Category: Twitter

Social Media Counts Towards SEO

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The rapid growth in popularity of social media has caught the attention of the major search engines like Google and Bing. In October 2009, Google Social Search was launched, which delivers results for the terms you searched from within your online social circle. By October, Bing implemented a new feature that delivers ‘Liked by Your Friends’ in Facebook information along with the search results. Many website owners interested in achieving page one rankings in the major search engines for the terms important to them wondered if their popularity on the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others could or would influence their rankings.

Well as it turns out, it does to some degree. In a recent interview with search engine guru Danny Sullivan, quoted here at seomoz.org, a Bing representative stated the search engine does “look at the Social Authority of a user.

Tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.” Google uses what it terms ‘Author Authority’ for both organic and news rankings. Google also looks to see how many people share a news article, much the same way Twitter ranks the top re-tweeted Tweets and Tweet topics. Google’s Author Authority and Bing’s Social Authority rank content according to their proprietary ‘authority’ scores. Google points out, however, that Author Authority differs from and is separate from PageRank, which impacts where on the search results pages a web page may be listed.

I highly recommend you read the post at seomoz.org for the ideas the author presents. Concerning search engine optimizing the social media content you produce, as always you want to include the keywords around which you are building your authority. You’ll want to keep your titles brief, containing only one or two keywords, so that the search engines can easily find your content.

Build your Followers by providing important content that is interesting to them. Reach out to new Followers both online and offline. Build a community among other “authoritative authors” who also write about the same subjects as you. And by all means, keep your social media sites, as well as your website, updated regularly with fresh, relevant and interesting content that makes readers want to share it with others.

Social Media is Important to Your Business Development

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Many small and medium sized businesses are starting to understand the business development effectiveness of social media or social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Buzz and others. According  to Globalspec’s latest report, Trends in Industrial Marketing 2010: How Manufacturer’s Are Marketing Today, 68% of industrial respondents “plan to increase spending on social media in 2010” and indicate that “Facebook and LinkedIn are the most popular social media applications being used.”

As stated in an article appearing at Mashable.com by Jennifer Van Grove Why Small Businesses Shouldn’t Take Social Media for Granted, the 2010 Business Monitor United States report — commissioned by UPS – indicated that among the general business population only “24% of respondents said they’ve received sales leads from social media, with just 1% citing it as a factor for business growth.”

The biggest fear among the “uninitiated” is a lack of understanding about how to get started, what to do exactly, and how to manage it over the long run. There is no doubt that managing social media is a time-consuming venture but one well-worth engaging in. If it’s within your budget, hire a professional to help you. If you are a maverick and ready to tackle it on your own then here are a few things to help you.

Start off slowly and discover ways to use all the available tools effectively. I recommend starting with LinkedIn and Twitter. Recently the companies joined forces (see my article Twitter and LinkedIn Forge New Partnership) to allow account owners to integrate their Twitter posts with their LinkedIn account so that either all of their posts, or just the ones they add the #in hash tag at the end of, would be visible to visitors who were interacting with their LinkedIn account profile.

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Sneak Peek at New Twitter Features

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The Sales & Marketing Business Brief recently gave us a sneak peak at some of the new Twitter features to be added later this year that are specifically designed to improve the management of posts and communications for business accounts.

The new feature I find most intriguing is Direct Messages, which is a customer engagement feature that “allows users to send private messages to other accounts, regardless of whether they follow the company on Twitter.” The new feature allows companies to “engage customers in one-on-one exchanges in a non-public setting,” making “Twitter a much more valuable means of opening a dialogue with customers.” For those of you who have a Facebook account you are already familiar with this type of communication tool. As with Facebook, the Twitter Direct Messages feature allows you to send a private message via the application instead of posting a tweet that can be read by all.

As a result of the unauthorized use of celebrity names, or those of politicians, CEO’s, or company brands, Twitter’s new Verified Accounts feature will require an account to submit to a verification process in order to bear the emblem or “badge” that identifies their legitimacy as who or what they claim to be. This helps to protect the company brand as well as assure the user he is communicating with or electing to follow the “real company” and “not some imitator.”

Lastly, the new Contributors feature allows “multiple users to post to the same Twitter account without having to share a password. This means businesses can partner with one another to post to a joint account and make announcements that could impact both companies’ customers.” Whether you share a password or allow access via a number of different passwords, you still need to be aware of your brand or identity management. Establish post guidelines and policies that protect your company if you are going to allow access by multiple users. It isn’t a bad idea to have an account monitor who can quickly delete any posts that do not comply with your policies.

Hopefully the addition of these tools will help prove Twitter a valuable asset to businesses in their marketing efforts.

New LinkedIn Twitter Plug-In is Real ‘Tweet’ Management Tool

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According to a recent LinkedIn blog post by Adam Nash, there are now over a million users taking advantage of LinkedIn’s Twitter application. The business social network has given the application a new upgrade that provides users with a variety of ways to manage how they track and follow their connections. You can install the new Tweets application here. LinkedIn began rolling out the new application May 25th, 2010.

The new changes involve four Tweets tabs:

Overview:

  • As per usual, you can Update Twitter status with your latest thoughts and goings-on
  • Quick overview of what your connections are tweeting
  • Who’s following you
  • Just like Facebook, suggests connections you can Follow

Connections:

  • Identifies all your LinkedIn Connections who also use Twitter and whether or not you follow them
  • Easily click ‘Follow’ if you wish to follow them
  • Or ‘Unfollow’ those you no longer wish to follow
  • Save your connections as a ‘Twitter List’ and LinkedIn will keep it up-to-date for you with the latest additions; once saved, you can ‘view list’ or ‘delete’ it

My Tweets:

  • Track your Tweets
  • Learn how long ago you posted a particular tweet
  • Share a Tweet by typing the Connection’s name in the ‘To’ box
  • Retweet the post again
  • Reply to your own Tweet if you feel you need to say something more

Settings:

  • Manage the way your Tweets post
  • Display all Tweets on your LinkedIn Profile or just the ones where you include the hashtag #  in at the end of your post – this is a great feature for trending
  • Manage all your different Twitter accounts in one area (you have to click on the Settings link in the upper right of the LinkedIn main application to add more Twitter accounts before you can manage which posts to include on your LinkedIn Profile from all of your various Twitter accounts)

Once again, you can install the new Tweets application to your LinkedIn account by visiting this link.

The nice thing about these additional features is the ability for you to position your social network marketing along with your professional networking.

Try it and tell me how you like it.

A must see for those who ask “what’s Twitter?”

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Lately I have been really wrapped up with trying to aid clients in finding, and committing to, a “balance” in their marketing plans.

One that allows them to optimize what they should be doing in what today would be considered “traditional” web marketing, while educating (and motivating) them regarding the “newer”  venues available.

If you have been seeing what I have, most clients have no idea of their options in the social network marketing world, and when they begin to see it they get intimidated very quickly.

What may seem new now to many quickly becomes the norm, and it’s so important to make an educated decision as to where resources should be dedicated so you don’t “miss the party”.

Twitter cannot be ignored in it’s ability to network and its overall reach.  We are starting to see it everywhere and you now hear it referenced on TV and radio essentially replacing the “call-ins” hosts once received.

This video is a “must see”.

At the end of the day marketing should be fun!

For those who do it, and those who “get it” :)