What to Tweet.

Previous Lessons:

Day 1 – Introduction and Account Setup

Day 2 – Following

Welcome to Day Two!  This is going to be a fun day!

This lesson will cover the basics of following people and getting followers:

• Following people you already know
• Finding new people to follow
• Friend or Follow utility
• When to unfollow someone
• Unfollowing people who are not following you

Day 2 – Video 1 – Following other followers.

Day 2 - Video 2 - Following via Blogs.

Day 2 - Video 3 - Following with Keywords.

Day 2 – Video 4 – Following TwitterGrader.

Day 2 – Video 5 – Following Lists.

Day 2 – Video 6 – Getting Followers

Day 2 – Video 7 – Unfollowing

Previous Lessons

Day 1 – Introduction and Account Setup

Over the course of the next 5 days, you are going to learn how to tap into one of the largest sources of traffic online today, Twitter. Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks and is also one of the most widely used websites on the entire Internet. The potential for marketers to find hot prospects for ANY market has never been so readily available! With Twitter, any person can tap into a global conversation, in real time and directly engage with any person who is talking about a topic that they are interested in. Having said all of that, I don’t really need to spend any more time selling you on the concept of Twitter. You bought this product so you are already sold. Let’s dive right into what you will be learning.

The following graphic is a summary of your next 5 days of education:

Day 1 – Account Setup

• Learning how to create a Twitter account with a proper profile
• Creating a customized Twitter background for a more personal touch
• Sending your first set of introductory Tweets
• Evaluating and choosing Twitter clients that meet your needs.

* Day 1 is a one time set of exercises. Once you have completed Day 1, you will not have to repeat any of these steps in order to use Twitter effectively. You will, however, want to revisit Day 1 every once in a while to make sure your profile remains up to date.

Note About The Next 4 Days

While Day 1 was a stand alone lesson, Days 2 through 5 can be seen more as an accumulation of knowledge and expertise. Each day will build on the previous day and these 4 lessons should be repeated over and over again as you develop your Twitter skill set.

So Let’s get Started!!

Remember it takes a bit of time for the Videos to load please be patient.

Day 1 Video 1 - Learning how to create a Twitter account with a proper profile

Day 1 Video 2 - Creating a customized Twitter background for a more personal touch

Day 1 Video 3 - Sending your first set of introductory Tweets

Day 1 Video 4 – Evaluating and choosing Twitter clients that meet your needs

I was reading Techcrunch and few stats popped out.

1. Twitter now processes 50,000,000, yes 50 MILLION tweets per day.

2. 50% are not in english, more or less.

So if we do some quick math, let me see here, carry the four, yep, that’s 25 million english tweets per day or:

9,125,000,000 (9 Billions Tweets a Year and Growing!!!)

Honestly, do we really have that much to talk about?  I love twitter , I use it, I get my news from it, I tweet my news and news which is important to me from it.  This post will go out to the tweet universe for people to read.

What’s my point?

Once again I will state loudly, SOCIAL MEDIA IS HERE, IT IS NOT GOING AWAY, LEARN TO USE IT AND INTEGRATE IT IN YOUR BUSINESS.

Nuff, said!