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Waking Up, Inc. is looking for a way to meet virtually in order to minimize the number of face-to-face meetings that seem to bog the team down on a weekly basis. Your job is to decide which of the following resources is best suited for conducting small group meetings in a virtual environment.

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Video chat
·        Skype
·        Zoom

Social Media
·         Twitter

·         LinkedIn

Reporting
·         Medium
·         Google Docs

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The main goal is to meet virtually by choosing a convenient option that works for all members.

To save time and energy, it is important that the alternatives be easily accessible and easy to update for any members that have questions or would like a detailed report of the meetings.

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To keep information confidential and private, it is best that applications do not include a personal profile or an account that could easily be accessed by anyone.

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A personal and professional account can be created

For professional use, Skype Business costs $5 monthly per user

Features include:

Recording and Playback

Polling

PowerPoint Presentations

Customized Participant Views

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Microsoft renamed Lync to Skype for Business in April 2015, and it's now been fully integrated into Office 365.

Skype for Business shares the look and feel of Skype, but it also adds some new features. The software offers easy access to IMs, video calls, voice calls, and online meetings, as well as the confidentiality of Lync through enterprise security, call encryption, and authentication.

You might already be using Skype for Business for all your business needs, but you could be missing out on some of the important features that this software has to offer.

What is Skype for Business?

Skype for Business is a robust replacement for Lync that lets you collaborate with 250 people at a time and helps you manage your employee accounts with enterprise-grade security. This pocket-friendly solution allows you to integrate all your office apps on the go and is available with the Office 365 suite of products. It costs $2/month/user.

Let's take an in-depth look at some of the useful features of Skype for Business that make it an ideal tool for any business.

12 Skype for Business Features

1) Conducts Meetings on the Go

Skype for Business lets you conduct audio, video, and web conferencing on the go. You can easily plan an online meeting well in advance, in addition to hosting one in real time. As many as 250 people can join a meeting with their individual devices. Other salient features are discussed below.

Schedule Meetings from Outlook

Skype for Business can be easily integrated with the Outlook plugin. This allows you to schedule your online meetings through Outlook with a single click. The presenter can choose a meeting topic and can also determine which participants can join the meeting. The details and information for a particular meeting or conference call are available on the Outlook template.

Schedule Meetings via the Web Scheduler

The web scheduler in Skype for Business helps you schedule a range of business meetings. In addition, it allows you to:

Get an overview of upcoming meetings.

View and adjust the details for a particular meeting.

Delete an upcoming meeting.

Send invitations to people to join a meeting.

Join an upcoming meeting.

Single-Touch Join

This feature allows employees to join your meeting with a single click. If the meeting was scheduled well in advance, participants can join conveniently from their calendar meeting reminders.

Multi-Party HD Video

It lets you view up to 6 people simultaneously on your screen live in 1080p resolution.

Content Sharing

Skype for Business helps you take your meetings to the next level by allowing you to share your desktop screens, Excel sheets, and PowerPoint presentations.

2) Numerous Presenter Controls

Skype for Business provides various meeting controls, such as the ability to:

Mute all or individual attendees

Hide the names behind display pictures

Block any person's video

Invite other people

Customize permissions to allow presenters to act as participants

3) Customized Participant Views

Skype for Business offers an array of features to both the host and the attendees of a particular meeting. Participants can easily join a Skype for Business meeting from a phone via dial-in conferencing and choose what they want to view:

Gallery View: lets you view other participants' videos along with the meeting content

Speaker View: lets you view the meeting content alongside the presenter's video

Presentation View: lets you view the meeting content

Compact View: showcases the participant's pictures as organized tiles

4) PowerPoint Presentations

Skype for Business helps you deliver PowerPoint presentations to more than one participant with high-resolution displays. You can also take advantage of other versatile PowerPoint features like embedded videos and slide transitions.

As the software uses standard JavaScript and HTML 5, you can also view presentations on a mobile device.

5) Conferencing Tools

In addition to all this, Skype for Business provides various web conferencing tools like a virtual whiteboard and annotations. The whiteboard allows you to arrange text, ink, drawings, and images on a blank canvas to deliver your message.

Participants can view annotations made on the whiteboard to gather more ideas, discuss the content, and brainstorm solutions.

6) Easy Broadcasting

The Skype Meeting Broadcast lets you broadcast content to over 10,000 attendees and is a perfect solution for conducting webinars. Though you can easily deliver content to large crowds over the internet, you can also reduce the number of attendees to however many employees you have in your organization.

Further, the tool allows you to post recorded video meetings to Office 365 Video. Anyone can join a broadcast using a device with a web browser and can either watch it live or afterward on Microsoft Azure.

You can host conversations between audience members via Yammer and can add external URLs to the broadcast to encourage viewers to take the next step.

7) Polling

Polling helps you enhance collaboration between the participants and the presenter by setting preferences for participants. It also helps you make decisions and take a final call regarding any topic by gathering responses in a group conversation. Additionally, the presenter can choose to either hide or show the poll results.

Thanks to this polling system, you can even gather your audience's input while they watch a broadcast.

8) Recording and Playback

The presenters and organizers can record various aspects of a meeting, such as audio, video, IMs, handouts, sharing sessions, whiteboards, and more, and everything can be recorded on the go. You also have the option to choose your preferred resolution settings for the recording.

9) Meeting Lobby

The Meeting Lobby allows you to specify who may join and is a perfect solution for any meeting involving confidential and sensitive information.

