TWITTER started as a mere social network among friends as a place to hang out with and have a break – just like Kitkat. With the immense popularity of Twitter, people have perceived it as a potential business tool which can surely multiply return of investment a hundredfold.

So how does Twitter works as a business tool? Here’s how: Twitter has inked an official agreement with a business-inclined social networking too, LinkedIn. This is the first step. However, Twitter executives have deemed that it is more profitable if the company itself will have its separate business feature. Thus, monetizing a blog post was formed. It is launched just real recently and it is actually still on its beta stage. For Internet suave folks, you may want to use the Twitter business tool in beta as a Contributor.

One such company which is using Twitter as an online advertising tool is Honeywell. Honeywell is a scholarship firm and they advertise their product using Twitter. Other companies which use Twitter as an online business tool are auto parts distributors. These are the ones which are located at the local level.

Word has it that various private companies are slowly catching up with the Contributor feature of Twitter. These companies are the ones which are usually on the verge of collapse with the current economic crisis but thanks to Twitter, they have slowly risen from a potential doom to be even more profitable than they were before the crisis hit America.

According to Nielsen Online, social media’s growth keeps on increasing. This year 2009, it shows a massive growth in the social web. While, Twitter and Facebook also made a breaking record; in the US alone Twitter reached over 7 million unique visitors in the month of February while Facebook continues to grow compare to MySpace.

Here are the top pick social media trends for 2010 by David Armano, an active practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience design, and the social web.

• Social media begins to look less social
• Corporations look to scale
• Social business becomes serious play
• Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
• Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
• Sharing no longer means e-mail

These lists are just the few of those emerging development in social media web. Since social media was created to allow direct collaboration and interaction with peers in the world, let us all look forward for many trendy changes that will possibly happen.

In 2010 Presidential elections in the Philippines will be conducted so expect that huge percentage of politicians will embrace into social media web to attract voters just like what President Obama did.

Women Runs the Social Web Communities! Information is beautiful come out of a study that a large percentage of women are using the social web. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, Bebo, Myspace and Twitter, have the most number of women users rather than men. But in Digg 64 percent of users are men. In Linkedin, YouTube, Delicious and Deviantart men and women are equal.

Social media is virtually sitting and facing the computer while communicating with friends and start building a relationship with other networks. According to a previous study, women are catching up in overall use and are framing their online experience with a greater emphasis on deepening connections with people.

Are women really more social in web compared to men?

FACEBOOK, the largest social networking site in the world already reached over 300 million users in the span of five months. This is a big success for Facebook! And as they continue to provide something new from services, applications and other features; the growth will eventually soar fast. Facebook has also gain the trust of the people in America as TRUSTe rank Facebook in the number 10th slot being one of the most trusted companies in privacy.

Along with Facebook success will be the launching of Facebook Voice Chat. The Facebook Voice Chat is powered by Vivox, a Boston-based company that provides the integrated voice service for virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE Online, and which already has more than 15 million users worldwide. This feature requires plug-in in which a user needs to install. But once installed, users will enjoy its features from individual chatting to group conversations. Will you become a fan of this new application? Let’s all look forward for the launching of Facebook Voice Chat.

Popular social bookmarking site, Delicious, is now connected to Twitter. Before, the “popular bookmarks” page contains a list of the most saved web pages which were bookmarked by different users. Like any other famous social bookmarking and networking sites such as Digg and Twitter (which had just launched its new design), Delicious also reinvented its pages and gives a new service for their users.If you take a look with the “Fresh Bookmarks” section and click on the arrow right button, you get to see different “Related Tweets” which are related to the subject. A user can now tweets while saving a bookmark.

Delicious explains the changes of their service:

“On the previous delicious.com page (click the Popular tab), you typically found links that had ~100 bookmarks – so more authoritative resources as opposed to fresh news. Additionally, given that the most popular tag on delicious is ‘design’, you probably encountered headlines like ‘100+ Wordpress Themes’ on most days (in fact, I used to make bets on this).

For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, “eats our own dogfood” by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs (as ~81% of tweets do not contain URLs).”

Along the launch of Delicious’ new features follows also the positive and negative feedbacks of fans and avid users.

Twitter launched its new design recently! Before it was just a simple micro blogging platform in which a user updates his/her profile status and shares them to friends. Twitter now turns into a superb social networking service, where most people access valuable information. It’s a place wherein we could grab and stay updated with worldwide news and events. Twitter is a place for branding. A lot of big companies in the world and influential people in different categories are already using Twitter for several reasons.

