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Small Business Owners! 6 Quick Ways to Help Your Customers Help You

Shaad Hamid — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:15:31 +0000

Sometime last month, my friends and I did what most people do on a Friday night. Yes, we went out to blow off some steam and in the process, popped in to Pizza Hut to grab something to eat. The problem was, we probably dropped by at a bad time. The waitress seemed like she’d be anywhere in the world except serving at our table. Don’t get me wrong, my friends and I weren’t expecting 5-star treatment, but is a little courtesy or even a smile too much to ask for? Like most people who simply wouldn’t bother to complain about how rude the waitress was, we just grit our teeth and left as soon as we could. Fast forward to the next morning and one of my friends suggested that we go to a local restaurant named Joe’s, located in Oxford’s Summertown (isn’t that the best ever name for a town?) so we paid them a visit.

From the moment we entered the restaurant, we were made to feel welcome. The food was absolutely divine, their attention to detail was impeccable and their service was amazing. In fact, their receipt had a handwritten ‘thank you’ along with a smiley face on it!

Apologies for the low quality mobile phone image.

It’s amazing how little effort can make a customer happy. Having enjoyed the food and the service, I felt I must run to the top of a hill and announce to everyone that these guys are amazing and that all my friends should check them out too; or at least the modern method of doing so, which is to tweet about them or to mention them on Facebook. Unfortunately I couldn’t tag them in my tweets or Facebook status as they didn’t have a presence on Twitter and Facebook. So here I was, a satisfied customer, looking to give this restaurant a big ‘thumbs up’ and a recommendation to my friends about how awesome they are, but with no natural channel to do so. So I thought I should compile a list of quick and easy ways small businesses can help customers become their advocates. (Please note that Joe’s, to their credit, have now set up a Facebook page).

#1 Out of sight, out of mind

At the very least, make sure you have some sort of social media presence so that, like me, your customers can recommend your business to their friends. This shouldn’t take you long, as setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter profile literally takes a few minutes. Make sure you include details such as the address, a phone number and a link to your website. If you are unsure or are not confident in doing this yourself, get someone who is tech savvy (like your niece or nephew) to do this for you. If you have the time, here are a couple of great posts on how you could set up a Facebook page and a Twitter page.

#2 A picture is worth a thousand words

Images can convey quite a lot about your business, and this is especially important if you are a restaurant or a retail outlet. This also helps to give your business or your brand some sort of personality. So when you include images of your premises on Facebook, make sure you either invest in a really good camera or you obtain the services of a professional photographer. Although this may sound silly, the images on the web do in fact influence what people think about your business, as it’s the only tangible way they could associate quality with.

If you want to take this to the next level, you could propose to your guests that you can take good quality images and with their consent, upload it to your Facebook page and invite them to tag themselves and their friends on your fan page. This will ensure people will visit, engage and share your page with others.

#3 Consistency is the name of the game

Now that you have set up a Facebook page and/or a Twitter page with about 10-20 fans or followers, it is important to consolidate your existing fans and to grow this number. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, it is extremely important to be part of your followers’ social network experience (which means being visible on their Twitter feeds and Facebook newsfeeds). Having said that, it is also important to not overdo this; there’s nothing more offensive on the social sphere than spam. On average, I’d say 1-2 posts a day is more than sufficient. The secret to maintaining great posts is to make sure your updates add value to your fans and followers. If you are a restaurant owner, sharing little cooking tips to your followers could be quite beneficial to them. For example, you could have a ‘recipe of the week’ post and share a tip to your followers.

#4 Offer incentives

Everyone likes to feel special and it’s the same on social media. Offering your fans and followers a special discount to try out a new item on the menu would help bolster loyalty toward your Facebook fan page.

#5 Save time with tools

I’m sure most small business owners wouldn’t really have the time to constantly be on social media platforms updating statuses and tweets. If you can’t hire someone to do this for you I suggest you use tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck in order to schedule your tweets for the coming week and to monitor what people are saying about your brand or business on Twitter. Make a schedule at the beginning of the week as to what type of tweets and updates you want to share with your followers and also schedule at least half an hour a day to monitor and respond to any user engagements.