10) Meeting Content Retention

Skype for Business users can upload a range of content for their business meetings in the form of Excel files, PowerPoint presentations, notes, and more. The retention period for a meeting's content depends on the kind of meeting:

One-Time

Content can be retained for a period of 15 days from the day the last person left the meeting.

Recurring

These work just like one-time meetings, except the retention timer resets if any other user enters the meeting within the 15-day retention period.

Meet Now

Content is retained for a period of 8 hours.

11) No Mandatory Authentication

Authentication is not mandatory for Skype for Business attendees. If a user does not have an account with the hosting company but has received an invitation, they may join the meeting by signing in with a guest account.

12) Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) Conferencing

As an added alternative, anyone can join Skype meetings by phone with Microsoft's PSTN conferencing solution, which is useful when there is no internet connection.

Local Dial-In Numbers

A Skype meeting invite contains the dial-in number by which one can easily join the meeting.

Easy Dial-In Conferencing

You can involve a person in your Skype meeting by simply dialing their phone number.

Meeting Roster and Controls

For greater control over a meeting, you can identify who recently joined via the internet or phone with the handy Skype for Business meeting roster. This also lets you check who the current speaker is or even mute a noisy attendee.

Make the Switch

These are just a few of the Skype for Business features that you should use for better management and productivity. Considering that Skype for Business has so much more to offer, it's highly recommended that you make the switch.

Are you an existing Skype for Business user? What are your thoughts? Do let us know in the comments below.

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12 Features That Make Skype for Business the Ideal Solution

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Microsoft renamed Lync to Skype for Business in April 2015, and it's now been fully integrated into Office 365. Skype for Business shares the look and feel of Skype, but it also adds some new features. The software offers easy access to IMs, video calls, voice calls, and online meetings, as well as the confidentiality of Lync through enterprise security, call encryption, and authentication.

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A personal and professional account can also be created

For Small and medium Businesses. Zoom costs $19.99/mo/host

Features include:

Vanity URL

Managed domains

Company branding

Custom emails

Cloud Recording Transcripts

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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With the permission of the company, staff can connect with customers and interact with one another direct messaging.

For a closed group meeting, it is ideal that an application contains video calling, file sharing, and e-mailing.

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Interact with business partners

Connect with businesses and professional users

Features include:

Post informative and engaging Content

Optimize pages with keywords

Enlist employee interaction

Ask for reviews and recommendations

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LinkedIn is the social network for businesses and business professionals. It is the best way to connect with others, source leads, find jobs, and network online.
Most businesses can greatly benefit from having a presence on LinkedIn. In fact, all 500 of the Fortune500 businesses have established a presence on LinkedIn.

As of February 2014, there are over 3 million company pages on LinkedIn.

As with any social channel, just setting up a page for your business is not enough. Engagement is a key factor; you get back what you put into it.

One surefire way to get the most out of LinkedIn for your business is to optimize your business page. Here are 4 crucial features every business should have on their LinkedIn page:

1/ Post Informative and Engaging Content Often

Just setting up a page won't get the attention of other LinkedIn users. However, what you post is very important.

Just as with all social media channels, your LinkedIn posts should not all be related to sales.

Even though LinkedIn is for professionals, it is still social in nature and the types of updates that will get the most attention are informative and engaging.

One of LinkedIn's newest features gives you the ability to target posts to a specific audience. Post with the intent of establishing yourself as an authority in your industry or area of expertise. Post often and also engage with other pages and groups.

There are over 2 million LinkedIn Groups. Find groups that are in your niche or your community.

If there isn't one, then create it.

An excellent example of a company offering thought leadership in their LinkedIn engagement is ADP. LinkedIn highlights ADP in a case study which shows how the company displays its expertise in human resources, employee benefits, talent management, business processing outsourcing, time management and payroll.

The results of their efforts lead to doubling their followers to 85,000 and LinkedIn is the number-one social reference for their website.

2/ Optimize Your Page with Keywords

Using keyword rich content on your LinkedIn page is advised for a few different reasons. Descriptive content lets readers know what you do.

However, those keywords also tell LinkedIn's search feature what your page is about so that it will return your company page in the results for relevant searches made by users. Consequently, it also helps get your LinkedIn company page ranked in the search engines for those keywords.

Just as with any search engine optimization effort today, it does not mean saturating your page with a list of keywords, but rather using those relevant keywords to describe what your company does, your products, and services.

LinkedIn features a case study on Service Brands that illustrates how they increased brand awareness with their company LinkedIn page.

Adding relevant keywords to their page and their status updates not only increased their LinkedIn followers by 83%, but also attracted new target customers and leads while improving the search engine rankings for their brand.

3/ Enlist Employee Interaction

Employees are 70% more likely to engage with your company updates on LinkedIn. All you really have to do is ask them and send out frequent reminders.

Make it easy for them to copy and share. Interaction from company employees on LinkedIn can amplify the messaging exponentially.

Employees sharing company updates with their own LinkedIn connections not only increases exposure, but can also act as an endorsement.

Word of mouth marketing is one of the best uses of social media for companies.

In addition to enlisting employee interaction, it is important to share LinkedIn's best practices for maintaining their own professional profiles on LinkedIn.

SalesForce was featured in a LinkedIn case study that exhibited how they met the challenge of engaging followers, increasing event attendance and reaching regional audiences. One of the tactics that helped them achieve their goals was through empowering localized teams to create their own content and then targeting the message to specific regional audiences.

