Social networking is an incredibly potent tool when it comes to marketing your business and your brand. It gets your logo design and core values out into the public eye in a way that is fun, friendly, and, best of all, free. However, many small business owners find that their social networking sites end up being more of a detriment than a benefit, because they allow the public to see sides of you that may not be congruent with your business’s professional image. Here are five simple tools for using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites in a way that benefits your company and build your brand.

Monitor personal revelations. There is nothing wrong with having personal information on your social networking sites; in fact, it may build your brand as customers will increasingly see you and your business as human and likeable. However, be very careful about what kind of personal information you post. Pictures of your children in Halloween costumes may be appropriate, depending on your brand, but picture of your drunken misbehavior at a Halloween party likely will diminish your business brand and your professional image.

Watch your language. Even a well placed and seemingly appropriate swear word will offend many of your customers, and the nature of the internet guarantees that this one slip will be ‘out there’ in the public view for decades to come. Using offensive language doesn’t say a lot about your vocabulary skills, either. Similarly, being critical or snarky may not be complimentary to your professional brand. Censor yourself carefully to create a positive image that customers will see as both professional and likeable.

Be politically correct. Unless political or other activism is part of your business brand, don’t include it at your professional site. Most businesses will not benefit from being controversial or overly opinionated. It will only alienate that larger-than-you-think portion of your customers who don’t agree with your personal beliefs.

Consistently update. Customers will stop returning to your page if you don’t routinely update it and add new information. This is a chance to present your brand to the world, so make sure you have a constant flow of relevant information that increase your market’s engagement with your brand while encouraging traffic to your business.

Maintain good branding principles. This basically sums up the preceding four rules. Small business branding isn’t just about logo design and color palettes, although these are certainly important. Every communication and addition to your social media pages needs to be a brand-builder, not a brand-buster. In the end, you didn’t create a social networking presence so your customers could see your weekend party picture; you did so to market your small business brand.

If you have questions about how to brand your company using social networking, or if you don’t really have a brand at all, talking to a branding consultant can get you started on the right path. Don’t let this opportunity to present your brand and your logo design to the public slip past you, and certainly don’t let it become a detriment.

The whole day today I spent in working on my Twitter social media account (@bonigala). I have been tweeting for quite some time now and have about 500 followers. To start with I was tweeting more about the different blog posts that I was writing but these days I am completely hooked and I tweet almost about every thing.

I am moving more towards tweeting industry related news, interesting posts and useful resources that I could share with my followers. To make this process more solid, today, I spend some time trying to automate the system using tool such as TwitterFeed, Twollow, TwitterKarma, TweetLater etc.

I am also trying to organize my sources of content that I will access for my tweets and blog posts. I think I have made a lot of progress. I will write another post soon outlining the various steps I have taken to enhance my social media participation and the results of these efforts. In the image above you can see my twitter account status as of today. I want to see how many followers I would have in a month’s time and also try and assess if I am making any more from Twitter at all.

Please share your stories of trying to enhance your twitter experience.

I was over at Chris Pearson’s website and watched an awesome video rant just now on how not be a jerk online, especially a celebrity jerk. Nice video and great insight. I was slightly annoyed by Chris’ high pitched rant but I guess he is very passionate about the topic and rightly so.

Chris talks about how people on social media networks such as twitter or facebook tend to ignore their fans and their messages. People spend so much time getting fans and connections but it has become a fad. Numbers are important. In fact I have noticed on LinkedIn, where I have a profile and more than 1500 connections, people get links and connections for bragging rights rather than for any practical use. Most often broadcast the number of connections they have in their profile name.

The same is the case on Twitter. Most people just try and get as many followers as possible. Yes, granted, this could be a good way to broadcast spam marketing messages. But that is not what twitter or any of these social media networks are about. If you have 10,000 followers on twitter then it is safe to assume that you are not really following them but rather simply want to send out your messages. Like a one way street.

I think people should not focus on bragging rights to the number of followers/connections etc and focus more on using these networks in the way they were meant to be used. To grow relationships, to share and to network in the true sense.