To put it mildly, social media tools are transforming the way we communicate. These days, people send a tweet instead of an e-mail and write on Facebook walls instead of dial phone numbers. So you know the best way to reach customers is to join these conversations, but how? Which platform will send the right message? Here’s a look at the top five tools and how can small-business owners can take advantage of this change in communication to boost their bottom lines.

Facebook: Best for engaging with customers

Every business needs a Facebook page, period. The social media giant is on par to reach 1 billion users by August, according to iCrossing, a media research company in the U.K. Translation: All of your current and potential clients already have an account. Once you fill out your page, Barbara Rozgonyi, founder of Chicago-based marketing firm CoryWest Media, suggests sending out updates at least three times per week to start attracting attention.

“Don’t just write about your business, take a community approach and talk about what is going on in your industry and your community,” she says. “It needs to be a good mix.”

Another tip: Don’t talk at people. Instead, engage them in conversation by asking questions and responding to their comments. If you don’t have time to watch your Facebook feed all day (who does?) commit a few hours per week to replying to every comment posted on your page, advises Rozgonyi.

Make posts semi-personal, too. Sprinkle in a comment about the weather with an excited note about your favorite sports team. (Note: Don’t write about what you ate for lunch; that’s too personal.) Conversation between you and your customer will not only help put a face on your company, but add to feelings of goodwill among your base. (Here are a few tips on how to get Facebook fans.)

Twitter: Best for sharing news about your company

“Think of Twitter as a news channel,” says Rozgonyi. “It’s a good place to promote your business, talk about things happening and connect with people.”

Unlike Facebook users who, generally speaking, want to feel warm and fuzzy about a company before being sold, Twitter users are open to the hard sell, she says. So use the platform to advertise sales and specials. There is a fine line, though. Too many sales-y tweets, and you will lose followers. Post about three times per day, and if you don’t have time to do that, download Hootsuite, an application that allows you to schedule your tweets ahead of time.

Need more ideas on what to tweet? Rozgonyi recommends searching for what your competitors and target demographic are talking about. Join the conversation and you will have followers in no time.

Another tip: Post statistics about your industry—“everyone loves numbers,” she notes—and recipes.

But what if you don’t run a restaurant?

“It doesn’t matter,” says Rozgonyi. “If you post your best recipes every Friday, people will start looking for that and pretty soon they will want to know what else you do.” (Here are the 12 most effective ways to engage on Twitter.)

LinkedIn: Best for finding new clients

Margelit Hoffman is obsessed with LinkedIn. As co-founder of Hoffman Productions, a video production company out of Allentown, Pa., she joins LinkedIn groups where her target customer is hanging out and strikes up conversations.

“I post discussions and lead people to interesting things we post on our blog,” she says. “I only post things that will help people. They need to get something out of it, or they won’t click.”

Her advice: Make sure your profile page is complete and your tagline explains what the company does, a good trick for increasing your search engine optimization, or SEO. From there, join groups and be active on them. In a recent post, Hoffman shared a video to an industry group and a man she didn’t know contacted her about a job.

“He ended up giving us our biggest contract to date,” she beams.

Not sure what groups to join? First, conceptualize your target market. Then click on the “Group” tab at the top of the page. From there, type in keywords that match your market, Hoffman suggests. When you find a group that sounds interesting and is open to the public, click on it to see what they are chatting about, then join. If the group is private, ask to be invited. (Get more tips on how to find leads using LinkedIn.)

Google+: Best for improving your search ranking

Google+ has similar characteristics to Facebook, but with one major perk: It has incredible SEO. The next time you do a Google search, check out the results that appear near the top of the page. See those tiny photos of people you know? Those are your friends already on Google+ who’ve posted a topic similar to the one you just searched. Ahh, the genius that is Google.

Hoffman uses Google+ purely as an SEO tool, so every time she puts up a new blog or tweet, she re-posts it to the site.