4/ Ask for Reviews and Recommendations

Reviews and recommendations drive social interactions and conversions online more than company advertisements or messaging.

Oddly enough, it is a rather simple concept because most of the time when a company asks for reviews or recommendations from its customers or clients, they respond, and it is usually in a positive way.

Hewlett-Packard is the subject of a LinkedIn case study that shows how activating the recommendations and asking for company reviews helping increase the exposure and create over 2,000 brand advocates in just two weeks.

The Takeaway

If you put forth the effort, LinkedIn can be a valuable asset to your company.

The exposure and connections that your company can gain on LinkedIn can be one of the best assets you have because of the social nature of the channel. When you establish your company as a leader and authority in your area of expertise, region, or industry, people are more likely to do business with you.

According to Entrepreneur.com, "LinkedIn research suggests that members are nearly 50% more likely to purchase from a company they've interacted with on LinkedIn, and 80% say they want to connect with companies on the platform."

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4 Crucial LinkedIn Features Every Business Should Have

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LinkedIn is the social network for businesses and business professionals. It is the best way to connect with others, source leads, find jobs, and network online. Most businesses can greatly benefit from having a presence on LinkedIn. In fact, all 500 of the Fortune500 businesses have established a presence on LinkedIn.

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Allows user to post content to be made public

Can be connected to other social media accounts

Features include:

Engage with other stories

Users receive an email digest with the latest stories (posts)

Allows readers to focus on content created by user

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Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner

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Kristi Hines / /

Have you considered publishing your content on Medium?

Are you looking for a way to distribute your ideas to a larger audience?

In this post you'll discover what marketers think about Medium, along with a step-by-step guide to using Medium.

Listen to this article:

Scroll to the end of the article for links to important resources mentioned in this episode.

Why Medium?

Jay Baer, a New York Times bestselling author and well-known keynote speaker, has been posting on Medium for over a year. He uses Medium for "...posts (sometimes original, sometimes repurposed) that are more opinion-based or take a stronger stand." He defines Medium as "...LinkedIn's cool younger brother who wears concert T-shirts all the time, but also checks the Dow Jones average on his iPhone."

Who can be successful on Medium? Baer explains, "I think businesses can have success on Medium, but perhaps more so as individuals rather than as businesses per se. In essence, what I do there is on behalf of Convince & Convert, through me. The same can work for other companies who have 'thought leaders' willing and able to take the time to post content on Medium that solicits a response."

Mitch Joel, president of Mirum Agency, also adds, "It's not just a place to publish, but an impressive platform for content distribution. As an infovore, it's also an amazing place to discover new voices and content - probably more powerful than just picking up a link from Facebook or Twitter." He plans to add Medium to his publishing schedule soon.

With those things in mind, here are some of the benefits of using Medium as your platform for publishing insightful content:

Medium received an estimated 35 million visitors in November 2015, with 36.78% from the United States, according to SimilarWeb. When new users join, they automatically follow Medium's account. Their current number of followers is 726K, so there are at least 726K users on Medium.

Medium allows you and your readers to focus on one thing: the content you create.

When you join Medium with your Twitter or Facebook account, you get a built-in audience because all of your Twitter followers and Facebook friends who use Medium will automatically become followers of your Medium account. As your Twitter followers and Facebook friends join Medium, they will automatically follow you as well.

Why It Might Be Time to Completely Change Your #SocialMedia #Strategy on @Medium https://t.co/P6AZ8MoD44 #smm

- Jay Baer (@jaybaer) November 24, 2015

Medium users receive an email digest with the latest stories (posts) by the people and publications they follow delivered to their inbox. Thus, all of your followers from Twitter on Medium will get notified of your latest stories (based on their settings).

If your stories are recommended by Medium users who have large followings, your stories will be shown to their followers on the Medium homepage as well as in their followers' email digest (based on their settings).

If your stories become popular, they have the chance of being featured as a Top Story to the entire Medium community or as a Medium Staff Pick sent in the email digest.

Those are some pretty exciting stats and benefits for marketers looking to reach new audiences through content.

What results can you expect? Kiki Schirr, co-founder of Fittr, posts to her Medium regularly.

She has found that "The great thing about using Medium is also its biggest downside: Medium comes with an automatic audience that is easily tapped, but difficult to transfer. If you're writing a post that needs 10,000 views, Medium is by far the best tool for capturing them. However, if your goal is to build an audience or brand, you should at the very least be cross-posting your content to a private domain. By posting a small piece each day I was able to reach 10,000 subscribers to my publication in 66 days. I think that's an exciting prospect for marketers."

Now, let's look at how to use Medium.

#1: Sign Up for Your Medium Account

To get started, you'll need to sign up for a Medium account using Twitter, Facebook, Google or your email address.

If you sign up with Twitter, Facebook or Google, you'll be asked to provide your name, email address and desired username (http://medium.com/@username).

From here, you'll be asked to choose your interests and follow some top Medium users and publications.

Then you'll be taken to your homepage.

#2: Edit Your Profile

At the top right of your homepage, click on your profile photo to find the link to go to your profile.

Click on the Edit link to edit your name, bio and profile photo. Note that URLs will be automatically hyperlinked.

Your Medium profile bio will also be used as the author bio at the end of your stories on Medium and in other areas throughout Medium.