#6 “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”
Use Facebook insights to measure and monitor the virality of your posts. Facebook provides a wealth of statistics, from how many people who are talking about your page right now to which demographic and geographic (including which cities) are most receptive to your posts. This will help you understand what works and what doesn’t. Marketers at one time used to spend quite a lot of money to obtain this market intelligence data which Facebook now provide you on a platter, and all this free of charge. So take advantage of the plethora of data and constantly tweak and improve your campaigns.

Conclusion

I’d like to share with you what an ultra-local business owner mentioned to me recently. His father set up a grocery store on a very competitive and busy high street in Colombo. I remember as a child frequenting his store on a daily basis with my grandfather who bought his loaf of bread, newspaper and his bottle of milk from this store like a prayer. How this business owner distinguished himself against his many competitors was his ability to form relationships with his customers. He knew my grandfather and me by name. He always made us laugh and we always left his store with a smile. So although two generations have passed, and his tiny grocery store is today a chain of supermarkets, he hasn’t forgotten what made his business succeed in the first place. When his son took over, he made sure he continued this formula on a whole new platform; he says that social media is simply a tool to form and develop these very same relationships at scale. None of the original classical methods of marketing have changed. The only thing that has, is where these relationships and conversations take place. Sadly most businesses don’t seem to grasp this concept well. Herein lies an opportunity for small business owners to be a serious threat to large multinationals. For me personally, Joe’s Bar and Grill has won a customer for life, without having to dish out heavy advertising spend.

*Image credit: ActiveSteve on Flickr.

How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother!

Pak Hou Cheung — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:23:35 +0000

Let’s get one thing straight first: you will NOT be required to do the following in order to get free followers on Twitter using this method:

Tweet interesting thoughts
Post ground breaking news articles
Be informative to your target market
Interact with people
Be selling a good/service to people in order to be followed

Over the past few years, as social media marketing has increased and become ever more popular, ludicrous businesses have popped up “selling” Twitter followers, with many brands also reporting the success of their social media campaigns simply from the number of increased followers.

Today’s post will not only show you how to get free followers, but also help you understand that having 100 followers as opposed to 100,000 makes no difference; it’s about quality not quantity (funnily enough, similar to SEO).

I will not be discussing the reasons as to why you would want more Twitter followers etc; a quick Google search will bring up a plethora of articles discussing it.

Learning Objectives

Before we begin I will outline a little structure to what this post will cover:

Show you how to get free Twitter followers
Prove to you that it is possible
Help you understand why even if you/your brand gets, say 100,000 followers from doing this, it would be useless – especially from a business perspective.

How to get free followers?

In order to start acquiring more Twitter followers you will need to log onto the following site: www.twiends.com and register yourself.

What is Twiends? Good question. Twiends helps people to develop their social network profile on Twitter. The whole concept works on creating seeds in order to incentivise people to “follow you”. So when you follow someone they give you a seed and vice versa; more information can be found about this here.

The whole concept is pretty straightforward – piggy-backing from one of the old tactics in Twitter that people used to use and still do, quoting “Team Follow Back/Follow Me, I Follow You.” Using the Twiends method is far quicker and more effective.

The Proof

This morning, to accompany the blog post, I thought I would actually show you guys that this is possible and to test how many I could acquire in under 25 minutes. Shown below is my dummy account “Pre Twiends” – please take note of the followers, following, time and date in the corner (I have no idea why this Twitter UI has not been updated yet either).

Within 10 minutes of setting up my account and gathering and distributing the seeds, I had already acquired 36+ followers. Note that my following figure has gone up dramatically, but that’s because of the way Twiends works, as shown below:

You will find that the featured users distribute the most seeds and the interesting Tweeps distribute fewer seeds, but sometimes you do get some who offer 8/9 seeds, so be on the lookout for those, as they do go quick!

Here is a top tip for you: when you first log into Twiends, I would recommend that you go to your settings straight away and turn your seed distribution to “OFF”, so you will not be giving your initial free seeds away, and use a few minutes to better acquaint yourself with the layout and how the programme works.

I used some of the time in between to follow some more people and to unfollow some people, and before I knew it, as you can see, I had 100+ followers in under 25 minutes and 79 new followers!

Why doing this is useless for you or your brand

Even though it’s great to show that with this it is possible to get 100,000+ followers on Twitter, it is useless for two reasons – for a person and business.

Firstly it would be useless for you on Twitter to voice your opinions to a load of people that are just there for the vanity metric.

Secondly, for a business, if those numbers do not convert to sales/leads, that is useless too.

