Increasing Your Facebook Friends & Twitter Fo...

I received a question on my Formspring account, which you can reach at www.formspring.me/erinblaskie, which asked, “What do you recommend people do to grow their Facebook and Twitter following?”

Growing your Twitter and Facebook following can feel like a daunting task. You start with a profile and an empty list of friends / fans and followers and you might feel as though you’re Twittering and Facebooking to dead air at first. Growing your following is not something that you can purchase or learn about in an e-book so let me save you a few dollars and talk about some natural ways to go about doing this.

Let’s first look at Twitter. When you create your Twitter account, you have the option to search for friends. If you’ve already created your account, you can still access this area by going to the account menu, in the new Twitter, and clicking on “Who to Follow.” From there, choose the “Find Friends” option.

Twitter allows you to check LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and MSN Messenger to see who you are connected to in those places. Once Twitter does a search of each location, it will show you a list of people you already know that are also using Twitter. I recommend checking these sites at least once per month because as your Gmail and LinkedIn contacts grow, you might find new people to follow.

Facebook has a very similar feature to Twitter. While logged into Facebook, click on “Account” and then on the left-hand side of the webpage, click on “Find Friends.” Here, you can search through Hotmail, Yahoo, Live Messenger, Gmail and other tools to find friends that you know that use Facebook. As with Twitter, make sure to check back at least once per month.

These first two options will allow you to naturally grow your following with people you know. This is a great option because people will be more inclined to follow, interact and engage with you when they already have a relationship with you. However, if you are looking to build a following based on a strategy you have, each site also has ways to locate people.

Twitter has many directory sites setup all over the Internet. WeFollow.com, Twellow.com, etc. are examples of these directories and they categorize Twitterers into searchable directories. They operate much like your Yellow Pages does but are setup for Twitter instead.

Facebook is a bit trickier but what you can do is look for groups and pages that are topic-based and then follow / friend some of the people who are active inside of that group.

Lastly, make sure that you have social media icons everywhere promoting your profiles on each site. Link to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and wherever else you have accounts setup to ensure that people can easily find you.

How to Have a Fun (and Successful!) Tweet-Up...

Guest post today by Pat Romain of Vizion VA

If you are not familiar with the term “ tweet-up”, a tweet-up happens when a bunch of people who have initially connected through Twitter actually take it upon themselves to meet in person. A tweet-up is a fun way to meet your online friends and have a drink or a meal with them, it’s also a great way to expand your network with people who have the same interest as you; but such a meeting can actually come off very akward and highly disorganized; imagine all those online folks come out from behind their computers what would they actually talk about? (Preferably in more than 140 characters).

If you decided that you want to host a tweet-up, then kudos to you, but if you have no idea where to start, this blog post should help.  A tweet-up is just like any other meet-up; you have to plan and organize your tweet-up in advance to have a successful, and most importantly, a fun event because trust me… those people on Twitter love FUN. It also depends on what you want to achieve by hosting an event like this but let’s get clear, I don’t believe that you should go into any networking event with ulterior money making motives, it should be about the people and getting to know them.

Here are some key points that I have found to be helpful when organizing a tweet-up:

1. Plan your event in advance: I know that you are totally excited to meet your online friends if this is the first time you are doing this but don’t wait until the last minute to start organizing your tweet-up.
2. If you plan to have more than 6 people come, book a venue or at least reserve a spot at a restaurant, and go visit it beforehand, it would not be fun to get to the place on that day and discover that there is no WIFI, you know that your Twitter friends are going to tweet while at the event make it easy for them; don’t forget to think of your #hashtag for the event.
3. Be the first to arrive, you are the organizer, nothing is worse than arriving after the guests have arrived, this is not the time to make an entrance, this is your event own it!
4. Say no to open bar. PERIOD. You also want to be clear on the billing for food and drink, if you are giving one free non-alcoholic drink, what about the meal? Who pays for what? If everyone pays for their own meal and drinks , you should specify that.
5. If you are hosting an event with more than five people get good name tags and pens for them to write their Twitter name, yes their Twitter name since that is what we know them by.
6. Use a site like eventbrite.com or meetup.com to administer the details of the tweet-up: to know exactly who is going to show up but always plan for a bit more people, to list the event details for you tweeple to see like the address of the venue and the hours the tweet-up is taking place and all other services that could be available for them to get there (transportation etc..)
7. Make sure that you get your twitter followers involved in the process so that they can tell their followers who are going to be in the area that the event is coming up and where to sign up . Tweeple’s (Twitter people) are really good at spreading the word.
8. Decide on the mood that you want at your tweet-up: determine whether you want a casual-let’s-talk-about-Apple-products-over-a-glass-of-wine event or something really formal where you have booked a speaker.  Then, make sure that your Twitter friends know exactly what’s up.

Now that you have everything figured out, it’s time to have fun, meet new people and mingle!

Free Teleseminar: LinkedIn for Virtual Assistants...

Most virtual assistants are not setup with LinkedIn yet and those who are seem to be missing some key ingredients to making their time on LinkedIn really worth their while. LinkedIn can be a key place to generate new business, gain exposure and network and the best part – it is free! Between the regular profile and the company profile options, there are many places to connect to other entrepreneurs and build a solid following.

During this free teleseminar with Erin Blaskie, you will learn:

• How to setup your profile on LinkedIn
• How to setup and connect your company profile on LinkedIn
• How to utilize the various areas of the site for maximum exposure
• Where to look for potential clients on LinkedIn
• and more…

Date: Monday, November 22, 2010
Time: 7PM ET (6PM CT, 5PM MT, 4PM PT)

Register your seat in this free teleseminar by clicking here.

(Please note: if you receive an error that you are already subscribed, that’s great news! You’ll receive the dial-in information and the event info a few days prior to the actual teleseminar.)