Rozgonyi recommends using the site for its Hangout function. This is where up to 10 different people can talk to each other on video. The function is very popular (check out President Barack Obama’s use of the tool) and can be used by small-business owners wanting to schedule free videoconference chats. (Here’s a look at some pros and cons of Google+ for small business.)

Pinterest: Best for increasing your visibility

Pinterest is the newest kid on the social media block, making a splash with more than 3 million monthly users. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest doesn’t encourage comments. It does, however, still encourage sharing—in the visual form. Users are able to “pin” photos of whatever they find interesting (i.e. videos, ideas, etc.) to their profiles and share “pins” with others.

“It is a good place for businesses with a visual element to hang out,” says Hoffman. “If you are a personal chef, for example, have a professional photographer take pictures of your food and post it on there. Then, when people share, it will increase your company’s visibility.” (Here are five tips on how to use Pinterest.)

Source: OPENForum

While you think social media may give you an instant boost to your business, without a plan of action or strategy, you’ll be shooting in the dark. If you market yourself correctly on social media, and Twitter, you can turn curious ‘googlers’ into loyal clients and customers, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Her are several tips to help make Twitter work for you.

1. Be easy to find! Choose a Twitter handle or name that’s close to your business name, and write up a clear profile that explains exactly what you do and where your clients and customers can find you. Utilize keywords that your customers might search for: your neighborhood, business focus and do link to your full website.

2. Do not shout. Don’t use all caps, people. It’s shouting, and it’s considered impolite. Consider your grammar, spelling, voice and tone as well. Even if you are trying to be casual, sounding professional on Twitter is paramount to your image.

3. Don’t repeat yourself again and again. Don’t tweet out a link to your Facebook page every day; people can find it on their own if you’ve posted links that are visible. Also, don’t tweet the same thing to a ton of people. It’s boring and very annoying.

4. Be timely. Let people know about specials you having coming up (whether it’s a special on a service, a limited-time only discount, or an upcoming event). Also, give a glimpse of what’s to come to garner excitement about what you’re offering. Invite your followers to get to know you!

5. Engage, engage, engage. Be a friendly word of advice, not anonymous. Share interesting article, news and catch up with others in your field! Network and respond. Twitter isn’t just about self-promotion, it’s about starting a conversation and building a relationship. Give your followers a clear picture of what you do, and share your voice in the conversation. Retweet interesting links by others, and aim for about half of your tweets to be non-promotional in nature.

6. Don’t auto-tweet or auto-DM. Think again before you put your account on automatic pilot. Don’t send auto direct messages to new followers. That pushes you farther away from them, and again, it’s just plain annoying.

Let people know it’s coming.
Let your followers know that a big announcement is coming soon and to stay tuned. Telling them you have major news and that you want to share it with them will keep followers coming back and generate interest for your company. Then, when you do decide to relaunch your brand/business, make a big deal about it.

Give useful information.
Giving free information to your potential clients and customers is a must. You want to be seen as an expert in your field, and to be a market leader you have to give away something for free. Another tip: for every 10-15 posts with free, useful info, provide a valuable incentive offer that only your fans/followers will get. You can also intersperse testimonials from clients and customers as well.

Start a conversation.
Don’t be afraid to pose questions to your fans and followers! Engage them. If you have a retail product and want valuable insight about your new packaging, poll your customers! Ask for their opinion. They will give you valuable feedback. This is not only very useful for you, but will also attract new customers.

Utilize video.
Make a one or two minute video out of a recent press release. Rewrite the release to make it more conversational, then create a video and post it. Then, if you’ve rebranded, show customers your new logo and tell them about your new service offerings.

Make time to be social.
Set aside 5-10 minutes, twice per day, to join the conversation on other social media sites. If someone responds to a tweet, post or to your blog, comment back and by all means, thank them! Retweet other useful tweets on Twitter, and point out useful Facebook posts. Social media is all about engagement, impressions and awareness.

Many companies, and even designers and developers, make mistakes while creating a website. If you’re looking to improve your ranking in the search engines, it’s helpful to knw what the common mistakes are –– so you can avoid them.

