Or at least it’s now set up for businesses to more easily market their products and services on the site thanks to the new fan pages, and the ability to get your own custom URL once you have 25 fans.

For example, I now have http://www.facebook.com/unchainedentrepreneur as the fan page for TheUnchainedEntrepreneur.com. Easy, memorable and a perfect place to communicate all things business separate from my personal Facebook page.

Just make sure you create the personal page first, then a separate fan page for your business. Otherwise you’ll run into problems down the road. Once you’re on there, start a conversation, join other conversations and offer info of value. Before you know you’ll be building your own online community of fans.

The craziest thing happened a few weeks ago…I’d just gotten back from a pair of conferences packed with amazing people. But rather than do the usual email follow up, I decided to try connecting with other attendees on Facebook first.

Low and behold, most people were already on there. On top of that, I wasn’t the only one with this idea…90% of the follow up I received was via Facebook too!

At this point it looks like Facebook is officially here to stay. More than 400 million users aren’t going to go away overnight, as proven by the dismal flop that occurred when only 32522 users pledged to give it up on Quit Facebook Day.

I’ll admit I didn’t want to get started with it years ago. Like many people I thought Facebook was just a big time suck. Then, once I got into it, it seemed great for keeping up with friends and family but not really made for business. So I didn’t take it that seriously or stay very active.

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Your Twitter bio gives you exactly 160 characters (no more, no less) to let your prospects know who you are, what your business brand is all about and precisely why they should do business with you and no one else.

So, the million dollar question is, what are you doing to add a little bling to your 160-word Twitter bio?

Well, if you take even five minutes to peruse a varying collection of Twitter bios, you’ll find that most small business owners obviously haven’t given much thought, time or energy to this seemingly simple task. (Let’s face it, 160-words isn’t exactly a doctoral dissertation.)

Interestingly enough, after perusing hundreds of Twitter bios, I found that there were three “Twitter bio themes” that seemed to keep cropping up again and again (and, again).

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Just as there are many reasons not to market your business, there are just as many reasons to progress despite the fears.

My social networking and public speaking skills were acquired. When I first began speaking, I would have an aerobic heartbeat just about the thought of being onstage or in front of a group. With support, practice and visualization, I overcame that block. By the way, I also used the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to help clear the energy blocks.

There are so many resources available for teaching you about the finer points of public speaking and networking, online as well as face-to-face. Toastmasters and networking meetings were a great resource for me. I even worked with a coach to fine tune my presentation and an EFT Practitioner to clear my remaining apprehension.

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Although Twitter is a very powerful marketing tool, I’ve noticed that some Twitterers get quite carried away and spend hours and hours (and even more hours) on Twitter every day. It’s time to stop the madness!

Twitter is probably one of the least time-consuming ways to market your small business products and services. But, you need to know exactly where to focus your “oh-so-limited”  time and energy when using Twitter as a marketing tool.
Here are 3 quick tips for keeping your Twitter time to under 15 minutes each day:

1) Follow 25 People  (5 minutes)

I recommend using a service such as www.SocialOomph.com You can set-up your SocialOomph account to notify you of potential Tweeters to follow based on specific keywords that you identify. In addition, you can choose to automatically unfollow Tweeters who are not following you.
Setting up this service allows you to easily add 25 “recommended” people each day and automatically unfollow people who don’t follow you.

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Well, the Gulf oil disaster is spurring a powerful moment to make real changes.

I was heartened to read this declaration to emerge from the Gulf oil disaster with a powerful new goal – to end the era of oil and transition to sustainable sources of energy

That’s why I signed the Gulf Declaration that was started by some of the bestselling authors and leaders of our day such as Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield and Michael Bernard Beckwith. Click here to read it:

http://www.gulfdeclaration.com

It just takes a minute to read and add your signature, which builds momentum towards the goal of energy independence and the creation of a sustainable world .

I hope you can join me in taking a stand and spreading the word!

I’m one of those folks that has resisted participating in the Social Media arena for some time now, but decided to get some training so I could learn exactly what to do and not make so many mistakes and faux pas that so many newbies seem to make. I’m really glad I did that. It has been money well-spent.

Of course, just about the time we got started in the course, we moved to this remote location with little to no internet and email access. So it has made it a bit hard to get very many updates and tweets out there.

Here’s something I learned that you may not know about but if you’re serious about social media you’ll want to know. Many Twitter powerusers use TweetDeck (or some other tool) to manage their tweets and to see what everyone else is tweeting about, and that’s great, but at least once a week or so, you should go to your Twitter account page and send some updates and messages from there. Seems that if Twitter detects that your account is going unused after a period of time, they can shut you down or make your account inactive and give your account name to someone else.

Are you on Twitter? If so, hopefully you’ve discovered the power of hashtags (basically a pound sign # and some letters). Or maybe you’ve
seen hashtags and wondered what the heck they were.

Well, basically they are a way for you to track what others are saying about you, your event, your product or whatever you’ve created
a hashtag for. The most common use is to let you track when someone  tweets about your upcoming event. You just create a hashtag (keep it
short since tweets are limited in size) then let people know to use  it when they tweet about your event. And be sure to use it in your
own tweets so it gets attached to retweets.

Then you can track usage on Twitter or using a service like  SocialOomph and see who’s talking about you.

When you write a press release, it’s important that it becomes a powerful marketing tool for you and your small business. You certainly don’t want to invest your time writing and distributing your release, only to discover that it didn’t bring you any traffic, leads or sales.
To ensure that your press release writing efforts are not in vain, here are ten tips for writing powerful press releases that work:

1) Provide Newsworthy Content. Make sure that your press release is timely and relevant to your readers. You can accomplish this by tying your story to current events, recent headlines or social trends.

2) Write Like a Reporter. When writing your release, use third-person (he, she, etc.) and a reporter-like format. Take a look at today’s newspaper to reacquaint yourself with the way that journalists write articles.

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There are countless topics within your industry to Tweet about.  However, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind. First and foremost, don’t forget that your Tweets can never be deleted; they exist in the Twitter universe forever and ever. So, don’t Tweet anything that you wouldn’t want your sweet, little-old grandma to read!

In addition, if you want to become a bonafide Twitter rockstar, then each of your Tweets should contain ONE of the following FIVE elements:

1) Educational. It’s vital that some of your Tweets offer educational value to your followers. This can be a tip, link to a blog post, or a new strategy that you want to share. As you begin Tweeting educational Tweets to your followers, it won’t take long before you are viewed as an expert in your particular industry.

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