#3: Connect Your Social Accounts

As mentioned earlier, you can build your Medium audience by connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts so your Twitter followers and Facebook friends who are using Medium will automatically follow you. To do this, click on the Settings link in the menu at the top right under your profile photo.

Scroll down to the Connections section and connect to Twitter and Facebook if you haven't already. Then choose whether you want those social profile links to show up on your Medium profile.

You'll also want to check your other settings to configure email and other notifications.

#4: Engage With Other Stories

Your Medium profile is composed of your latest stories and your engagement with other stories. Before you write your own story on Medium, you should get to know how it works by engaging with other stories.

To find stories to engage with, review your email digest with stories from people and publications you follow. Alternatively go to your homepage to see stories that are trending and those recommended to you by people you follow or click on the tags in the right sidebar to find stories on a specific topic. You can also use the search box at the top right to find stories by keyword.

To engage with a story, you can start by highlighting a favorite quote or phrase. Popular stories will often have the most popular highlights annotated.

Click the pencil icon to add the phrase you've selected to your profile's highlights. The comment icon allows you to respond (comment) on the story at that location. The Twitter icon allows you to share that quote as a tweet along with a link to the post. The private comment icon lets you leave a private note that only the author(s) of the story can see.

At the end of the story, you'll have the option to engage with the post further. You can recommend it using the heart icon, leave a public response using the comment icon, share it on social networks using the share icon, save it to your bookmarks using the bookmark icon or click the three dots for more actions like embedding the story on your website.

These actions (highlighting, recommending and responding) will all appear on your profile after your latest stories.

Note that you can remove highlights and recommendations by revisiting the stories. But you can't delete responses.

#5: Write Your Own Stories

Once you've perused the top content on Medium and have a good idea what Medium users consider great content (based on highlights, recommendations and responses), you'll be ready to write your own stories on Medium. To do so, click on the Write a Story button at the top right of the Medium homepage.

The interface for writing a story on Medium is minimalistic to help you focus on one thing only: your content.

To start, simply enter your title. When you do, you'll be able to access the menu items under the three dots next to the Publish button.

The editor hints and shortcuts will reveal the basic keyboard shortcuts you can use on Medium when writing a story.

There are also advanced keyboard shortcuts you can use on Medium when writing a story.

You'll also get some tips on editing your text.

Plus there are tips on how to add media to your story.

And you'll find tips on how to add links to your story.

You can even add mentions of other Medium users in your post so they get notified (based on their settings).
Sharing Drafts
Your draft is automatically saved periodically when you make changes. You can click the Share button to send a private link to your draft to others. They can use that link to add notes to your story so you can revise it before publishing.

You'll get a notification when someone you've invited to your draft leaves a note.

You can find your Drafts and Stories by clicking on your profile icon at the top right and selecting that option.
Publishing Drafts
When you're ready to publish your draft, click on the drop-down arrow next to Publish. This will give you the option to add tags to your story and edit its privacy and licensing.

You can use those options to make your story publicly visible or unlisted. Unlisted stories will be visible to anyone who has the URL to them, but will not be listed on your profile. Note that people can still create public responses to unlisted stories. With licensing, you can choose to copyright your content or share it with Creative Commons licensing.

If you chose public visibility for your story, your followers on Medium will be notified in their digest (based on your settings) that you have recently published a story. You can also share the link to your story and promote it like any other piece of content.

To feature your new story on your profile, go to the story on your profile and click on the drop-down arrow.

This will move your story to the top of your profile until you use the same arrow to unfeature it or feature another story.

#6: Import a Story

When you click on Drafts and Stories in the menu under your profile icon, you'll notice the option to import a story. Click Import to import articles and posts you've written on other sites to your Medium account.

Note that Medium's terms of service specifically say that "If you own the content, you're welcome to copy it from other places and publish it on Medium (and vice versa) as long as you didn't give exclusive rights to other platforms or publishers."

When you enter the URL of an article or post you've authored on another site, you'll be given advice on how to edit it for Medium.

From there, you'll be able to edit the draft of your imported story before publishing. Note that a lot of styling elements from other websites won't carry over to Medium, so things like tables and columns will need to be adjusted accordingly.

#7: Create Publications

In addition to creating stories on Medium, you can also create publications. Think of publications like Google+ collections or Paper.li newspapers. They allow you to group your content in a specific way and allow people to subscribe specifically to the stories you add to those publications.

The biggest advantages of using publications are:

Send letters to your publication's followers. Letters are stories that are added to your publication and emailed directly to your followers (based on their settings).

Invite other Medium users to be writers and editors of your publications. Writers can submit stories to the publication and editors can submit and approve stories to the publication. If you don't invite other writers and/or editors to your publication, you can only add your own stories and responses to other stories to the publication.

Click on the publications link in the menu under your profile icon to create a publication. There, you'll see the publications you've created, the publications you follow and the button to create a new publication.

After you click on the New Publication button, click on the arrow at the top right of the page to reveal the main publication settings.

In the Info section of your publication settings, add details about your publication: an avatar (image), name, description, contact information, tags and logo.

In the People section, you can invite writers and editors to your publication.

Once you edit the settings of your publication, you're able to edit the layout and design. You can add new sections by clicking the plus icon and change the layout of each section using the icons at the top right of the section.

Use the Stories drop-down menu to determine what stories will appear in your publication.

Once you're finished designing your publication, click on the arrow at the top right of the screen again and click the Create button. Whenever you need to edit your publication again, visit the publication and click the drop-down arrow to find the Edit link.