1. Splash page - The ‘intro’ pages with banner images or flashy graphics have fallen out of favor, not only in the design world, but with search engines. Flash is not indexed well and does you more harm than good.

2. Not utilizing the title tag. The spiders of most of the search engines crawl title tags first. Thus, your title tag should contain the most focused keywords. No need to stuff keywords (that’s a no-no), just keep the keywords relative to your business.

3. Duplicate content. Duplicate content is very common across sites. This hurts you, because it reduces the potential of being indexed in the search engines. Also, irrelevant keywords in the description and title tags are counterproductive for search engine rankings.

4. Keyword cannibalization. Using lots of unrelated keywords (keyword stuffing/spamming) is a huge no-no. Google indexes the content of your entire page, and they index only the relevant keywords. So adding unnecessary keywords is useless.

5. Poor URL selection. Many URLs are either too long or non-descriptive, often times just a sequence of meaningless letters or abbreviations. URLs should be easily read and recognizable, and ideally contain the most important keyword.

Every business wants to expand their appeal and customer base. And over and over, marketing gurus preach about creating Facebook pages (and ads) as well as opening a Twitter account. These are all great ideas, and it’s important to create a strong presence in social media. But you also have to stand out from the crowd.

So how do you position yourself differently? One way is to create a video and upload it to your site as well as other social media outlets. But many business owners have never held a video camera, much less produced their own video. Here are some tips for beginners who desire to get started with using video on their own business’s website.

1. Use the right equipment. Once you’ve planned out what type of video you want to make, find the right equipment to shoot it with. If you want an authentic look that has a classic home video appeal, a simple Flip camera should suffice. But if you truly want to upgrade your audience’s viewing experience, you should use a tripod, or hire someone with very steady hands.

2. Pay attention to sound & audio! Of particular importance is background noise. If cars are whizzing by or if you can hear wind blowing into the microphone, the extra background noise will ruin a good video. If your camera has a headphone jack, plug it in and run some sound checks. Make sure your audio is clear.

3. Review what you’ve filmed and make sure your lighting doesn’t overshadow your subject. Don’t shoot with a window in the background, and watch for shadows. Lighting is certainly important, and though it doesn’t have to be perfect, it helps to review what you’ve shot to make sure your video can be seen.

4. Edit, edit, edit. People have short attention spans, so keep it simple, and short. People will often skip from video to video on sites like YouTube until they find something interesting. Rarely will someone watch a 5 minutes plus video all the way through if they don’t know what it’s about. Keep your video short and engage your audience so they understand the point right away.

5. Upload and distribute to social networks. But don’t forget your website! Once you’re happy with your video, export it and upload onto YouTube, Vimeo and other social networks. Tweet the link to all your Twitter followers, post it on your Facebook business page, and email it out to your customers.

With so much conversation and chatter happening on the Web right now, it’s tough to know how to get your business to stand out from the masses. Here are some tips that can help you learn more about how to gain fans, followers and friends and increase your business’ online presence.

1. Be authentic. Be honest and compelling, and professional. This is a core ingredient of social media success.

2. Make time! Yes, we are all busy and we have very full lives. Small business owners are no different. But as many highly effective people will say, you always have time for what you put first in your life. So make time and make it a priority.

3. Consistency is key. If you don’t participate on a regular basis, you won’t see results in the social media world. You don’t have to tweet 500 times a day, or even be on your computer 24/7, but a 24 hour response time is a good benchmark to have when answering to comments, questions or feedback.

4. Tell a story. People love glimpsing into the lives of others. We’re fascinated by it. Don’t share anything you feel uncomfortable with, but let people know the authentic you.

5. Plan, plan, plan. Think about what you want your social media goals to be six months, a year, even two years down the road. Formulate a plan of action and stick to it. You’ll be thankful you did.

6. Learn from criticism. Nobody likes criticism, even when it’s well intentioned, but many times this kind of feedback can help your organization or small business make changes for the better. Don’t ignore it completely — listen to problems and then make a decision on what to do.

