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One of the best ways businesses can use Twitter for client acquisition and brand development is by answering questions people ask relating to their service and/or product. It's also a great way to grow your online community, and meet fellow colleagues in your industry.

What makes me passionate about my job is my belief that social media can help bring back the small town feel we lost along the way. I grew up near a small town in Florida named Clermont. Our claim to fame was our hills of citrus groves, and our community was largely made up of small and family run businesses. But, over the years the citrus groves were hit hard by freezes, and as Orlando started to creep closer they were replaced by subdivisions, and large corporations started pushing out the little guys.

Every marketer desires brand loyalty. I see a lot of giant offers, beautiful ads, funny commercials, and eye-catching billboards. Although there is nothing wrong with that at all, it won't foster brand loyalty. As a consumer and a marketer, I'm a big believer in the little things. The details of life are what capture my attention, memory, loyalty, and passion. I find this truth to be evident in the world of client relations and relationship building.

LinkedIn is the professional social network for business development and marketing purposes. If you haven't created your profile yet, make sure you read my previous post, The Ultimate LinkedIn Profile Cheat Sheet as soon as possible, and get started growing your network. With over 161 million members to date, you can't go wrong.

Last week, Beatriz gave us some great reasons why we should take control of our Facebook privacy using lists. This week, I'll give you some simple instructions on how to create custom lists in Facebook, and how to do it without spending hours on Facebook. The easiest way to create lists is to roll your mouse to the right of the Friends section in the left sidebar of your Facebook page. Or, you can go to https://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/lists.

Have you ever wanted to share a blog post on Twitter but couldn't find share buttons? Or maybe you wanted to subscribe by email but couldn't find the proper sign up form? These days, more and more people are penning blogs for business development and marketing purposes, and I think that is great, but a few critical mistakes can send readers screaming for the hills never to come back.

Breaking News: Facebook is launching Facebook Camera, a new mobile app, that looks eerily similar to Instagram, the company that they recently purchased for $1 billion. Why would Facebook purchase Instagram and then launch their own similar application? I'm thinking they might have purchased Instagram prior to launching the app so they have a full monopoly on all camera applications, and to use their technology.

If you own a QSR franchise that isn't expected to compete with the McDonald's' or Dairy Queens' of the world then it might be time to motivate the troops by saying you're not afraid to take on your more heralded competition head on. This has been a successful strategy we've implemented with our franchise clients. The quick-service industry thrives on competition and if you don't have the stomach to compete with the multi-national corporations then you might be in the wrong industry.

LinkedIn is the social network for business professionals and networking. With 161 millions members to date, it's one of the most popular social networks to date. Are you using it to its fullest potential? While we hear a lot about Facebook and Twitter for lead generation, LinkedIn can be just as good, if not better, if you spend a little bit of time optimizing your profile.

The Airtime story is the current video platforms are designed to talk to only people you know. But Parker and Fanning met in a chat room 15 years ago, not knowing one another at all, and that turned into creating more than one business together. They missed the serendipitous nature of these kinds of meetings so decided to recreate them using today's technology.

Have you ever wanted to post something on Facebook and the immediately thought of someone that might not apreciate the post? Maybe it's your mom, or your boss, or your girlfriend. Well, lists make it easy to categorize the people in your life and share information that would only pertain to certain groups of people in your life.

Did you know there's a way to have someone's public posts show up in your Facebook News Feed or have people follow yours? Whenever I talk about the Subscribe button, I usually get blank stares. After Facebook Lists, it's probably the most misunderstood Facebook feature that you should probably be using.

Today while I was reading American Express OPEN Forum I came across another article with some bad advice to small business owners. Barry Moltz's "How to Calm Your Social Media Anxiety" article misguides business owners into the type of thinking that actually makes them ineffective with social media. Here are his points, and my thoughts on the advice he should be giving to small business owners that are feeling overwhelmed.

There are two groups of people that will always have the best perspective on your business: your customers and your ground level employees. Any business owner that ignores that fact and doesn't learn from these two groups is shooting themselves in the foot. When it comes to social media, the best content comes from where the rubber meets the road, not from marketers who haven't a clue about the day to day operations of the business.

With the advent and need for business Social Media metrics many of us in the digital marketing world are on an ongoing mission to answer Gary Vaynerchuk question "What's the ROI of your Mother?" Well in this post I will tell you one quick and easy way to generate metrics for your social media campaigns using a wonderful free tool along with my favorite…Google Analytics.

Do you know what your mobile website looks like from a smartphone? If not, take a close look right now. A poorly designed mobile website is more detrimental than not having a website at all. Going mobile should be one of your top priorities as there has been a huge surge in web traffic (103% to be exact) to leading ecommerce websites over the past year. If you sell your products and services through an e-commerce section on your website, this post is a must-read for you!

Here is the third part of my three-part series on 7 habits of expert analytics you're probably missing out on. Again, like the rest of the habits, the need to truly understand your customer is paramount and the best way to do so is by understanding your visitor base both quantitatively and qualitatively. A lot of people look at only one variable when it comes to their analytical data (the what) but have no context as to what it means (the why).

You've conquered the bounce rate. You're the master of referring links. And you definitely know how to produce a polished analytics report. Hold on to your cotton socks, I'm here to share how you can become an even greater analytics pro. This is the first of a three-part series on 7 habits of expert analytics you're probably missing out on.

This is a blog post by one of our favorite people in the world, Jennifer MacDonald aka @jennimacdonald. Jennifer did a blog post (video blog post) for us exactly one year ago today about blogging tips. Because she's super organized, Jennifer remembered this important date and did an anniversary post about even more blogging tips!

By now, most of you have probably already heard about Danny Brown's unfortunate weekend. Although no lasting damage was done because of the time and effort Danny puts into building relationships, it is alarming that someone could hack into his Facebook account, pretend to be him and try to cause mayhem. What's even more alarming is this is one of our own. Danny is an intelligent man who knows his way around social media (understatement). He's not someone absent-mindedly falling for those phishing scams that are all over Facebook. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone.