Last week we gave you some simple instructions on how to sign up with Twitter. Now you’ve done that, what’s next?!

Here’s a basic guide to using Twitter. Its not definitive – your comments are welcome!

Following people

1.    Start out by following people who you are genuinely interested in hearing from. This might be your industry figurehead, a national paper, an industry magazine, or a commentator
2.     Your customers. Show you’re interested in your customers by following them whenever you can. That will make encourage them to follow you, and open Twitter as a channel of communication
3.    Don’t follow people just because they follow you, unless they are your customer. Only follow people you are genuinely interested in.
4.    Avoid following people who have high numbers of followers and follows. These will just be using auto-tools to build their follower base. Lots are US based.

Tweeting your News

1.    Every time you add a new post or item onto your blog or website, Tweet it with a headline and a link.
2.    Every time you change your prices, have an offer, or have any other news that you wouldn’t otherwise have on the blog, Tweet it

Tweeting other people’s news and blog posts

1.    Set up an Feed reader with all your important writers’ latest posts. Here’s a guide on how to set up a feed reader
2.    When you see something that you find interesting, summarise it and send a link to it

Commenting on other people’s Tweets

1.    For the people who you are following, read their posts. If you’re interested, reply @them
2.    When people send you an @message, responding to it quickly

ReTweeting (RT)

1.    If someone compliments you, your website or your company then ReTweet it by copying it into your own post and prefacing it with RT @them:
2.    If you see anything of genuine interest that you want to attribute to the original Tweeter then RT it in the same way.
3.    Do your customers a favour by retweeting their messages to your audience

Direct Messages (DM)

1.    Keep any private messages to DM
2.    If someone RTs your message then thank them privately with a DM

General Guidance for Tweets

1.    Mix up your Tweets. Send some links to your site, some to others, and include no links in some. Have a mixture of general Tweets, @Tweets and ReTweets.
2.     Tweet any comments you get on your blog comments including a link directly to those comments. Try to get a debate going
3.    Ask questions to generate interest and get answers
4.    Remember that a lot more people will be reading your tweets than responding them. If you’re using it for customer service than showcase your finest work!

Tools

1.    Ping.fm Distributes your posts to multiple microblogging platforms
2.    Shorten URL Mozilla Add on. Puts a URL shortner shortcut in your  browser, makes for quick URL shortening
3.    TweetDeck. Desktop application that lets you monitor for mentions and direct messages across multiple Twitter accounts.
4.    Tweetpic. Allows you to link images to your posts.

Tracking

Twitter traffic is notoriously hard to track as it mostly comes from redirects.

1.    Bit.ly: This can give you click data about the traffic that your shortened URLs are generating
2.    Google Analytics. Using the URL Builder, you can manually add a tracking URL onto your website address before you shorten it.

And that’s about it! Any other ideas or comments? Please let leave them below.

Did you know that ‘best practice’ web design is that almost every website needs to include a privacy policy? In fact, UK law also indicates that if you are collecting information about people then it is a legal requirement to let them know that you are doing it.

A privacy policy is a single page on your website that explains to users what information you are collecting about them as they arrive and move through your website.

If you have installed Google analytics then you will automatically be accumulating information about your users in huge detail. Aside from all the usual analytics stuff such as how they found your site; how long they spent on it; and what pages they looked at; you also find out other more personal data. This includes where they are; what ISP they’re using; what browser they’re using and their screen size.

Others of you might not have installed Google analytics, but may well have a feedback form that asks for email addresses.

And finally, the WebEden website building system itself uses cookies to identify individual users. For example, if someone becomes a member of your website, the system attaches a cookie to them which makes it more straight forward for them to log back in again the next time they visit.

All these mean that it’s a good idea to have a privacy policy. Aside from fulfilling your ‘best practice’ obligations, having a privacy policy is looked upon favourably by the search engines. When the Google spiders crawl your website, a privacy policy is one of the things they look for. It can help you – albeit in a very small way – get your website boosted up the Search Engine Results Pages.

If you’d like to put a privacy policy on your website, below is a template that you can use. Make sure you fill in and adapt the bits that are appropriate for your website.

privacy-policy-template

You don’t need to make your privacy policy a major part of your website, just include a small link to it on the footer of your site, or from your ‘about us’ page. It doesn’t need to be part of the main menu.

Good luck finding and using one – let us know how you get on using the feedback form below.

A few weeks ago we blogged about how to put your business on the map with a Google Local Business listing. This is a great way to make sure that you appear when people search for your sort of business or service in Google local or Google Maps.

Google has just enhanced the local business listings so that you can now get great statistics about how many people view your listing, and how they found it.

To recap, once you’ve signed up to Google local business listings, this is what your listing looks like:

People can find these listings by doing a search on Google.co.uk or in Google Maps. Once they find your listing they can click on it to see your details, reach customer reviews, and get discount coupons . They can also get directions to your location.

All good so far.

But what would be really useful for you is to know how the people looking at your listing found it. Did they search for ‘taxi in edinburgh’ or ‘i want to go to the airport’ to find your taxi company listing? And if you do some advertising in the local paper, do you find more people searching for and finding your listing?

If you knew the answer to these and other similar questions, you’d be able to make better decisions about how to send more traffic to your listing, and what sort of information to include on it. And that, ultimately will lead to more customers.

Well now you can do just that thanks to a new feature that Google have launched in the local business center. They’re calling it a ‘dashboard’.

All you need to do is claim your listing and go through the verification process.

This is the kind of information that the dashboard will give you:

•    Impressions: The number of times your business listing appeared in the SERPs on  Google.co.uk or Google Maps search in a given period.
•    Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business’ website or requested driving directions to the business.
•    Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing. Was it ‘taxi in edinburgh’ or ‘fastest way to the airport’?

You also get access to a load of lists, maps and graphs which displays your data. Here’s what it looks like:

All the stats will get updated every day.

Those of you who are familiar with Google Analytics will recognise these graphs – they’re very similar. If you don’t know about Google Analytics, its a free tool from Google that lets you see exactly where your website visitors are coming from them and what they’re looking at on your website. Here’s a video tutorial on how to set up Google analytics for your WebEden website.

To find out more about accessing using the dashboard, take a look at the video below and then visit Google’s Lat Long Blog for a more in-depth overview.

This is the third and final video tutorial in our basic guide to Google Analytics.

Up to this point we’ve shown you how easy it is to find out information about how many people are on your website, and what pages they’re look at. But there’s a problem. Because you are the person building your website, you’re also the person who visits it most. So lots of the statistics that you look at on Google analytics is actually yourself looking at your website.

Don’t worry though, there’s a really easy way to exclude yourself – or any other specific visitor – from your website data. All you need to do is set up a ‘filter’. What the video to find out how.

Any questions, please leave them below.

Having shown you how to set up Google analytics on your website, last week we introduced a basic guide to Google Analytics.

This week’s tutorial is a continuation of that guide. Here we show you how to segment your data so you only look at particular types of traffic to your website, be that search traffic, direct traffic or other types. We also show you how to export reports, and how to schedule reports too.

Are you getting to grips with Google analytics? Leave us a comment below.

When you are a website builder, its important to understand how people are using your website. You need to know how many people are on your website; which pages they’re looking at; where they’ve arrived from; and how long they stay. Understanding these will help you improve your website, and add more content that you know your visitors like.

All these questions can be answered by installing Google analytics on your website. Last week we showed you how to set up Google analytics on your website. This time around we’re going to take you through all the basics to help you navigate around the interface.

Have a go and let us know what you find out.

Hopefully by now you’ve built a website that you’re at least partially happy with. And if you’ve installed a site counter then you’ll at least know you’re getting some visitors. But where are those visitors coming from? Are they clicking through from another site, or are they coming from Google? And which pages are they looking at on your website? And how long are they staying there?

To answer these and many more questions you need to install Google analytics on your website. Google analytics is one of the best web analytics tools, and best of all its free. Here’s how to set it up on your WebEden website.

How did you get on? What have you found out about your visitors?