Once you finish your edits, click on the arrow at the top right of the screen and click the Save button.

To add stories to your publication that you've already published on your Medium profile, click on the story's timestamp.

Next, click on the three dots at the bottom of your story, and select the option to add it to your publication.

Once added, you'll be able to see it in your publication.

Also note that the link to any publications you create or contribute to will be linked on your profile.

To send letters to your publication's followers, click on the drop-down arrow at the top of your publication and then click on Letters.

On the next screen is an editor similar to the one you use to publish new stories, with a few features specific to email.

Click the Email Preview button to send a test email to yourself. When ready, you can send it to your followers.

Keep in mind when you send the letter, it will also be published to your publication. To see your letter in your publication, you'll need to click on the More Stories button.

If you want to remove the letter from your publication, click on the timestamp for your letter. Then click on the three dots and select the remove option. Note that this will not unsend the letter, just remove it from your publication.
In Conclusion
Medium is more than just a blogging platform. It's a place where marketers can collaborate, share viewpoints and explore ideas.

Have you used Medium for yourself or your business? What has your experience been? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

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Medium for Business: The Complete Guide for Marketers

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Have you considered publishing your content on Medium? Are you looking for a way to distribute your ideas to a larger audience? In this post you'll discover what marketers think about Medium, along with a step-by-step guide to using Medium. Listen to this article: Why Medium?

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Must be verified to be considered an official account

Users can be contacted by anyone

Features include:

Interact with influencers and customers

Advertise on Twitter

Participate in Twitter chats

Handle problems through direct messages

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With millions of daily users, Twitter can be a powerful tool to raise awareness about your business, engage with customers and develop leads.

Setting up a Twitter for Business profile is simple, but just like a muscle, it needs to be used regularly to be most effective.

Understanding how to navigate Twitter for your business can go a long way in business growth.

This article is for business owners, or their marketing and communications teams, examining the benefits of incorporating Twitter into their business marketing strategy.

From hashtags and pinned tweets to Twitter lists and social media influencers, there's a lot to Twitter. With the right marketing plan, businesses can use the platform to increase sales, boost brand recognition and improve customer service.

Twitter is a social media and online news platform where people communicate in short messages - up to 280 characters long - called tweets. Founded in 2006, Twitter is now one of the most popular social media platforms in the world.

This can be a powerful platform to combine with your LinkedIn and Facebook marketing efforts. Whether you're new to Twitter or you want to start using the platform to boost your business, here's everything you need to know about it.

Parts of a Twitter profile

Your Twitter profile has six parts: your Twitter handle, username, profile picture, bio, header image, and a pinned tweet. All these elements should work cohesively to be an accurate representation of your business.

Your Twitter handle is your @name, your identifier on Twitter. This is the name at the end of your Twitter page's URL and the name other tweeters will use to tag you in posts. It can be up to 15 characters and should help people find your business easily.

Your username, or display name, appears above your Twitter handle on your profile and can be up to 50 characters. This would be the name of your business or brand.

Your profile photo is displayed on your profile and in every tweet you post, so it should visually represent your business and brand. Many brands use their logo.

For your bio, you have 160 characters to describe your business. Include information such as your location, business hours and website URL.

You can use the header image behind your profile picture to highlight promotions, events or news about your business. Unlike your profile picture, this image should change regularly.

Your pinned tweet is the first tweet people see when they visit your profile, so make it an interesting one that represents what's going on with your brand. As with your header image, you can change your pinned tweet whenever you want.

Twitter terminology

These terms are important to know when using Twitter for your small business.

@: As on other social media websites, you use the "at" symbol with a user's handle to tag or mention them.

# (hashtag): A hashtag, denoted with the pound sign, is used to index words or phrases on Twitter. When you click on a hashtag, Twitter automatically shows you other tweets with the hashtag. This makes it easy for people to follow topics and events.

Block: If you block an account on Twitter, they can't follow you, add you to Twitter lists or see your tweets. You also won't see their tweets.

Bookmarks: Similar to bookmarks in an internet browser, the Twitter Bookmarks button allows you to save tweets so you can find them easily later. This is particularly helpful if you want to read an article or watch a video linked in the tweet but don't have time at the moment.

Direct messages (DM): You'll often hear people refer to direct messages as "DMs." This option allows you to chat privately with an individual user. If one of your customers or followers has a question, they can ask you via DM. There is no character limit on DMs, so your response can be as detailed as necessary. However, if someone you don't follow messages you, their message will show up in the "requests" folder by default, so you might not notice it immediately. You can change this in your settings.

Follow: When you follow an account, you're subscribing to see that user's tweets in your timeline.

Followers: Twitter users who follow you can see your tweets in their timelines.

Like: You can like a tweet by clicking the heart symbol under it. You can see all of your likes on your profile.

Lists: You can make public and private lists of other users you find interesting. You don't have to follow a user to include them in a list. For example, you may make a list of local news outlets or writers, your competitors, influencers in your industry, or important customers.

Retweet: Retweeting is similar to sharing someone's post on Facebook. If you like a tweet and want your follows to see it, you retweet it. Then, the tweet shows up on your followers' timelines and your profile.

Timeline (or home timeline): Your timeline displays the tweets and retweets of the people you follow as well as promoted tweets.

Trending topics / trends: These are the currently most discussed topics and hashtags on Twitter. You can see trending topics on the left-hand side of your Twitter homepage in the "trends" box. You can customize your trend display to show what's popular in your location or with the people you follow.

