Twitter is where small business owners enjoy the freedom of competing with big business houses. No matter what their yearly revenue is, even a small-time proprietor can effectively market his organization by harnessing the power of this social media platform. However, working smart is the key to success on Twitter. Read on for our top four tips on grabbing attention on Twitter.

Keep posting updates

Being inactive on Twitter is as bad as not being on Twitter. Regularly interact with your followers and on an average, try to post 20-22 tweets a day.

Evenly distribute your tweets

If you post 10 tweets a day, and 9 of them are about yourself, your company, and your products, you might be ignored by the very people you are trying to attract. Resource sharing should be your prime focus, but you must also indulge in casual conversation with your followers on Twitter. Let people feel that you are trying to socialize as opposed to pushing your services and products down their throat.

Create Twitter lists

Twitter lists help you create and maintain a resource for yourself and your followers. Moreover, those who you place on your lists are most likely to feel flattered. In fact so flattered, they might just feel obliged to show their appreciation by making efforts to spread a good word about you.

Allow others to RT your updates

A single tweet is of 140 characters only. But, you must ensure that your followers are able to retweet your updates, adding your name at the end. Thus, you must try to leave at least 15-20 characters at the end of each update. This way, your updates will be retweeted by your followers and automatically enhance your web presence.

The tornado that hit Joplin the City in Missouri a few days back has left the city in ruins, resulting in a death toll of around 116. Many homes were completely devastated by the strong gusts of wind of speeds up to 319 kilometer per hour, including the St. John’s Regional Medical Center. It also destroyed a school building and picked up cars off the streets, tossing those at buildings later on.

Naturally, the restoration process is underway at present, along with hundreds of citizens across the city trying to locate their friends, family, and colleagues among the piles of rubble. There is, however, one tool that has been helping the citizens get the news of the disaster out to the rest of the world, and keep in touch with family and friends living out of state.

It is Facebook.

Within hours, a Facebook page created for bringing the plight of the affected people to the notice of the rest of the world got a ‘like’ count of 3,000. That number has been growing ever since, helping people across the nation get in touch with their friends or family, who have been affected by the tornado. In fact, some people have come to know about this natural calamity only through the social media website. Even now, updates are constantly being posted on the Facebook page from ground zero of the tornado, about the rate of success of the search and rescue operations, and the identities of the people, who are being rescued from their collapsing homes.

Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter can always be used for keeping in touch with the rest of the world during a natural disaster. The tornado of Joplin the City is a glowing example of that. Now let’s hope that these are put to good use even in future cases of natural disasters. Perhaps that would help reduce the feeling of loss among the affected people to some extent!

Well, we are talking about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Zynga founder Mark Pincus.

We all know that Zynga’s Facebook games such as FarmVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker has contributed hugely in making the numero uno social media platform more popular. It was Mr. Pincus who understood that Facebook has great potential to excel as a social-gaming platform, and the rest is history.

Some of the most popular Zynga games on Facebook are Blackjack, Café World, Fashion Wars, Special Forces, Scramble, and many more besides the best-known CityVille, FarmVille, and FrontierVille.

The relationship between Facebook and Zynga has also been rocky at times. According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, in May 2010, Zynga threatened to dissolve its association with Facebook altogether as the former demanded exclusive use of Facebook credits for monetization of gaming applications. However, things fell into place, and the two companies entered into a five-year strategic relationship. The said agreement aims at increasing their collective commitment towards social gaming on Facebook, with an enhanced usage of Facebook credits in Zynga games.

Today, Zynga is one of the most spoken-of enterprises in Silicon Valley, and is all prepared for an I.P.O next year. Reportedly, Zynga players have raised over $3 million for worldwide social causes. On the other hand, the other Mark’s Facebook is bustling with over 600 million active users and estimated revenue of $2,000 million in 2010.

So, is Facebook a success because of Zynga or Zynga’s a success because of Facebook? What do you guys think?

Osama bin Laden’s death once again highlighted how important social media has become to how people consume news. A survey done by social media website Mashable discovered that a full 51% of their readers found out about Osama’s death from either Facebook or Twitter. Now granted, readers of a popular website that focuses on social media and technology are more likely to be always connected to the social web and be more social media savvy. But consider the following data from Pew Research’s 2011 report on American Journalism. In 2010, every news platform saw either a fall in numbers or found their numbers plateauing, except the internet.  Also, more got their news from the web than they did from traditional newspapers.

While established newspaper houses are still the largest producers of information to be consumed, for breaking news, it seems that the internet, along with social media are the king of the hill. It began with television, which could bring you the news faster than any newspaper. But television still needs a reporter’s presence, a camera crew, and at least people tuned in to that specific channel. The social media is, however, wide open, and everyone is a reporter. Like Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant who infamously and unknowingly live tweeted the raid on Osama’s compound (and saw the number of his Twitter followers shoot up to 100,000+), ordinary people are now channeling extraordinary news via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms. Social news is here to stay, and mainstream media is already feeling the pinch.