The Community Participation Pyramid courtesy of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

In this week’s Twitter column I want to debunk a myth that gets spread by the likes of CNN Money and Mashable. Roughly it states that Twitter becomes more of an RSS reader than a real social networking venue due to “only” 27% of Twitter users being active. The number is correct but the conclusion is wrong. The contrary is the case:

Twitter users are by far more active than the average social media users or rather lurkers.

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This week’s Twitter column is about a very intriguing survey by Neicole Crepeau. She surveyed 336 Internet users asking them several questions about their Twitter usage and perception. The most note-worthy finding is that most of those who have quit Twitter did it out of boredom.

At the same time these people didn’t use Twitter in a way that made Twitter interesting in the first place. So in a way it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: You use Twitter in a boring way and you quickly get bored of it. Continue Reading »

Twitter and nofollow is the topic of this week’s Twitter column: While even Google who has introduced, along with other search engines, the nofollow attribute to combat spam a few years ago does not propagate the use of it anymore, Twitter went nofollow big time just recently. What does this mean?

Twitter distrusts everything you say.

Not only outgoing links get the so called link condom so that search engines ignore them. No, now also internal links from your tweets on Twitter get wasted. This means that even when you address us with @seoptimise we don’t get the Google juice due. Continue Reading »

A new craze has been sweeping Twitter during the last couple of days, with hundreds of suggestions for #seofilms and #ppcfilms. This has been so popular it even managed to make it as a Twitter trending topic!

I’ve picked out some of the best ones here:

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Welcome back to our weekly Twitter column. Last week I hailed Twitter crowdsourcing and suggested some ideas on how to motivate your peers to participate in your blog postings.

It worked very well in my case, the SEO FAQ I asked you to steal. Many readers and Twitter followers have taken part in the whole process. I credited those who added their questions and answers already in the FAQ itself.

This time I want to show off the contributions done after the SEO FAQ was finished, the stolen SEO FAQs.

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Crowd by victoriapeckham.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Ever since I’m on Twitter I’ve tried to get as many people to participate spontaneously in writing my posts or rather compiling my lists. I always seek contributions for my “30 something” flagship posts. The appropriate term for these kind of participation is crowdsourcing.
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Image: Happy Beaver by stevehdc.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Yesterday many people on Twitter cried out in outrage about a misled tweet from @vodafoneuk – in it some apparently tweeting under the influence employee made a badly spelled comment about the hygiene of homosexuals.

Then the person also threatened to hunt for beavers!

This is indeed outrageous! As you probably know beavers are an endangered species and have been extinct a few years ago in the UK. Hunting them just to vent your anger is the last thing to do. Continue Reading »

To be honest: I hate all the Apple hype. I hated it on Digg and I hate it on Twitter as well. Twitter has been flooded with iPad tweets in such a manner that you can’t find the real news anymore.

The real news this week for us is that Twitter changes its recommended users list.
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This week’s Twitter column comes a day late. I think it doesn’t matter when I post my weekly Twitter post. The important fact is that I do at all and the the quality of the post makes it worth reading. So from now on I won’t be that exact anymore. The weekly Twitter column will stay though. It might appear earlier or later in the week, depending on breaking events for instance.

This week I want to speak about Twitter arrests.

It seems Twitter is exempt from free speech and arrests for Twitter usage become commonplace.

I know this is a business blog and we write about Twitter topics relevant for businesses but this is an issue that should matter for all of us.
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This week the Twitter Friday column expands as a major Twitter SEO topic is on our agenda. Last week Technology Review published an article titled “How Google ranks tweets“.

In the TR article leading Google engineer Amit Singhal explains ranking factors for tweets.

Some of the ranking criteria are quite clear and obvious while others remain fuzzy behind Google’s veil of secrecy. There is one big surprise: Google hates #hashtags, or at least some (probably you using too many) of them.

It seems Google treats #hashtags the way it dealt with the meta keyword tag in the past: Neither do they really count nor do they count in a positive way in case they do.

In other words: Using hashtags may hurt your tweet rankings. That’s not all of course.
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