Key takeaway: To use Twitter for business, you need to know common terms like "hashtag," "timeline" and "trending topics" so you can use these sources of insight. You'll also need to understand what it means to follow, like, bookmark, block, DM, @mention, and retweet another user or post.

Tools of Twitter

Keeping your account(s) organized needs to be a priority. Two popular third-party tools to help you do that are TweetDeck and Hootsuite.

TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, is free to use and has a sleek user interface with customizable columns where you can organize lists, notifications, and your feed. You can also track hashtags in separate columns, schedule tweets in advance (something you can't do on the Twitter website or mobile apps) and add multiple Twitter accounts to manage several users at once. TweetDeck is accessible via web browser.

Hootsuite, which lets you manage other social media accounts besides Twitter, operates similarly to TweetDeck, allowing you to schedule your tweets, manage your replies, respond to messages and tweets, and generally automate your account's management. It is arguably not as sleek or simple as TweetDeck, though, as it uses tabs for each profile you connect to it. Hootsuite offers a free version, or you can use the pro version for $9.99 per month.

Hootsuite and Twitter itself have mobile apps for use on a smartphone or tablet, and you can add multiple user accounts.

How to set up a business Twitter account

Twitter and other social media platforms often adjust their setup process, so these steps may change in the future, but as of February 2021, these are the steps to set up a Twitter account for business use:

1. Create an account. Visit the Twitter homepage and click "sign up." You'll be prompted to create a username and Twitter handle, provide your business email and a phone number, and supply your date of birth to confirm that you meet the age requirements to use the service (your birthdate is not publicly available information). Be sure to pick a Twitter handle that clearly represents your business, but you can adjust it later if needed.

2. Verify your account. Once you complete the first step, Twitter will send a verification code to the phone number you provided. Enter that code in the provided space and click "next."

3. Create a password. As you should when signing up for any account online, make sure that this password is hard to guess and not in use for any of your other accounts. Use a combination of letters, numbers and special characters to make it unique and complex.

4. Complete your profile. Now that you've supplied the basics, you'll be prompted to fill out your profile. You will need these components for a complete business Twitter profile:

Upload a profile picture. This is often your company's logo or, if you're creating a personal account to use for business purposes, a professional photo of yourself. Upload the picture (approximately 400 by 400 pixels) and adjust if necessary.

Write a bio. Describe your business succinctly in this 160-character space. You may wish to include one or two hashtags that are important to your business.

Select your interests. Next, you'll be prompted to select some areas of interest so Twitter can recommend like-minded users for you to follow. You can skip this stage, but it will be helpful to select areas of interest related to your business. For example, if you are opening a Twitter business account for a home renovation company, you may want to select "home improvement" or "interior design" as categories of interest.

Choose users to follow from the suggestions. You'll then receive a list of popular accounts that Twitter recommends you follow. You can skip this step if you already know which accounts you want to follow, but you do want to get started with following other users. If you do take some of Twitter's suggestions, only select the recommended profiles that relate to your business, rather than people you are personally interested in following who are not relevant to your brand or industry.

Tell Twitter if you want to receive notifications. Turn on notifications for now, as this is the best way for you to act and respond to others quickly as your Twitter presence grows.

Upload your cover photo and other business information. You have a few more items to provide before your profile is complete.

Create a cover photo. Upload an image or custom graphic that represents your business. This could be an original photo or illustration, your tagline, or other branded imagery. The recommended dimensions of this graphic are 1500 by 500 pixels.

Add your location and website. Select "edit profile" on your main profile page to supply this information. For the location field, if your company has multiple branches, select the location of your headquarters.

How to put Twitter to work for your business

Social media holds value for businesses of any size. It spans multiple demographics and spreads your company's message. As a business owner, you should carefully consider how Twitter will fit into your overall social media marketing plan.

Here are some ideas on how to use Twitter for your business.

1. Use hashtags.

Hashtags are searchable identifying words or phrases that groups hundreds (or thousands) of tweets together. They're a great way to increase the visibility of your content beyond your own followers. There are many popular hashtags that most active Twitter users are familiar with, like #FollowFriday and #ThrowbackThursday.

Many brands latch onto trending topics to contribute to the conversation or sell their products. You can also create your own hashtags to draw attention to your brand or events you are holding.

Only use hashtags that are relevant to your content. For example, if you tweet about starting a business, you might use the hashtag #entrepreneurship. You should also limit how many hashtags you use. The more you use, the less likely people are to interact with your content, because they'll find your posts spam-like.

Also, look at the trending box every day. Located on the left-hand side of your timeline if you're on desktop or on the search tab in the Twitter app, the trending box can provide inspiration on what to share with your followers. Again, just make sure it's relevant to your brand and that you use the trending phrase or hashtag in your tweet.

2. Handle problems through direct messages.

Direct messaging has evolved over the years, especially for brands. This is a major platform for troubleshooting your customers' issues and handling their problems, and the way you interact with them is important.

It's smart to handle individual customer complaints and issues through DMs for a couple reasons. For one thing, you don't want other users to see the problem and think less of your company. Also, there is no character limit on DMs, which gives you the freedom to help customers properly.

By default, only users you follow can send you DMs. You can set up your Twitter account to receive messages from anyone, though, making it easier for all customers to contact you. Simply go to Privacy Settings and enable "receive direct messages from anyone."