We’ve added more tutorials on this series on Google analytics:

Here is a basic guide to Google Analytics

Here is how to segment your data and export reports

Here is how to exclude yourself from your website traffic data.

And if you want to, leave us a comment below.

This is where we start to open up the whole world of Google, to make sure that you are taking full advantage of all the services that the big G can bring you. Google is so much more than just a search engine. Its services including advertising, web analytics, mapping, email, spreadsheets… the list goes on. Google produces new products at a prolific rate, as we revealed in our Google the innovator series. And if you’re building a website, Google is there to help. The first step to gain access to all these great tools is to set up a Google account. Here’s how.

As you are by now probably sick of hearing, the latest release from website maker WebEden allows you integrate your WebEden website with both Facebook and Twitter. This allows you to update both Facebook and Twitter from your WebEden site, and also invite people in your social networks to become a ‘member’ of your WebEden website.

And with the HTML widget, you can also display your Tweets on your WebEden site too.

Also, we have spoken elsewhere in this blog about good Twittering tools that help to drive traffic, and ultimately sales on your website.

But can you really measure the effects of all this social stuff?

Well, to start with, you can use Google Analytics or other link tracking tools to measure how many clicks and sales you make from the links you post in Twitter. (If you’re interested in finding out how to add Google Analytics to your website, then please let us know using the comments box below.)

Dell proudly announced recently that they had made more than $3m of sales from links that they placed in Tweets. The Dell account @delloutlet has over 600k followers, and whenever they have a good offer they Tweet a link to it. Dell reckoned that the people clicking on these links have bought more than $3m worth of PCs from them.

But many others are saying that the development of a social community around your product or service cannot be directly tracked to a boost in the bottom line. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter should be about listening to customers, interacting with them on an informal basis, and finding out how they want your product to change and develop. It should also be about supporting customer needs, and communicating with them in a way they want to be communicated with.

Because all this touchy-feely interaction should ultimately lead to a recommendation and a good review. It’s that word of mouth stuff that is the jewel in the marketing crown. It just so happens that it is the most immeasurable thing too.

And maybe there is a flaw too in even trying to attribute the bottom line benefits to your social networks. It could be argued that in the example above everyone who was following Dell would have probably bought from them anyway, its just that they happened to click on the Twitter link. In fact, maybe they were going to buy a full price Dell but were lucky enough to get the same product for less because they saw the Twitter post.

Have you tried utitlising your social networks to connect new people with your WebEden website? Have you seen any direct or indirect benefits from Twitter or Facebook? Let us know about your experiences below.

I woke up this morning, looked out the window, and knew I wouldn’t be able to make it in to work. Unless you’re lucky enough to be way out West (Cornwall not California), the UK is getting more than a dusting of snow.

Its all very pretty and of course its exciting too: the kids just love it, and I’m already looking forward to thawing them out later on.

However, if you’re trying to get into to work, the weather can be a nightmare. Hundreds of thousands are struggling on foot and by car, and the trains… well the trains are behaving just like trains in the UK always do when faced with anything other than perfect conditions.

But whilst all this stuff is enjoyable / frustrating (delete as appropriate), one thing is true. When the weather is bad, website traffic goes up. When people can’t do what they normally do, they have to spend time doing other stuff. And these days more and more that means booting up their computer and getting on the Internet.

The traffic goes up on all fronts. More people search on Google, more people browse Facebook, more people go shopping, and more people do research.

That’s great news for website builders like us! If there’s more people spending more time online, the chances are they’re going to be spending more time on your site. If you run a community website then it’s a great time to to engage with your website visitors. And if you sell products, or use your website to showcase your company, then there’s a real opportunity to reach new people and get some new leads.

So the next time you’re tutting about the inconvenience, remember that your website will be reaping the benefits – there’s a silver lining to the (snow heavy) cloud!

Anyone caught out today? Leave us a message below.

Update 3.2.09: I just checked our website stats package (we use Google Analytics) for traffic yesterday and it looks like I was right. We had many more visitors than normal for a Monday. Here’s the graph:

So if you weren’t struggling to get around, or building a snowman, you were probably on the Internet!