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Whether your business sells to consumers or other businesses, Twitter represents a real marketing opportunity. This amazing communications platform has grown from non-existence to 125 million users in about 3 years. Many people have experienced the “dribble” of Twitter and there’s even a TV commercial that pokes fun at the senseless things people say on some of the popular social media platforms. Others however, have found marketing success using Twitter – but you have to have the right expectations and something meaningful to offer.

As we talk more and more with businesses trying to get serious about using social media in their day to day operations, we begin to see trends and hear the same questions from different people. The business owners I speak with are all very intelligent individuals and have proven their understanding and competence in business. Yet the questions I hear and the mistakes I've seen still pop up. To me, this is a matter of perspective and understanding than it is a matter of competence. To help put some more perspective around these mistakes and my observations, I've assembled the following list of the top five things I see businesses doing wrong and how these mistakes would fit into the context of an offline social interaction.

If you are a small to mid-sized business (SMB) in the B2B (business-to-business) arena you are likely wondering how to hop onto the social media marketing wave and ride it to success. You are not alone. B2B clients nationwide are listening to the hype, asking tons of questions and seeking guidance on how to take advantage of this emerging trend. There is little doubt that social media is taking the Internet by storm but so much of Facebook, Twitter and others seems to be focused on personal interactions. But most in the SMB B2B space don't have promotions every week, don't hold special events every month and aren't generally doing special marketing blitz's on an ongoing basis. That being the case, what on earth does a SMB marketing to other businesses do with social media marketing?

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc. Twitter is simply a waste of valuable time - at least that's what I used to think. Chris Leone, our resident Social Media Mad man, battered on me for long enough trying to convince me that Twitter was more than just a way of skipping my work duties and that there is some genuine value to investing time therein.

Social media. We’ve all heard about it. And we’ve all heard that we’ve all heard about it. And we’ve all heard that we’ve all heard that we...

While there's undeniably tremendous opportunities for growing your business and brand on Twitter, it can also be a VIP pass to high profile figures - including athletes. With the Olympic games in full swing, I've compiled a list of some of the top 2010 USA Olympians who are actively tweeting their experience in Vancouver.

It’s been around for a little while now but yours truly just came across it and thought it deserved a mention. In this crazy world of social media it’s easy to forget that you are pumping a lot of information into your Online social tools and all in all, if your online data is important to you, Backupify is an easy way to get it back should anything go wrong. Backupify works with Twitter, Google Docs, Wordpress, Gmail, Facebook, Zoho, Delicious, Flickr, Basecamp, Photobucket, Blogger, FriendFeed and more. Obviously data you generate today is not stored on your computer. Granted, it is unlikely that an Online service will simply lose your data, just as it is unlikely that your hard drive will crash if you are good at up keep etc. however it can and does happen all the time. Hackers target these social mediums obviously and so it might be worth considering using something like Backupify. Backupify uses the Amazon cloud to backup your data and the nice thing about this is that should Backupify prove to be a flash in the pan (which seems unlikely) then your data has been stored on a titan of the Internet … and we’d have to hope they make their own backups .

You know - it's all the rage...everyone is talking about social media. Everyone is getting caught up in social media - and I don't blame them because social media is bringing the world closer together. I can't tell you how many people have told me stories about how a long lost friend or school mate found them on Facebook or LinkedIn and now they are resurrecting their relationship. That's all good!

Facebook has made two VERY significant plays this week. It seems ever since their failed acquisition of Twitter, they have made aggressive attempts to de-thrown the current micro-blogging king. Will Facebook's recent moves be enough to do the trick? Probably not. But they're certainly taking a big step in the right direction.