3. Use photos, GIFs and polls.

Twitter allows you to add up to four photos to a post. You can also create graphics to add to your tweets. Not a Photoshop whiz? There are numerous tools online that can help you create the image you need.

Using photos and GIFs in your tweets is a great way to connect with followers. Twitter has a built-in GIF keyboard; you simply search for a keyword and choose the clip that best suits your tweet.

Engaging with your followers on Twitter is imperative to keep consumers interested in your brand. One fun way to involve your followers is to create a poll with these simple steps:

Click the "compose" box at the top of your home timeline.

Click the "add poll" icon that looks like a horizontal graph.

Type your question into the main "compose" box.

Enter your first poll response option into Choice 1 and the second option into Choice 2. You can list up to four answer options in your poll; each option can be up to 25 characters.

The poll stays live for 24 hours by default, but you can shorten that timeframe if you prefer.

4. Do live tweets.

Live tweeting is another potential way to get a topic trending on Twitter. Essentially, live tweeting is when a user tweets their reactions to an event as it happens, whether it's entertainment or breaking news.

Live tweeting most commonly occurs with TV shows and televised events. It's not uncommon during events such as these to see the trends box filled with related topics. For example, during the Oscars, you might see the official awards show hashtag listed along with the names of celebrities and films that have just won major awards.

If you throw an event and want your attendees to live tweet about it, it's a good idea to create your own hashtag for the event and share it with your attendees so they can spread and follow it.

When you're live tweeting or using multiple tweets for the same topic, make them responses to the original tweet. This makes it easier for users to follow the entire conversation.

5. Host and participate in Twitter chats.

Another way to engage your followers or get a topic trending is to host a Twitter chat on a topic relevant to your brand or expertise. Twitter chats are straightforward, but they require a relatively large and active follower base to be successful.

A Twitter chat happens when several Twitter users discuss a specific topic simultaneously using a shared hashtag.

Usually, one Twitter user hosts a chat at a specific time, with prepared questions and discussion points. The host will tweet out the questions, often labeled "Q1" (or whatever number the question is), and participants will respond with "A1" and their thoughts.

Twitter chats usually last about an hour. They are a great way to show how active you are on social media and to engage your followers (and theirs).

6. Interact with influencers and customers.

It's important to interact with the right people on Twitter. It's always smart to engage with your customers to keep them happy and with potential customers to help them learn about your business. Perhaps you also want to focus on others, such as journalists or influencers whose specialties are relevant to your brand, and an easy way to do that is with Twitter lists.

"[Take] advantage of the Twitter list function to create groups of journalists who are friendly to your cause or potential customers, influencers, [and] industry-specific trade show attendees," said Jason Myers, senior account executive at The Content Factory. "You can then filter out the noise of random follower tweets and target your engagement to those folks who are more likely to help you reach your social media marketing objectives."

7. Advertise on Twitter.

Twitter is free to use, but if you'd like to pay to promote your account on the platform, you have plenty of advertising options.

Promoted Tweets: These ads look just like regular tweets, except that they are labeled "promoted" at the bottom, and they appear in the regular Twitter feeds of users who might not be following you yet. Promoted Tweets are a way to increase engagement and expand your reach to a wider group of users beyond your follower base.

Promoted Accounts: Promoted Accounts are designed to help brands become more discoverable and grow their numbers of followers. These ads are displayed in multiple locations on Twitter, including in the "who to follow" box on a user's homepage, on the home Twitter feed, and in search results. Your Promoted Account ads target Twitter users whose interests are relevant to your brand, so you might gain followers who are actively engage with your content. All of the ads are labeled "promoted" just like Promoted Tweets so users can distinguish them from other content on their feeds.

Promoted Trends: Promoted Trends appear at the top of the trending topics list in the trends box on Twitter. They, too, are clearly labeled as "promoted," but otherwise, these ads look exactly like other trending topics, and users can interact with them in the same ways. While Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts target specific users, Promoted Trends are visible to all users during their promotion period, including on the Twitter mobile app. Promoted Trends are a good way to get people talking about your business with a specific hashtag.

In addition to these options, Twitter has a host of marketing tools to help you improve your campaigns.

Twitter Amplify: Amplify allows you to share real-time television content (for example, videos of sports highlights) that you can integrate with your brand or sponsors. This can help you reach users besides your current followers by delivering content to targeted audiences.

Promoted Video: While Amplify gives you the ability to share videos from TV programs and other broadcasts, Promoted Video opens up the possibilities even further, allowing you to use any kind of video and thus be more creative with your campaigns. Unlike embedded YouTube videos, Promoted Video content is hosted directly by Twitter and only available as a paid marketing tool.

Mobile app promotion: If your brand has launched an app, whether it's the cornerstone of your business or a complementary tool for your service, this is the tool for you. This option lets you target your desired audience on mobile devices to drive app downloads. You can create a custom image and app description for the ad and target users by location, gender, language, and mobile platform. For example, if your app is available only on iOS devices, you can target users who access Twitter from those devices. The tool also features a unique measurement system that shows you how your campaign is impacting your app installations, purchases and registrations.

Verified accounts on Twitter

A blue checkmark next to a user's display name indicates a verified account. This means that the social network considers the user to be a prominent brand or influential individual, and it confirms the user is who they say they are.

According to the site, an account may be verified if Twitter determines it to be of public interest. Typically, this includes accounts of public figures in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business and other areas of popular interest.

