One of the best ways to take advantage of social media is to use it for increasing your brand awareness. Companies have found many creative ways to use social media and increase their reputation through leveraging the following five tools:

1. Facebook
   

So I’m going to make some assumptions here, like that you have a Facebook account, know what Twitter is and have seen pictures on Flickr, if not take this as a warning before you start “over sharing.”

SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITE PRIVACY SETTINGS ARE ONLY THERE TO GIVE YOU A WARM AND FUZZY FEELING AT NIGHT

Social media is on the rise for businesses that are looking to take on this weak economy by boosting their marketing effort online. According to a 2009 survey by BtoB Magazine and the Association of National Advertisers, 66 percent of marketers are now using social media. The other 44 percent haven’t found a way to convince their boss or clients the usefulness of this tool.

Seeing as I am a new member to Twitter myself – I wanted to put out there a simple and unique guide to the twitter basics… all in 140 words... Enjoy and Happy Twittering!

Set up your log in information and your profile.
Twitter is a social networking/microblogging service used across the world.

All signs point to Twitter continuing to boom internationally, with more than 105 million users to date, 60% of which live outside the United States.

On December 30th, 2009, Selena Gomez, (better known for her role as Alex Russo on the TV show "Wizards of Waverly Place"), visited Daireds Salon and Spa Pangea (client) for a haircut. Later, she tweeted about the positive experience to her 1.3 million followers.

When do you usually make your sales calls? Is it first thing in the morning, around 9am? Or maybe you subscribe to the theory that the best time to make a sales call is around lunch time. Either way, you'd be wrong. According to a recent study by MIT, the best time to make sales calls from website leads is the 4-6pm block.

Today may prove to be a game changer for Twitter.

Why?

Because of lists. Today marked the major release push for Twitter Lists, a new feature that's been rolling out slowly to users over the last week or so. Twitter Lists will allow you to create lists of other Twitter users, which you can share across your network.

Contrary to popular belief, I say the best day of the week is Monday. Not Friday, not Thursday, and certainly not Saturday... Monday. Why is it my favorite day, you might ask? Because on Mondays, I get to review and edit our fantastic weekly podcasts. Sure, I usually know the topics ahead of time, and most days, I even participate in the podcasts, but in a world where yesterday's news may as well be last year's news, a refresher is always good.

I'm often asked the question, "What do you think the next Twitter is going to be?" Until very recently my usual answer was to mention FriendFeed, due to it's powerful aggregation offerings.