I came across a good article, with some good first-hand tips, by Lynn Terry of ClickNewz, on how to properly promote products & reviews via Social Media.

Lynn gives an example of a product review she wrote for the best Apple iPad case. She dropped and shattered her original iPad, so she went through several iPad cases before she found a couple that served her needs.

Other people are searching for iPad cases too and asking for recommendations. Lynn replied to one of those tweets conversationally, and included a link to her personal experience (with a video demo).

Blogs also offer some good social media marketing opportunities. You can:

• Leave a comment, linking back to your review in the URL field. This will often offer very little click-through rate, but does count as an inbound link.
• Create a Trackback to their post, if they publish Trackback links. These count as inbound links and also see a higher click-through rate than blog comments. One idea is to do a round-up post as a follow-up to you review that includes links to other blogs discussing the product – with the call to action being to read your review or comparison.
• Find other bloggers who are affiliates for the same product? Offer to let them interview you about your results with the product. Allow them to use their affiliate link to the product in the interview post, with your only requirement being a link back to your review.
• Write guest blog posts for other affiliates, including their affiliate link to the product, with a call to action in your bio or byline at the end that leads them to your review.

Another great resource for product conversations are the many social Q&A sites, such as Yahoo! Answers.

Are you promoting your products via social media properly?

Full story at ClickNewz »

In a first ever move, Google is now carrying ads from someone else’s ad network — Twitter’s, as Google integrates Twitter’s new Promoted Tweets into Google Realtime Search.

It’s quite a coup for Twitter. Not only did the company get Google to pay it for its data last year ($15 million, it’s rumored), something relatively few publishers have done, but Twitter’s earning in a second way from the ads that are now appearing.

Promoted Tweets are a way that advertisers can make their tweets show above all others on Twitter itself, when someone searches there. In some ways, it’s Twitter’s form of Google AdWords. Now, when people do searches on Google and go into Google’s real time search results area, Promoted Tweets will show there above other results. The screenshot above shows this happening in a search on ‘verizon’.

Full story at Search Engine Land »