In fact eMarketer have released some stats which show exactly how much rubbish is floating around on Twitter. The stats (August 2009) show that 40.55% of Tweets were deemed “Pointless Babble”. That with an additional 3.75% of spam and you are starting to approach a value that would make Twitter perhaps only 50% useful.

Tweets Worldwide By Content Category, August 2009

There is an upside to all this useless chatter on Twitter (and Facebook). It used to be on blogs.

This means that blogging will gain a higher reputation now that Twitter has taken much of it’s useless blog posts away. This will mean that more of the information found on blogs will actually be meaningful and therefore gain a higher ranking / reputation from search engines.

Although he does not guide you through the exact steps on how to setup your own blog, he does tell you what they are all about, different platforms that you can use, the importance of blogging, what RSS is and a little about adding social media and links.

This article is great if you want to know that little bit extra about blogs and/or if you wonder whether it is a good idea for you to start up your own blog on your website.

1. What For?
   What do you plan to use your blog for? A blog is best used to add additional information to support the content that already exists on your website. This may consist of special offers, product reviews, special occasions, informational articles, news releases etc. Do not copy the exact content that exists on your website or you will trigger a duplicate content penalty in search engines and your website rankings will decrease rather than increase.
2. How Often?
   How often do you plan on updating your blog? How often will you add new posts? In order for your blog to be successful, and by successful I mean in order for people to come back and visit it often and more importantly for search engines to rank it highly, you need to add new posts a minimum of three times per week. Ideally you should post at least five times a week. If you cannot update your blog as often as this, then it may not be worth the effort to include a blog on your website.
3. Blog Location:
   Where you put your blog is very important. Many people will setup a new account with Blogger or the like and use their space. This results in a domain such as “yourblog.blogger.com” and they will usually like to their website and vice versa. Although this is a start, it is not the best start. Instead your new blog should be hosted on your own space and should be located as either a subdomain of your own website or as a subfolder. So ideally what you want is something like “www.your-web-address.com/blog/” or “blog.your-web-address.com”.
4. Blog Name:
   If your blog is hosted on your own space then “blog” is the most common term used for ease of use. If it is hosted on the blog systems URL, then it is best to use descriptive keywords seperated by hyphens and limit it to about three words maximum. So if you sell HP printers for example you could use the domain “hp-printers.blogger.com”, otherwise, your own URL should have your most important keywords in it and therefore “blog” should be sufficient.
5. Blog Plan:
   To keep your blog up to date it is best to have a plan in place of when you will update the blog as well as what topics you will update it with. Plan what topic you will post on each day of the week to ensure that you have enough content to write about. With a plan in place you can also schedule blog posts, writing them in advance. 

Facebook is a great example of a Social Media Marketing site – one which continues to grow in popularity. 

Clear The Air, a charity group that I have worked with for the past 3 years have had great success by starting up their own facebook group.  In response to increasing air pollution in Hong Kong, they are committed to the introduction and implementation of measures to significantly reduce air pollution in Hong Kong. By engaging with the community in Hong Kong through facebook they have increased their own paid membership (through donations) as well as building their facebook members to over 1000 people. This is a large step for such a small organization and has led them to increasing their membership to include corporate members as a result.

Other popular Social Media sites are Blogs (such as this one), of which Clear The Air have also benefitted from. Blogs reach your community through articles you release to engage your visitors to come back to your site and keep up to date via RSS feeds and you may also have them participate in leaving comments on your blogs to encourage user participation which creates a buzz and some healthy debate. Clear The Air have further increased their visitor numbers through their News Blog, Energy Blog and Tobacco Blogs significantly. In fact after implementing these three blogs as well as the facebook group, visitors to the website have increased by over  400%.

After implementing such social media sites however, one major shortfall is that most people do not continue to participate within their own community and things start to become stale. It is important to continue updating information and engaging community support through events, activities and promotions in order to continue to build a network of people who are actively involved in whatever it is that you are trying to help them out with.

However, when actively participating in Social Media Marketing, it is important not to promote your product or service 100% of the time. In fact the less you do that, the better. What you need to do is help out your visitors by providing with information they don’t normally receive during a sales pitch or the like. You can discuss advantages and disadvantages of something, provide support and basic information, provide tips and hints, offer alternative solutions even if those solutions are not your product or service – bring up your service or product as a solution only when it is highly relevant to the topic being discussed. In the initial stages of building a social media marketing site you may not want to promote your services that much at all in order to build up trust within your community that you are not just out to make a quick buck like all those other sites, but that you actually care and wish to help your visitors. Many blogs do just that and may be running ad free for up to a year to create a buzz and build visitor numbers to a peak before placing ads on their site to earn any type of revenue.

As well as creating your own social media sites, it is also important to scan the web to find potential review sites that chat about your products or services. This can be of great importance to you as you can get an idea of what people are saying about your products or services and you can actively do something about it – and then you can chat about it yourself with your own community to gain valuable feedback of how you can improve your product or service and therefore your reputation. Many companies have no idea what is being said about their products or services online. This is highly valuable information and can either make you or break you. If you are seen to be actively involved in your niche and actually listen to both the good reviews as well as the bad (which are also good), you will be viewed in a different light to most companies who are all about selling rather than listening.

Social Media Marketing is the latest trend in communicating with your community and if you are not actively involved you are just another brick and mortar store without a clue about where your business is headed.