[Our clients at Talance ask us web strategy and tech questions all the time. In the spirit of giving, we’ll be answering your reader questions here in the blog every week. Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page or click here. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

John K. asks:

How are people finding me on Twitter? I keep getting messages that people are following me, but I don’t know how they found me.

First of all, John, congratulations on your burgeoning Twitter network! The fact that people are finding you proves your account is doing what it’s supposed to do: connect you to more people.

There are a few ways people might be finding you on Twitter, including these common methods:

Someone looked for you on Twitter. If you click Find People in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, you can use a variety of methods to find people you know. The first option is a search, where someone could have searched for your username, first or last name.

Someone uploaded their address book to their Twitter account, and you were in it. If you allow it, Twitter will fetch your address book from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail or MSN and perform a quick match between the people in the that address book and the people who have Twitter accounts.

Someone they know is following you, or vice versa. You can see a list of followers on any profile page on Twitter. So if you’re following your local dog club’s Twitter account, anybody who looks at the list of followers on the dog club’s page can find you, and follow you, from there.

Someone saw a post you made. Any time you send a post to Twitter, it’s marked with @ and your username, such as @talance. So if I made a comment on my dog club’s Twitter page, anyone can click the @talance next to my comment and follow me that way.

Send us your tech questions by using the comments form at the bottom of this page or click here. We’ll review your question before posting, and get back to you with a response. Oh, and you can follow Talance on Twitter too: @talance

I’m asked many times by clients what kind of social media they should invest in. It’s a tough question to answer, largely because it depends on what kind of social media makes sense to the people who you’re trying to reach. That’s why the best idea is to ask them directly.

Put together a survey, either printed or digital, and distribute it to your constituency or congregation to see where they’d like to hear from you in terms of social media. Ask them what kinds of social media they currently use, and then ask them how much and often they use them. It’ll give you a good idea of their capabilities and tendencies.

You can also make a pretty good educated guess. If your constituency is made up of largely older people, you’re probably best off seeing if you can transition from a printed bulletin to an electronic newsletter. If your audience is young and hip, hit them where they go: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube.

Also check out our social media survey.

One of the things I like best about exploring Twitter (I’m @talance) is watching it evolve and change so quickly as people use it and discover new uses.

But it’s still easy to feel left out and confused, which is why I think it’s a good exercise to look back at the very first messages up on Twitter. It can make you feel better to see how unsure everyone is when they delve into a new technology.

A few randomly selected examples of first Twitter updates:

Figuring out if this is really something I want to do
We’re finally live! Sorry to those who have been waiting so long.
trying to figure out twitter…
is learning to twitter…

So watch and learn. Ideas and applications will occur to you.

Recently, someone from a UK firm putting together a glossary of social media jargon asked me to contribute. The world of social media jargon is immense, but I realized I’ve been hearing the word “ping” in a sense that didn’t really make sense to me.

Ping, v. This is something you send to a computer for an automated response. I’ve heard it (erroneously) as a synonym for “e-mail” or “instant message.”

You can look at more social media jargon from their glossary.

One of the nice benefits of our Talance’s Massachusetts Non-profit Social Media Report is how many conversations it’s opening up about how non-profits are actually using social media – or struggling with how to use it.

Someone in one of my networks said her organization doesn’t use social media precisely because it does work. This is a charity that receives loads of requests for services, but that’s sorely needing donations. She’s afraid if she does start a social media program, she’ll be overwhelmed by more requests for service that she can’t handle.

My suggestion to her and anyone thinking about a social media program is to focus your efforts. Social media shouldn’t be a distraction. You’ve got to fine-tune what kinds of programs you’re using and what results you hope to get from them. If you need donors, then you don’t need to focus on awareness campaigns. You need to focus on fund development campaigns.

Make sure you know what you want to get out of any marketing program before you start one. (And of course, the best place to start is by reading the benchmarking survey.)

A free preview is available at: Talance’s Massachusetts Non-profit Social Media Report A few little gems:

• 80% consider social media important for peer-to-peer networking. By contrast 31% find social media unimportant to their business and marketing strategy.
• The great majority (85%) are not using social media for online giving.
• More respondents plan to use online video than those who plan to use blogging.

Plus, some great background for those new to technology.

Starting a social marketing effort is certainly time-consuming. It’s important to think about how much time you’re willing and able to feed into a new 2.0 project before you start one. All those abandoned Facebook pages and blogs are sad and arguably do more harm than good.

But knowing how to arrange your time budget is hard if you have no frame of reference. That’s why I like this posting from the Museum 2.0 website, How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?

These guys break it down into a useful timeline and formulae so you can make a pretty good estimate as to how much time you’ll need to free up to dedicate to your new online project.

It’s not often that yours truly gets to share the stage with anyone, much less a fancy pants like poet laureate Robert Pinsky. But here I am, helping my friends at non-profit JBooks.com, try to garner money through a YouTube video plea. (Look for my Oscar-worthy eye-roll.)

Watch and enjoy:

Establishing a social media marketing plan requires heaps of work. Of course you want to know how much you’re getting out of all the hard work you’re putting into one. But the trouble with boiling down ROI on a social marketing effort is, “… you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.”

This is according to a helpful post from Jason Falls, who writes for Social Media Explorer. He says every session on measuring ROI in social media is a waste of time. That seems extreme to me – it’s only a waste if your “return” is monetary – but I understand his point. Embarking on a social media plan is more about getting out there and joining in the conversation than converting sales.

But it makes sense for churches, synagogues and non-profits, where the goal is to join in the conversation. The point is to figure out how you’re going to quantify your social effort.

Writing a standout profile on LinkedIn is s a little like writing a resume. There are sure-fire mistakes you can make, but a really good one is harder to define.

I was talking about what makes a good profile with an author of a book on job hunting and social media (McGraw-Hill is publishing it in October, and I’m featured in it, so stay tuned for an update). The perfect profile is one that meets your goals. If you’re a new organization, does it inform and connect people back to your website? If you’re looking to make sales or raise funds, does it connect you to hundreds of people so you can extend your reach?

First think about what why you want to have a LinkedIn profile, and then think about the most useful things to include on it.

As for the mistakes, here are three that top my list:

• Weird or blurry pictures. LinkedIn pesters you to upload a picture, but don’t give in if you don’t have anything good to upload. Something that’s blurry or shows you looking anything but crisp and professional is a no-no. Employees and clients check out this page, so be aware of that. Opt for nothing over something odd.
• Poor punctuation. You wouldn’t add a bunch of open brackets or incorrectly spaced hyphens in your resume. Why would you on your profile? It may be in answer to an effort to cram in more information – or for some other reason I can’t imagine – but some people are too sloppy/creative with their postings. Make it clean.
• Skimpy information. You don’t have to divulge everything about your personal life on LinkedIn (nor should you), but put something meaty on there. Don’t do it just to do it. Nothing at all is better than a half-written profile.

See my profile on LinkedIn.