7. Always listen. Be aware of what people are saying about your brand or business. An easy way to do this? Sign up for Google Alerts, so you can monitor what’s being said about you online on a regular basis.

8. Develop a social media policy. Formulate a policy for your team so they know what’s appropriate to talk about online, and what isn’t. Keep a document handy so that all your employees can be briefed on what’s expected.

9. Go mobile. With iPad sales skyrocketing, the demand for apps on the go shouldn’t be ignored. If you can, develop your own application now or put it in the works for the future.

10. Have fun! Social media is an exciting and fast-paced environment. Creative and original ideas often have the best chance of standing out, so there’s no reason not to have fun with it!

We often get asked, “How can I make sure my e-blast is read by my clients or customers?” Clients want to make sure that in the myriad of emails that litter our inboxes each day, theirs isn’t the one that’s deleted instantaneously. While inboxes these days are a cluttered world, you can take some steps to make sure yours isn’t immediately launched into the proverbial trash bin.

• First, respect your reader and don’t waste their time. Your customers aren’t sitting around waiting for your email to arrive. So when it does, make sure you get to the point – quickly. Tell your clients and customers what you want them to know, right away.

• Always ask permission. Not everyone wants to receive your latest news or product information. So make sure you ask your readers if they’d like to receive your updates. If you show them a sample of what they’ll get along with information about how often they’ll get it, even better.

• Keep your goals in focus. Sit down and come up with an answer to the following: “What is the one thing you want people to do when they get this email?” Designing with a myriad of 5 or more goals is hard, but 1 or 2 are much more attainable. This also helps you measure your success.

• Don’t bury your unsubscribe link! Disclaimers are the prose of lawyers, but we have to abide by them. If people are not interested in your content anymore, there’s no point in continuing to email them. So make unsubscribing easy, and if your readers decide to come back one day, they’ll know exactly how to do so.

• No fancy coding allowed. While CSS and HTML render wonderfully on the Internet, it isn’t so for email clients. So code like it’s 1998, and use inline CSS. You’ll be glad you did.

•  Images aren’t always viewed. Those using Outlook or Gmail will often need to click to show your images. No matter how beautiful and engaging your images are, if they can’t be seen, you won’t convey your message. The solution? Make sure your email  has HTML text as well as plain text, so you don’t alienate anyone.

• Test, test, test. And test again. Make sure you test your email on a variety of clients. Doing so will help you see the potential pitfalls and help you remedy any problems. After all, once you hit send, you can’t take it back!

There are millions of sites on the Internet, and there’s certainly a lot of online real estate that lacks great design and content. To be successful on the Web, it’s important to have a grasp of the fundamentals. Here are 10 takeaway tips to any effective Web site.

1. Answer the who & what. Just like those old term papers in college, your site should shout the basics to all your site visitors. What do you do? Who are you? What services do you provide? Don’t leave site visitors second guessing what you offer.

2. Make it easy for visitors to contact you. We all know people often have short attention spans. On the Internet, that attention span is incredibly short. Give your site visitors the information they’re searching for –– before they move on to one of your competitors. Make sure your company’s contact info (address, phone number or even a link to Google Maps) is conspicuous throughout your site. Don’t make people search.

3. Give users a clear path of navigation. How often do you visit another site and can’t find what you’re looking for? You get frustrated and move on. Don’t confuse your site visitors by not giving them clear-cut navigation that is easy to understand, and find. Ease the experience for your site visitors, and that’s one step closer to winning the sale.

4. Make it fast. The dial-up experience is fading fast, so the old 8-second rule for loading sites no longer applies. We recommend that your site load in 3-4 seconds or less. Any longer and you’re in trouble. If you’re over that loading time, talk to your designer about cleaning up your site’s code and any intensive rich media.

5. Make it meaty. Effects are nice, but they don’t close the deal. Content is still king. Rich imagery is great, but only if you have well-organized content with a strong voice and clear message.

6. Focus on the most important facts. Don’t overwhelm your end user. Quickly highlight your company’s two or three most salient features (exceptional customer service, experience, commitment to quality) and hammer those themes throughout your site. Pick the best reasons why you’re special… and stick with them.