To put this into perspective, ask yourself a question: as a person or brand on Twitter, would you rather have a 100,000 followers and 0.1% of those are genuine sales/replies, or would you rather have 10,000 followers and 70% of those followers lead to sales/replies?

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother!

Can Meeting Your Followers Face-to-Face Increase Loyalty?

Marcus Taylor — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:35:32 +0000

A few days ago I was looking through my mentions on Twitter and I noticed a rough correlation between the strength of relationship I have with a person and the frequency/consistency of their interaction with me. I also noticed that strength of relationship was in rough correlation to the medium(s) that I’ve communicated with them on. In other words, the followers who I’d only spoke to over e-mail or Twitter weren’t interacting with me as often as those who I’d met in real life.

It got me thinking: if the depth of a relationship impacts frequency of interaction online, and the medium in which I communicate with people on impacts the depth of relationship, is it possible to increase the loyalty of your followers by meeting them face-to-face?

How real are you to your Twitter followers? Image Credit: Aristocrats-hat

Meeting Face-to-Face Increases the Likelihood of Social Interaction, IF You Have Shared Interests.

When you meet someone face-to-face, you become more likely to then interact with them online, providing that you have shared interests and consider them to add value to your newsfeed. Having met someone in real life is a ‘filter’ that some people (subconsciously) use to prioritise who they interact with socially.

I decided to ask my followers what they thought about whether meeting someone in real life improves the likelihood of engaging with them on Twitter afterwards. The general consensus was that most people found meeting someone face-to-face does have a positive impact on interaction on Twitter.

Can Skype Increase the Loyalty of Your Audience?

Nowadays, the process of meeting someone has become more of a spectrum than a binary choice, as you can virtually meet people through video calls, instant messaging and audio technology.

Research has proven that the use of voice and video communications helps when building relationships. What this means is that hypothetically if you were to Skype someone, they’d be more likely to interact with you in the future than if you were to have solely had correspondence over e-mail or Twitter.

I personally love Skype and use it regularly as a way of getting to know new people whose blogs I find interesting or tweets I enjoy. I find that it adds so much more context to the relationship I end up building with that person, as quite often I will end up finding something I have in common with that person or learning about the interesting things that they’re up to.

Skyping with one person a week will increase your followers’ loyalty
I strongly recommend Skype as a means of getting to know your followers. Deepening your relationships with your followers will not only allow you to get to know your audience, but it will also increase the interaction you have with your followers and they have with you. I recommend trying to put aside a little bit of time each week to having a Skype call with your followers, even if it’s just one call a week.

Final Thoughts – How Many of Your Most Loyal Followers Have You Met?

I ran some data on my Twitter followers and found out that I’ve met 80% of my ten most loyal Twitter followers (those who retweet me the most) in real life. I asked around the office and on Twitter and the general consensus was that most people had met between 60 – 90% of their most loyal Twitter followers (the average being 76%). Although based on a small sample size, I think it’s fair to assume that for most of us, the people who interact with us the most are those who we meet in person. Which, if you turn it around, makes a lot of sense – those who we share the most interests with (and thus interact with online) are the people we’re most likely to meet and develop relationships with in person.

A big thanks to Stuart Duff, Richard Fergie, Jenny Foden, James Carson, Eloi Casali, Gavin Llewelyn, Bas Van Den Beld, Ruben Martinez, and the SEOptimise team for inputting into this post!

The Ultimate Guide to Securing a Job in Social Media, SEO & PPC

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:01:19 +0000

There are many misconceptions about the kind of skills and traits you need in order to find a job within the Search Engine and Social Media Marketing Industry (hereinafter referred to as ‘SE & SMM Industry’). In order to dispel most of these misconceptions and to provide a guide-like resource to anyone looking to make their first step into the world of search and social, I have listed eight tips that would keep you in good stead in your job search including how to answer the dreaded “what prior experience do you have in Search and Social Media Marketing?” question.

Tip # 1 – Turn the darn news off!

How many of us have heard of how bleak the current climate is in terms of employment for new graduates? Almost every day I see depressing stats thrown about on news sites. So please do yourself a favour and turn a Nelsonian eye on all the negativity regarding current unemployment levels. Why is this important? It’s important because you reflect the state you’re in to potential employers. You want to portray the best version of ‘you’ to them. Negative stories on the media only reinforce the belief that you will not secure a job (which obviously isn’t true).

