The number of followers you have on Twitter has always been a hollow metric – unless you’re actively engaging with and converting that community, it’s simply another number.

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When you’re a brand looking to use social media to raise awareness of your products and services, boost website traffic footfall and drive sales, where do you turn? Which social network is right for you?

Largely, it depends on your goals. What are you trying to achieve? While a broad presence across two or more social platforms usually pays dividends for businesses, if resources are limited and time is strained, finding the best social channel for your needs is the most sensible way forward, based on audience size, relevant demographic and target profile.

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Are you a different person on Twitter than you are in “real life”?

Social media (and, indeed, the internet) is a glittering lure. It presents a clean slate. You can be anyone. On Twitter, or any social network, it pays to present the best version of yourself. That’s a good thing – in fact, it’s smart, and advisable, especially if you’re using Twitter in any kind of professional capacity.

But if the you that we see on our screens is completely different to the you behind it, then it’s simply a matter of time before that illusion is exposed.

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How do you get more followers on Twitter?

It’s the age-old question, and while the number of followers that a profile has on Twitter is not always a true indication of status (and certainly quality), brands hoping to use the micro-blogging social network to raise awareness, drive traffic and generate sales will always be looking to proactively grow their audience.

This is particularly true for small businesses. What can and should they be doing to attract relevant followers on Twitter?

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Which social media sites are small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using for business?

Facebook (as usual) leads the way, with 19 percent of SMEs favouring this platform, ahead of LinkedIn (14 percent), blogs (13 percent) and Twitter, with the latter being used by just 4 percent of these firms.

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We’re big fans of Buffer at AllTwitter, the popular social media optimising app that lets you easily share content on Twitter (and other social platforms) throughout the day.

Big news. Now, and for the first time (both on Buffer and ANY social media platform), you can use Buffer to schedule native retweets alongside your normal content. Old school, editable RT @ retweets are also supported, and the new functionality works on the web and mobile.

So what are you waiting for?

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Calls to action are a well-established and powerful marketing tool that help brands drive awareness of products and services, and they have proven to be very effective in digital marketing.

But how do you make them work on Twitter?

Use an exclamation point!

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Thanks to a new SEC ruling, Twitter will shortly be making its arrival on Wall Street, via Bloomberg, and Marketwired reached out to the investment community to gauge their reaction.

The bottom line? Investors under 40 mostly welcomed the news, with 70 percent believing the SEC ruling is beneficial to investors, and 60 percent say that they’re already actively using social media for investment research. More than half (53 percent) believe information provided by social media is “very credible”, and 80 percent believe that more companies will disclose information via social media.

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In 2007, way before the social media gurus, comedians, journalists, celebrities and the media, Brandon (aka B.J.) Mendelson signed up for Twitter. B.J. has found many positive ways to use Twitter, but you probably haven’t heard about them because nobody has told you the truth – until now.

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If you’re a reader of this blog you likely know that Twitter is really rather popular in the U.S., with recent estimates suggesting around 141.8 million total accounts in the States alone, about 27.4 percent of all Twitter users.

If you’re a regular reader, you probably know that Twitter is also popular in Japan and the United Kingdom. But where else is the micro-blogging social network growing like a weed?

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