7. Soft sell success. Many people are leery of purchasing from the Web. That means you have to explain how your product will benefit them. They need to understand what they are getting out of a purchase.

8. Keep your content fresh. If you expect your clients and customers to frequently return to your site, you have to give them something to come back for. You can’t just design your site and let it sit. Again, content prevails. Give customers useful information, and they will come back to you for more.

9. Reward your customers. Nothing gets more press, tweets or Facebook banter than a site or company that offers something for users. iPhone apps, downloadable coupons, and e-incentives are embraced easily by everyone. Give them something (preferably for free), and the result will be a loyal customer base.

10. Don’t be afraid of white space. White space reduces cognitive load for your site visitors, and make it possible to perceive the information presented on screen. When your customers visit your site, the first thing they try to do is scan the page and divide content into digestible pieces of information. In this case, less is truly more.

We get a lot of questions about social media these days from clients. The buzz around social media is deafening, and it seems that “everyone is doing it.” Though, in more cases than not, businesses are still warming up to the idea.

When trying to come up with a social media marketing plan that works for you and your business, we can often learn from mistakes that others make.

Here are 6 faux pas to avoid:

1. No automated greetings. When you set up a 3rd party social media application to automatically reply to your followers, you’re basically being seen as spam. Don’t put your virtual foot in your mouth.

2. Put together a plan. Put together a strategy, and communicate that strategy to your employees. You’ll need a clear idea of how social networks can expand your company’s marketing or customer service strategy. You’ll also need to make sure you  have clear benchmarks you can use to measure how your plan is doing.

3. Don’t be a broken record. Repeating yourself over and over again on your blog, facebook wall or Twitter page is a recipe for disaster. It not only alienates current and potential followers, but it’s embarrassing. Come up with original content.

4. Engage more than sell. While shameless promotion is a good thing, too much of a good thing can work against you. Don’t be afraid to change things up by posting links to news in your vertical market or industry, or cite interesting things people in your network are saying. Give your audience interesting tidbits of information to keep them engaged.

5. Personality helps. Each employee who is posting to your account(s) should be encouraged to be themselves. Don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through — in your tone, message and voice.

6. No ghost tweeters. Many companies pay other companies or outside experts to run their social media strategy. Huge mistake. Put your best people on your social networks and educate them on how to respond to clients and customers… quickly and professionally. It’s minimal cost for maximum return.

Being green is becoming more than the “in” thing to do these days. It’s the responsible thing to do. As the world’s population continues to grow at an exponential rate, it’s becoming more and more important to conserve our resources. Designers can help by offering “green” marketing options to clients.

Of course, different clients have varying motivations, and clients who are only interested in their bottom line may respond positively to sustainable design because it’s less harmful to the environment. A client who is only interested in their bottom line may respond to the idea that sustainable design is a good option because the design is less harmful to the environment. That’s something everyone can feel great about.

However, a client who is already supportive in caring about the environment won’t need the marketability pitch. They may want to know that the design materials used are from renewable resources; these are a more sustainable option becaues the Earth can replenish and sustain that resource.

Pitching a green alternative doesn’t have to be pitched as an “alternative.” It is simply another option. One that your client may be happier with than the standard if it truly fits with their product, consumer base and marketing.

For example, a client who already is concerned with the environmental impact of the product it manufactures may choose to go with a recyclable product. An offer a designer can say is: “A design made with easily removable, recyclable parts encourages recycling. Recycling instead of using raw resources to create new materials is a more sustainable choice. This type of strategy helps the planet to sustain the amount of natural resources we all rely on.

Of course, pitching sustainability to some clients is not an easy task. But it is effective if we take small steps. No one can be entirely sustainable right now. So the focus should not be on the now. Think long term, and try to get the ball rolling with clients. Passion is key and a designers who pitch sustainable and environmental concepts in their offerings are  not doing it for the money. By making a case for environmental impact and how we can all do our part, it’s easy to see why it’s the right thing to do.