Tip #2 – Learn industry jargon

The first thing that intimidates most people from absolutely anything is the unfamiliarity of a situation, a place or a group. This is true for the SE & SMM industry as well. We tend to use a lot of industry jargon to sound cleverer than we actually are. So for anyone not familiar with commonly used phrases and terms, this industry may seem quite intimidating.

For example read the following terms:

rel=”canonical”
Sitemaps
301 redirect
Panda update
GWT
Robots.txt

If you don’t have a clue about what these words mean don’t think, “Oh man! This industry isn’t for me!” rather, make a note of these terms and find out their meanings. In times like these, the mantra I take solace in is “every expert was once a beginner”. So even today, there are times when I end up at meetings where I don’t understand what some people say. The key is to not be intimidated but to learn these terms and learn them quick. The beauty of this industry is that everyone’s constantly learning, including the ‘experts’. This is important to know especially when you start off because you will hear lots of new terms and words that are unfamiliar to you. So be comfortable in being in the realm of the unknown and enjoy the exciting but steep learning curve ahead of you.

Tip #3 – Start networking early!

Our Director of search, Kevin Gibbons, mentioned that he met final year university students at Pubcon (a search conference held in Vegas) recently, who were walking around meeting industry leaders and handing out business cards. They were networking even before finding a job, so make sure you attend industry events or even local networking events and build relationships with people within the industry. Once you’ve met with them make sure you continue fostering the relationship via Twitter and LinkedIn.

Tip #4 – Ask and you shall receive:

This links with the previous tip; once you’ve networked and met someone influential within the industry don’t go “could you give me/find me a job please?”, rather ask the right questions. Ask questions about current roles that are in demand, or what skills are valued the most and what’s hot within the industry right now? These questions will give you greater insights into the skills that are in demand and will help you focus on a particular role to go after.

Tip #5 – Find your niche that match your strengths

If you ask me what the best thing about working in the SE & SMM industry is, I’d say it’s the diversity of the individuals who make up this industry. Surprisingly not all of us are geeks, technical, or even tech savvy but we’re good at what we specialise in. no one can be amazing at everything, so there are niches within this big umbrella called Digital Marketing or eMarketing. If you take the SEOptimise team as an example, you will find some with degrees in computer science, business development, classical archaeology & ancient history, physics & philosophy, mathematics, mechanical engineering, business management and the list goes on. So if your degree has absolutely nothing to do with computers, it is perfectly fine! I believe this industry is big enough to accommodate your skills and talents.

Tip #6 – Leverage your existing skills

If you’ve got any of the following skills, make sure you highlight them in your CV:

You have web development and design skills – this is the most natural transition into the world of Search and Social Media. Simply because you know what it takes to build a site, so it’s only logical that you learn how to promote your site to your target audience. Most often these people you target are either searching for something on Google/Bing/Yahoo/Baidu or passing their time on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn. So the very basic objective of Search and Social Media Marketing is to make sure your website is in the faces of these people.

You are analytical – you love statistics, you love mathematics, you love excel then you might enjoy PPC or Paid Search. This is where you pay search engines and social media platforms to display your adverts and promote your brand, service or any offering.

Writing is your passion – the SEO industry is waking up to the fact that quality content is integral to all marketing activities. Big brands are taking web content really seriously! So if you love writing really engaging, thought provoking, high quality content then you can enter this industry as a copywriter. Tom Critchlow went to the extent of suggesting that every company should appoint a ‘chief content officer’ to manage and maintain quality web content.

You are creative and think out of the box – this trait can be useful in a number of ways. You could be creative in coming up with really interesting blog posts, you could come up with really creative ways of doing link building that others haven’t thought of. If you love expressing your creativity through art or graphics, you could be really good at creating and designing infographics. More importantly you could come up with loads of creative ideas for SEO, PPC or Social Media campaigns (as you would in an advertising agency).

You are a software engineer and programming is your thing – the SEO industry is always looking for new and innovative software and tools to be built in order to make their day to day work easier. So when you network with people within the SE & SMM industry be sure to ask “what kind of tools would you like built to make you work more efficiently?” find out what these are and build them. If you can go to an interview and say you built a tool that your friend (or an agency) uses to manage their Facebook ad campaigns or it helped them manage SEO projects efficiently, I can assure you the agency will be quite interested in you. Having someone in-house to develop tools that improve efficiency and productivity is a competitive advantage for any agency.

