There are plenty of tools out there to simultaneously update your tweets and your Facebook updates, including TweetDeck, Ping.fm and others.

However, when it comes to syncing your tweets and your Facebook fan pages the choices are slimmer. I took a look at a few different options out there, but I found that Hootsuite offers the most elegant solution. Hootsuite is a free suite of tools that help you better manage your social media activity.

First go setup a free account at Hootsuite if you don’t already have one. Once you’re logged in, you’ll click on Settings, choose Social Networks, and then Add a Social Network. This will open a small window where you can select Facebook Pages and select which page you want to sync with, then click Connect with Facebook. Once you’re all set up you can use Hootsuite to post a message to Twitter and update your fan page at the same time.

If you can’t view the movie above, you can watch How to Sync Twitter & Your Facebook Fan Page over at YouTube.

Thanks to Karen Skidmore who gave me the heads up on this.

Rich Brooks
Social Media Marketing for Small Business

As a lot of small business and non-profits know, social media sites like Facebook are a great place to connect with your audience and build your business or membership.  

There are a number of reasons for businesses, non-profits and just about any organization to be on Facebook:

• Location, location, location: a lot of your prospects, customers, members and constituents are already on Facebook
• As people become a fan of your business, or interact with your fan page, their activity appears in their feed. This is then seen by their friends, increasing the chance that you’ll be promoted to more people
• Fan pages are free to setup and run

One way to build your fan base is to add a fan box to your Web site or blog, which makes it easy for people to fan you.

The fan box is also great if you have a static Web site and can’t make updates yourself. Just have your web developer to add a fan box to your site; now the updates you post to your fan page will appear on your Web site automatically.  

Here’s a video called “How to Add a Facebook Fan Box to Your Web Site or Blog” which–surprisingly–shows you how to add a Facebook fan box to your Web site…or blog.

Rich Brooks
Helping Small Businesses Leverage Facebook Since…wait, what year is it?

With so many people, business, non-profits, politicians and other organizations blogging, it can be challenging to get your blog noticed.

That was the topic of a segment I recorded yesterday for 207, the evening news program here in Maine. Pat Callahan interviewed me about how to create a better blog and how to get your blog noticed.

I also had an opportunity to plug our upcoming social media marketing conference: The Social Media FTW Fall Conference which I'm putting on with Chrystie Corns and Jaica Kinsman here in Maine on Wednesday, 9/23/09.

At the end I got to mention a couple of blogs that I couldn't live without, ProBlogger and Copyblogger, (although I embarrassingly gave the wrong URL for ProBlogger…it's dot net, not dot com.)

If you are interested in blogging, but still have questions, be sure to download my free white paper, The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make (email registration required.)

You can watch the video here or on the "big screen" at the 207 Web site.

Rich Brooks
Small Business Blogger

If your business has products or services that require regular billing, you might want to look to PayPal to automate the billing process.

In this short video on How to Set Up Recurring Billing in PayPal, I'll show you step-by-step how to automate recurring billing, whether you want to bill once a month or twice a week, and whether you want to bill for six months, a year or forever.

Once you've set up the recurring billing PayPal will generate code you can add to a Web site, blog, or even put into an email.

Rich Brooks
Helping Small Businesses Do Stuff

Adding photos to your blog posts is a great way of making them more eye-catching. However, the cost of royalty-free imagery starts to add up, and you also don't want to end up being sued because you used photos without permission.

That's why I use photos from Flickr with the Creative Commons license. As long as I give attribution to the appropriate photos, I'm in the clear.

Which got me thinking: why don't I offer up my photos to other bloggers in the hopes that they'll give me attribution and link back to my Flickr page, increasing my online visibility? I wasn't sure how to go about it, but it turns out it's pretty simple, as this video, How to Share Your Photos Through Creative Commons will show you.

You can share your photos through Creative Commons on Flickr here.

Photo courtesy of therichbrooks.

Rich Brooks
Maine Web Design

There's a number of reasons small business owners and entrepreneurs should consider Gmail as their primary email tool:

1. Great spam filters (the best I've used)
2. Your email is synced whether you're using the office computer, your home computer, a computer at the Internet café in Brussels, or from your iPhone
3. Insanely fast search
4. It's free
5. The threading of messages is fantastic (90% of the time)

However, the default setting of Gmail is to send your emails from you@gmail.com. That's not so good for a small business (or any business) that's trying to brand itself. You want all of your emails to come from you@yourcompany.com.

(For those of you who still have your AOL email address on your business card it's time to step up. Your email scribbled on a cocktail napkin has a more professional feel.)

And no, Gmail's not perfect and it does take some getting used to; perhaps the topic of another blog post & video.

In the short video below I'll walk you through how to add your domain-branded email to Gmail, and how to make it the default email on your account. Or, you can watch How to Send from Another Email Address Using Gmail at flyte's YouTube channel.

Rich Brooks
Web Design for Small Business

Lately I've been doing a number of presentations on blogging and social media, and in these presentations I talk about the power of RSS. You can use RSS to stay on top of your industry, your competition, your clients or simply your interests in a time efficient manner.

However, the idea of RSS is confusing to a lot of people, judging by the number of hands that go up during that part of my presentation.

It's a shame that something that has Simple as its middle name should be so complicated.

To that end I put together this short video to show you the benefits of using RSS and how to subscribe to an RSS feed. Enjoy it here or at YouTube: How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed…the Video!

Rich Brooks
Syndicate Me

Update: Completely forgot to include a great RSS video that came before from the good folks over at Common Craft:

Every Web site has conversion points; actions you want your visitors to take to move them down the sales funnel. It could be clicking on a "buy now" button, signing up for an email newsletter, completing a contact form, and so on.

Using Google Analytics Goals we can track this activity at our Web site. By setting up goals we can find out not just how much traffic a search engine or Web site is sending us, but what's the quality of that traffic, and even what each lead is worth.

In the video below you can see how to set up and use goals to gain new insight into the activity at your Web site, or you can watch How to Set Up Goals in Google Analytics at YouTube.

Rich Brooks
Goal Oriented

Last week I played Tech Guru on 207 again. The topic was Free Alternatives to Quicken. I found out after the show that Quicken now does have a free online version.

Oops.

The other sites we looked at included:

• Google Docs: create your own spreadsheet or use someone else's
• Wesabe: a finance package / social networking mashup, and
• Mint: A slick online tool that's rated best by PC Magazine and Money Magazine.

If you can't view the video below you can watch the segment at the 207 Web site:

Rich Brooks
As Seen On TV

In this ongoing video series on Google Analytics we've come to the content section; specifically, looking at what people are doing at your site.

To continually improve your Web site's effectiveness you need to have a better understanding of which pages people are landing on, which pages they're viewing, and ultimately where they're abandoning your site.

Google Analytics provides insights into all these questions, and gives you a cool site overlay that breaks down which links people are clicking on for every page on your site.

You can watch the video below or check out Google Analytics: How Are People Behaving On Your Site? at YouTube.

Want more Google Analytics goodness? Check out these other videos and don't forget to subscribe to our blog!

• Track Visitor Behavior Using Google Analytics
• Use Google Analytics to Better Understand Your Site Traffic
• Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters
• Google Analytics Dashboard: The How-to Video

Rich Brooks
Tracking Your Behavior Right Now