When most people think of customer service, long wait times on the phone, rude phone operators, and impersonal emails come to mind. Thanks to Twitter, however, customer service no longer has to have such negative connotations.

Twitter has redefined customer relations. Not only does Twitter enable companies to resolve customer problems very quickly, it also contributes to brand building efforts while reducing costs.
Why is Twitter an Ideal Platform for Providing Customer Service?

Twitter is lightning fast. Typically, calling customer service representatives involves frustrating wait times. On the other hand, Twitter allows staff to monitor issues and respond to them very quickly.

Twitter is very viral in nature. If other users notice that you are providing great customer service, they will take notice and share their experience, which will in turn bring you more attention and sales.

Providing customer service via Twitter is a lot less expensive than running a call center. And since you’re communications are limited to 140 characters, you are forced to keep it short, which usually means that it takes less time to solve problems.

Using Twitter to provide customer service is far more interesting for staff and customers than using telephone or email. Customer service reps will also feel more rewarded for their efforts because the immediate impact of their interventions will be visible on Twitter.

Monitor Your Reputation

In order to effectively provide customer service via Twitter, you must track all conversations that are going on about your brand. Find out what people are saying about you by tracking all relevant keywords, such as your company name, flagship product, nick name, etc. There are several tools out there you can use to track multiple keywords on one page such as Monitter. Tweetbeep sends you emails containing all mentions of your brand and links to each tweet.

Make Sure Your Customers Know Where to Find You

Your ability to provide great customer service on Twitter will be limited if your customers don’t even know you’re there. Make sure they know how to find you and follow you by advertising your Twitter presence on your company website, following others, and asking them to follow you back.

Respond Quickly to Customer Concerns and Complaints

When you’re monitoring your brand and find a customer complaint, respond as quickly as possible. Use @replies to ask the disgruntled customer how you can be of help. If it’s a complex issue, you can DM the customer and provide him with your phone number or email.

@replies are typically the best way to deal with customer complaints because they are public. Other customers dealing with similar issues can see your tweets and thus resolve their problems following the same advice, saving you time.

Connect with Followers on a Personal Level

Don’t just use Twitter to handle customer complaints. One of the major benefits of building a Twitter presence is the opportunity it gives you to improve your brand image and reputation. Give people a reason to follow what you have to say by retweeting successful resolutions to customer issues, giving updates about the company, and building a rapport with your followers.
Several companies out there, including Comcast, Southwest Airlines, and Ford, have successfully used Twitter to resolve customer service issues and build a stronger brand. Using Twitter to provide customer service is also far more cost-effective than telephone or email.

So there you have it. Twitter has transformed customer relations. Is your business ready to take the plunge?

Next, Discover Here More Tips On How To Make Money Online … And Then Watch This FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO Course

In this article I wanted to share with you what I have found from consulting with dozens of small business owners on Google Adwords.

During the last 6 years, we have consulted with small businesses routinely who have set up an Adwords campaign and have just about given up on this medium. Usually the complaints include things like:

• I receive lots of clicks (which costs tons of cash), with very little to show for it.
• I really have no clue what I am doing on Adwords – it is too complicated.
• I do not understand how to set up Analytics or conversion
• I have a good set of keywords in my campaigns, but I seem to get too many clicks, for no leads.
• I have set everything up, but I don’t see my ads anywhere.

7 Biggest Google Adwords Mistakes

Once we get to take a look at the settings in these campaigns it is usually pretty obvious why the company is not achieving the results it expected:

1. The website is not designed to be compelling, nor capture leads or sales.
2. The keywords are too broad in nature – e.g. ‘carpet’ and ‘cleaning’, instead of ‘carpet cleaning Houston’
3. The keywords are lumped into single adgroups with no attempt at putting them into themed groups: e.g. ‘carpet cleaning’, ‘tile cleaning’, ‘upholstery cleaning’ are all in a single adgroup.
4. Conversions are not set up, so there is no method to track leads and what keyword, ad etc. generated the lead.
5. Ads do not match the keywords, or do not point to the relevant page in the website.
6. Ads are poorly constructed and do not entice visitors.
7. Bid costs are too low relative to daily budgets or vice versa.

