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Even though Twitter doesn’t have as many followers as Facebook isn't growing as fast as Pinterest it is still a vital cornerstone of any social media marketing plan. Twitter does drive traffic to your website and it does contribute to new leads for businesses websites. In fact, businesses with over 1,000 twitter followers had over 6 times more traffic than businesses with fewer than 25 followers and five times more leads. (Source: Hubspot, see Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses eBook)

“My customers are not online, they don’t do Facebook.” Generally this comes from a business owner who doesn’t like social media or they talked to one of their customers who does not have a Facebook account. For all I know they may be right. I haven’t researched their customer’s profiles but after a few questions it is clear they have not researched their customers’ profile either. Even though all of your potential customers are not online a lot of them are. Most of these active, online prospects are not going to be reached with outbound marketing techniques like direct mail or an ad in the yellow pages. Where can a business owner or marketer get information on what their potential customers are doing online?

Recently I added the Vocalyze widget to my web site. This is a bit of text-to-speech streaming technology that translates my written blog into an audio stream. You can see it on the right side of this page, it’s the little toucan icon under the words “Vocalyze It.” Give it a try; just click the link that says “Listen to blog articles.”

In Monday’s blog, Does Social Media Marketing on Facebook Increase Business? I mentioned the EAT OUT Columbia City fund raiser I helped Country Doctor Community Health Centers promote. One of the more helpful and obvious tools available in Facebook is the Events tab. It is fairly straightforward to set up an event in Facebook. For more information check the Facebook Help section on setting up events. Once you have an event set up what can you do to promote it? Here are five suggestions.

The folks at Forrester Research have long been involved in studying the use of social media for businesses. They are behind the 2008 ground breaking (excuse the pun) book Groundswell: Winning in a World by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. In the book the authors outline what they call the Social Technographics Ladder. This breaks down users of social media into six different categories.

Twitter is one of the tools I recommend for my clients doing social media marketing. It’s a great place to get leads, and according to Edison Research’s report: Twitter Usage In America: 2010 more than half of Twitter users follow companies, brands or products and use Twitter to find out information about those brands. Managing and exploiting the power of Twitter can get a bit overwhelming at times so many of us use a variety of tools and there are a lot of tools. I can’t begin to give a definitive list, for that you will need to visit The Definitive List of Twitter Tools. But I can give you a list of the ten twitter tools I use the most.