Do you want to improve your Twitter listening skills? Here’s a closer look at how to monitor your brand, yourself or your competitors using Twitter

1. Decide What You Want to Monitor. Decide which information you want to monitor.  Common types include your brand names, industry keywords, customers and competitors.

A daily listening routine gives you more value over time. Spend the time you need to find the right mix and create a routine that works for you.

2. Track Your URL Shorteners. Use URL shortening tools to monitor the links you share on Twitter and help you find out what’s popular with your audience.

As Jeff Bullas says, the popular URL shortener bit.ly “allows you to track how many people are clicking on the shortened link with a set of metrics that displays it in a visual format as well as textually.” This makes it easy to track your important links and monitor the interactions you have on social media.

3. Use Twitter Lists to Monitor People on Twitter. You might find it convenient to create your own Twitter lists and monitor people through these lists.  Remember, you can set up a private list to follow your competitors and you’ll be the only person to see this private list on your Twitter profile.

You can also set up an RSS feed to follow someone else’s Twitter list using Twitter Lists 2 RSS.

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We just installed the widget on the home page of fanminder.com that auto-imports the most recent blog posts to the home page. So this is a test I’m hoping it works!

We are pleased and excited to announce the newest release of Fanminder, Version 1.5.

We’ve been hard at work at this release for a few months now. While it’s mostly “infrastructure” and not features, it’s much-needed infrastructure we couldn’t be happier to share. The release contains:

• Co-Branded Solution Provider experience
• Reduced Setup
• Simplified Welcome Message
• Customer Billing
• Mobile Signature

Co-Branded Solution Provider experience – The co-branded experience enables our resellers’ (we call them Solution Providers) logo to appear on every screen of the application to the right of the Fanminder logo.

Reduced Setup – This feature shrinks the number of pages and information required to setup a new account from four pages to one. Information such as store hours and payment method are not requested any longer. The goal of this feature is to minimize effort to start using the application.

Simplified Welcome Message – We have eliminated the original default Welcome Menu that a fan would see upon joining the list from his/her phone (the original Welcome Menu allowed the fan to request business hours, phone, and address via text reply.) Now, every customer can customize his/her Welcome Message to suit their needs.

Customer Billing – This feature enables Fanminder to directly bill a customer’s credit card on a recurring schedule. ‘Nuff Said! Actually, a little more: Automatically billing our customers is a key requirement for us to grow quickly and we’re glad we have this ready because we’re growing quickly now.

Mobile Signature – One of the key requests we’ve heard from merchants is to ensure their name is included in the text so their customers know who the text is from. Currently, all text messages display on a phone as coming from Fanminder’s short code, 244326. Because of this, fans glancing quickly at an incoming text may not know who its from, and delete the text.

With Mobile Signature, a merchant can create any “from” copy they like and that copy will appear in the body of all outgoing messages. A merchant may also change the copy at any time for a single message or all messages

We’ve just put a big release behind us. My hat is off to our spectacular team who devoted themselves to launching this. Look for updates on our next release soon!

For those who have used Facebook you don’t need the survey results to tell you how effective Facebook is for marketing, but a new survey shows that is very effective.

Particularly encouraging is the following paragraph below from the survey:

“The fact that only about 5 percent of the firm’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social-media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

Five percent is nothing to sneeze at. That’s 650 new Facebook fans in three months. For some small businesses, that would be fantastic growth. And 650 new fans could lead to a few good sales. Just a 1% conversion rate on that would be about 2 new sales a monthwith zero expense. If your average sale is $100 then you have a $200 return on investment per month.

The size of the numbers don’t matter. Some will be larger and some will be smaller. The fact is, Facebook fan pages can be effective marketing. Even if effective as niche marketing programs, which can often be more effective marketing programs anyway, Facebook fan pages work. The evidence is in.

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According to data from Compete, Facebook has surpassed Google as the top source of traffic for major portals like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. In December, 15% of traffic to these sites came from Facebook and MySpace. 13% from just Facebook. They say it’s among the top traffic drivers for other types of sites as well.

In a recent WebProNews article, I asked if it is becoming increasingly less critical for businesses to have websites, when they can just have things like Facebook pages and Google Place pages. The discussion is more complex than just that (feel free top participate here), but the general point is that you can have a strong web presence without having an actual web site (although I still recommend having one in most cases).

By Facebook’s most recent stat counts, the site has over 400 million active users. Half of them log on each day. Over 35 million upate their status each day, with over 60 million status updates posted each day. Over 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week, over 3.5 million events are created each month, and there are over 3 million active Pages on Facebook.

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