With its new homepage is a more concise Twitter description: “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”. Before it was: “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Twitter also updated its “trending topics”. Previously it gives eight to ten trendy search results, now it displays twenty three trendy topics updated constantly. Twitter will still undergo changes along the way to provide users with more quality and accurate search results.

Together with Twitters’ launched of a new homepage is the new plug-in service called “Add a Tweet” by Dmitry Shapiro. “To make every page on the Internet commentable”, this is AddaTweet’s mission. To install, simply watch the video for instructions.

Twitter made a big name in the web since it was launched last 2006 as a micro blogging and a social networking site. Twitter made it possible for its users to send and read their buddy’s online updates now commonly called as “tweets”. Tweets are micro blogs limited only to 140 characters which can be seen in the profile page. Tweets are delivered to the “followers” who subscribe to user’s page.

Because of its popularity, which reached more than one million registered users, twitter got a slot in the academic industry as it is included in the Collins English Dictionary. The Collin’s dictionary was published by HarperCollins.

Collins English Dictionary defines Twitter as:
Noun -a website where people can post short messages about their current activities.
Verb-to write short messages on the Twitter website.

These are also included in Collins English Dictionary:
Twitterati- users of the website
Twitterverse- the website and its users

How active are you in your social interactions over the web, most especially on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites? Can you monitor your daily interactions and participations? Below are two recommended sites which can help track your interests and get an updated buzz of what’s hot in the web.

• TINKER is a web-based tool which tracks down the latest Twitter posts all over. It got even the latest buzz from other social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. It’s easy. All you need to do is to have an account. Then create an event stream. By embedding tinker in your blog, website or profile page, you can already promote your own events and allow other people to tweet directly through your event stream.

• TRENDRR is one of those sites which monitor the latest topics of current blog posts all over the Web. For instance, the current hot topic is the death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Trendrr monitors which topic is generating lots of posts. Trendrr uses keywords in doing this. Trendrr has lots of competitors so why use Trendrr? Because it is not just a place to track trends (that’s why it is called Trendrr in the first place) but it generates new ones. Just simply sign up your own account and you can generate your own topic too…well what else but to be trendrr, of course.

Are you addicted to social media sites? If you are, then most likely you share valuable links, content or any new idea that you discover while doing social media campaigns. But do you share the information to different social media sites evenly? Social media geeks always have a platform to monitor their social media activities. Can you also do it, or do you have these tools? Through this new tool “Geek Chart” we can now monitor our daily social activity over the web.

“A Geek Chart is a badge to put on your website that shows where you share stuff online.”

Geek Chart calculates the last 30 days activity you did to different social media sites you are connected with. As of now, Geek Chart serves eight social media sites including Last.fm, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious and your own Blog. You only provide your username to these social media sites and it will calculate your sharing preferences. Every slice of the pie chart links to your social media profile. A pie chart can also be embedded and you have to place the code within your blog. Everytime you share a link or content, Geek Chart also automatically updates it.

Do you believe that effective commenting in other blogs helps build your profile online? This is one of the basic foundations for a very effective social media marketing campaign, according to some experts.

The following are the most basic commenting strategies you should consider and doing this everyday will surely make wonders. Keep track on this.

1. Pick a target. Look for power or very influential people or prominent websites like TechCrunch and Mashable. They are examples of most influential social media blogs. Subscribe to blogs like these through RSS reader to keep you updated for new published articles. POST COMMENT on their articles and expect to build traffic to your page.
2. Make a schedule for leaving comments. Everyday you engage in many activities around the web. Sometimes you forget to take a glance with your subscribed RSS feeds. You can set a schedule like 1-2 hours a day wherein you leave comments to newly published articles.
3. Quality + Quantity. Oftentimes brilliant comment gains more attention rather than the article itself. Think of a quality comment in a natural way relating to the subject in whom you can grab other’s attention. In this way, there is a chance wherein your comment will acquire more retweets or buzz.
4. Use your brand name rather than keywords. Using keywords and not your brand name makes your comment to be kicked off easily.
5. Add approaching comment. Avoid leaving comments like “nice article” or “great article” because it sounds spammy. In other way, comments like that are acceptable if there is a supporting reason on why you said it’s a “great article”.
6. Insert relevant links. Do not be afraid to insert links within your comment as long as it is relevant to the topic. But, if you keep on inserting irrelevant links it will damage your reputation online.