A verified Twitter user can lose their verified status if they change their handle or protect their tweets (i.e., make their tweets visible only to their followers). In these instances, Twitter will automatically review the user's account to ensure it's still eligible for verification. Consider this if you decide to rebrand.

In November 2017, Twitter suspended its verification process. Many users viewed it as an endorsement by Twitter and criticized the social media platform for verifying accounts of controversial people. However, in December 2020, Twitter announced that it was bringing back the verification process.

Twitter tips and tricks

In addition to following the best practices and techniques explained above, you should observe these general rules to maximize your success on Twitter.

Don't buy followers.

You can purchase followers from certain services to beef up your count. While it may be tempting to make it look like you have more followers than you actually do, it's not worth it. The followers you get aren't real and won't interact with your brand, so they add no value and make you look bad if you're found out.

Go mobile.

The Twitter mobile app is incredibly well integrated with the web platform, so the transition from tweeting on your computer to tweeting from your smartphone or tablet is virtually seamless.

Embed tweets on your blog.

If you have an active blog on your brand's website, you can embed tweets into it to showcase any fun content you shared or comments from your loyal followers. This is a great way to incorporate your social media accounts on your website.

To embed a tweet, go to the tweet you want to share and click on the "more" tab in the upper right corner. A dropdown menu will appear; choose "embed tweet," and it will take you to a new page with the appropriate HTML code. From there, just copy and paste the code where you want it to appear.
Stella Morrison and Brittney Morgan contributed to the writing and reporting in this article. Some source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.

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Twitter for Business: Everything You Need to Know

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With millions of daily users, Twitter can be a powerful tool to raise awareness about your business, engage with customers and develop leads. Setting up a Twitter for Business profile is simple, but just like a muscle, it needs to be used regularly to be most effective.

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In a professional setting any data relating to the company should be reported privately and information should be kept confidential.

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Create documents with built in editing software like Grammarly

Share files online and offline

Features include:
Collaborate with remote workers
Auto-saves work with optional back-up storage
Has word processor, spreadsheet app, and a presentation builder

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Google Docs is a free, web-based platform for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. You can access it from any computer with a web browser and internet connection, and you can share documents with others to edit and work on together.

Nearly 23% of small businesses used Google Docs in 2015, and that number is growing. If your small business isn't taking advantage of this free platform yet, read on to learn why it should be.

Google Docs offers all the capabilities of many high-dollar office suites, but it's available for free on the cloud. It features a word processor, a spreadsheet app, and a presentation builder.

The word processor comes with a host of features including spell check, a word counter, voice-typing capabilities, the ability to insert pictures, charts, and tables into your document, and more. The spreadsheet app handles everything from simple graphs and tables to complex equations. Google Slides, the presentation app, lets you build professional-quality presentations in minutes and lets others collaborate on them remotely in real time.

Best of all, Google Docs is free to use, requiring only an internet connection and web browser. Because it is cloud-based, you do not have to download anything onto your computer. Even the documents you create get automatically saved to the cloud and do not take up space on your computer, though you have the option of saving files onto your hard drive.

One of the best features of Google Docs is the ability to share documents you're working on with remote employees and co-workers, so you can build and edit those documents together. It even has a color-coded feature that shows you who is responsible for each edit, and it tells you when the last update was made to the document and at what time.

By combining Google Docs with Google Hangouts, you can efficiently build a spreadsheet or create a presentation with a group of co-workers in different cities or provinces just as if you were all sitting around the same conference table.

Ever gotten so wrapped up in typing out a long report that you forgot to save your work periodically, and then a power outage wiped out all your progress? That's never a worry with Google Docs - the platform is constantly updating your work in real time and saving it to the cloud.

If you make an update to your work and then decide you prefer the way it looked before, you can scroll back through every edit you've made and restore a previous version of your document.

With apps for both iPhone and Android, Google Docs is available on the go. If you need a co-worker to edit a document but, you know they're out of the office and travelling, you can send them a text and have them take care of it on their smartphone or tablet. Then, you can log in to your Google account and see the finished product in real time.

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Why You Should Use Google Docs for Your Small Business | QuickBooks Canada

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Google Docs is a free, web-based platform for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. You can access it from any computer with a web browser and internet connection, and you can share documents with others to edit and work on together. Nearly 23% of small businesses used Google Docs in 2015, and that number is growing.

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The best choices for virtual meetings and reports are reduced down to:

Skype Business and Google Docs

Questions that were considered to make the choices were:

What is our goal? What are we trying to accomplish?
Access the most simple app to conduct virtual meetings and keep transcripts recorded under one single document that can be accessible to all members of the group.

What does the alternative need to do? How will it meet our goal(s)?
The alternative, Google Docs, simply records and keeps data altogether in one document so that it could be edited by any member in real time. It updates the members who are visiting the document and allows anyone to add information in real time.

What standards are the most important for this alternative to meet?
Company standards should make it it priority to keep information confidential and safe within the members of the company.

What is less important?
Less important items would be community outreach and customer engagement.

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For members to reach an agreement on whether they like the chosen applications or not, members could implement different methods like:

Voting

Consensus

Authority Rule

Compromise

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Skype Business allows users to connect from anywhere whether they are on the road or at the office. A single sign in option can be used to make the application easier for the user. The application also allows users to share files, presentations, screens, and even record the meetings for those who are not able to attend.

Google Docs allows users to edit documents, chat, and share information in real time. With all of the options that Google offers with Google Classroom, emailing, presentations, word processor, excel and many more, all information can be accessed with a single sign in.