Given the recent blog post concerning hosting firms marketing through social networks like Twitter, I wanted to ask the folks here at HD what methods they use to advertise their services where platforms like Twitter and Facebook are concerned?

I personally do use both, Twitter specifically, and I'm working to integrate better and better with my main site and blog in order to push traffic back and forth. I do also market DavinciTeam that way at times though our following is too small now for me to offer clear results.

Do tell!

I use both Twitter and Face book to promote the events and happening. Twitter has really allow for some solid traffic and push.

Without knowing what I would actually do with it, I tried to open a HostingDiscussion channel at Twitter, but could not get the name due to username character limitation. I do not want nor need "hostingdiscussi" username.

I tried liking Twitter, but they suck.

nice...what about hdiscussion.

What on earth would hdiscussion mean? It totally ruins the experience.
Me doesn't like it.

How about artashesispicky oh what to long.

I like Zachary's best

There's a number of variations that you could try though.
HD-forum
HostDiscuss
HDtalk
HDfans
HDTwitter

I had to shorten our name to just "handsonhosting", but I do that on many forums too since they don't like long names.

I'm not a huge fan of twitter myself, but I've found it easy to push blog posts through it and getting traffic quickly through there on specials etc. Seems like a lot of hosts follow us though more than users.

social network is good if you have followers I guess.
Otherwise on-page SEO is my real option to generate traffic.

We use Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. And I also blog under the username of Steves Inisight. It's all about creating opportunities by sharing information.

Well said! The more information that is out there and the more people who see it, means the better chance of getting someone to ask a question and close a sale.

Agree, its about making the most of the tools available, the only downside, is time and effort keeping abreast of them all.

I have still got to get my head around both facebook and myspace to gain any advantage from it.

I only use twitter and facebook fan page to post promotions. I have tried using facebook advertisement campaign and saw no results. It was a waste of money advertising on Facebook.

Have you any advice on the facebook fan pages, I'm not sure I'm up on that one.

I've created a company face book page and profile, got a few fans from people I know but I presume the trick is to get 100s of fans?

I had the individual fan page up, and I was doing testing with the GROUP options for our company, but I found that the PAGE actually is a better way for marketing yoruself. To my knowledge you can not link to a group, but you CAN to a page. So while we have a "Hands-on Web Hosting" GROUP, you have to do a search for it. Instead if you can give them the direct link to the page, or what I've recently started looking at is using the TinyURL to do the posting;

http://************/handsonwebhosting

The advantage with the PAGE is that you can tweet directly to the page. Currently GROUP pages can not support this.

Our PAGE versus GROUP is an experiment, and we've found that the PAGE will give you more flexability.

If you want to read more about all things related to Facebook, check out http://www.allfacebook.com/

AWWW.. I guess HD removed the TinyURL feature.. I've used it in other forums, but I guess that's good practice. So instead I have an .htaccess rewrite to the facebook page - http://www.handsonwebhosting.com/facebook