It is perfectly possible to stick a bunch of seemingly relevant keywords into a campaign, slap together an ad and let it rip!!!

However, doing this will almost certainly not bring you the results you would like.

Does Google Want You to Fail?

Of course the answer is no, but you have to understand that Google has built its dominant market share by realizing that people using a search engine want ‘relevance‘ – they want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. This means that if an advertiser is bidding on the keyword “dogs”, but they sell “custom dog collars”, they will get a ton of searches for anything containing the word “dog”, 99.9% of which will not be relevant for “custom dog collars”, so the click through rate (CTR) will be very low for this advertiser. (CTR is the percentage of clicks relative to the number of times that an ad was shown in a search).

Google will penalize this advertiser by showing their ads lower down the page (or more likely on page 24!!!) because they are not relevant to most people searching for dog related keywords. This gives a better experience to the search engine user, which is the goal.

How to construct a well put-together Adwords campaign is not rocket-science, but it does take a degree of understanding of the mechanics of the system to ensure the type of results that are desired.

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This post questions the notion about secret search engine optimization methods and SEO secrets. Are there SEO secrets or is SEO just a process of layering the fundamentals to produce the appropriate reactions?

If you came here to find a list with an illustrated “it’s as easy as 1-2-3 checklist”, then it is time to adjust your expectations and focus on more tangible guidelines to provide a foundation for producing real SEO results.

Anything worthwhile takes time, energy and effort. To create top ranking results in search engines is no different. There is no need to try and trick search engines, just give them what they want and allow the algorithms to work in your favor.

If your method is ethical, the last thing you need to fear is algorithms. Remember, they work for you if you provide the right signals.

What ARE the proper SEO Signals?

The secret to SEO (if there is such a thing) is based on a trinity of relevance…

1. Build as many relevant keywords to relevant pages as possible.

2. Build scalable site architecture and naming conventions (think Wikipedia).

3. Make sure that humans and search engine spiders know about it.

For example, if you have 1000 pages and each one ranks for 5 keywords, then you have 5000 relevant keywords driving traffic to your website; as a result of that will produce x amount of converting visitors.

Getting from 5000 to 50,000 keywords or respective visitors requires a scalable relevance model. And to create relevance you must identify your market and craft methods to appeal to attain traction tactfully and efficiently.

Growing anything takes time and naturally you must feed a site of that magnitude (to reach 50K visitors or more with something fresh, new and unique or exciting if you ever want to see them again (not just more of the same old new same wrapped in a new dress).

So, instead of thinking of the marketplace from the ground up, you can apply the top down model and emulate formulas for SEO that already exist.

Which type of strategy would you use? More pages to create more traffic (which requires more links and more time) or less pages and a higher concentration of theming you’re content to rank for a specific keyword? It really depends on your competition and ranking objectives.

Not everyone purchases or takes the optimal conversion objective the first time they visit your website. In fact, many will never return, so which do you focus on?; first time visitors, repeat visitors or both.

You have to have the simplicity and the clarity to communicate benefits to first time visitors, yet offer enough substance for those coming back for a second or third time to evaluate your offer. Providing substantial value is one method you can use to evolve the context and engagement levels of virtually any website.

Between forums, social media, search engines, press releases, targeted promotional platforms (like classified), affiliate’s, b2b marketing and websites like craigslist, e-bay, Google product search or other targeted niche sites, you should be able to tailor a specific offer to each type of prospect to create a frenzy and achieve suitable conversion over time.

The reality is, just because you haven’t tapped into it, that traffic exists and there are consumers frequenting competitors sites using the sames keywords you could acquire if you apply SEO. You just have to create something worth entertaining to incentivise visitors and then once they do, give them a reason to come back or pass it on to others.

So instead of thinking about short-cuts, automation or bending the rules. Just consider, there are no real SEO secrets, just temporal algorithms that are bound to change.

Search results do not just magically appear on their own, you have to plant the seeds and tend the results to harvest the reward of traffic, conversion and engagement, that is the real secret of SEO.