If you are a people person – you love a good social gathering and love meeting new people, or you are really good at picking up the phone and striking conversations with strangers, then you could get into link building and do some serious ‘blogger outreach’ activities. Link building is probably the most difficult and time consuming activity in SEO. Therefore, it helps if you are a natural hustler. And trust me; your skills will be worth its weight in gold!

At the top of my head, these were the skills that came to mind, if I have missed anything please do pop down to the comments and share with us what other skills that you think can fit into this massive puzzle called the SE & SMM industry.

Tip #7 – Find out what employers are looking for

Some very famous people within the industry have listed what they look for in a candidate in the post titled How To Recruit An SEO – The SEO Industry Leaders Reveal Their Secrets which I urge you to read. Bear in mind this particular post is aimed at people with a little more experience within the industry, having said that, it’s still a good idea to learn about the thought process of those who actually hire you.

Tip #8 – Answering the dreaded “so what experience do you have in SE & SMM?” question

OK so you must be thinking this is all well and fine. But every time I apply for a job they ask me what experience I have. How do I gain experience if I don’t get an opportunity to build experience? This is actually a great question and I completely share your frustration. But the beauty of the SE & SMM industry is that you don’t need to hold a job or a position in order to demonstrate your skills in SEO, PPC or social media. Yes, you read that right!

Here are some ways you can demonstrate hands on experience:

Be an active member in clubs and societies at university

While at university join a club or a society and put yourself up to be part of these committees. Or if you don’t find any club interesting, you could go ahead and start your own club. Setup a Facebook page and a twitter page and start managing it. This experience will give you loads of insight into how difficult it is to actually manage and promote a Facebook page. Get familiar with tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, learn how to schedule tweets, test out what works on social media and what doesn’t. If you could go into an interview and say I set up a Facebook page for my club and increased its fans from virtually none to 856 within 6 months and list out the activities you undertook in order to increase these numbers, I can assure you they’d be well impressed.

Don’t forget volunteer work, internships and work experience roles

I know there is debate about interns not getting paid and whether it’s ethical or even legal to not get paid for work experience. I shall not comment on the politics or the legality of this practice in this post, but in my case I worked two internships before landing my proper role within the SE & SMM industry. My first internship role was unpaid and the second paid me a very small wage! So at one point I worked two jobs at the same time and worked about 70 hours a week! One job gave me the necessary skills for my career and the second paid my bills. In no way am I encouraging you to follow in my footsteps (seriously, I was out of my mind!) but the fact that I took on internship roles that were directly related to the career I wanted to pursue, helped me look attractive to potential employers. So don’t ever write off doing volunteer and internship roles. Any experience that is relevant is good experience!

Go around asking SMEs if they need a hand with SE & SMM

Recently a couple of friends asked me what they could do to demonstrate their skills in social media. I advised that they go out and find ultra-local businesses such as restaurants, pubs and cafes and suggest setting up Facebook and Twitter profiles for these businesses and offer to manage these. Local business owners don’t have the time to invest in social media and probably even don’t see the point in it. If you can convince them that it’s a great way to retain customers and win new ones, chances are they will let you be their social media guy. Also speak to local charities and offer to do some volunteer work and devise plans on how you could help their fundraising activities through social media. Also make sure to organise events at university and use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote them. All this is work experience and makes your CV look good to potential employers.

Make sure you blog (especially if you want a role as a copywriter)

If you want to get into SE&SMM as a copy writer, make sure you blog regularly and build a decent following. Write about subjects that excite you or are passionate about, such as reviewing movies, albums, books, restaurants and events. Show you can blog about different subject areas and build relationships with other bloggers. One industry where SEO, PPC and Social Media are integral to the success of their business is the travel industry. So make sure you write about traveling, hotels, countries and cities in an exciting and engaging way. Also it would be advantageous if you could demonstrate your ability to write copy in a completely different style to that of your own. This is because most often you will be writing on topics that may be alien to you.

You have your own website

If you know how to develop and design websites, then a really good way to demonstrate first-hand SEO skills is to set up your own website and implement SEO techniques. Test different title tags, landing pages and link building efforts and see how they affect search engines rankings, traffic etc. also include social elements such as the many Facebook, Twitter and Google+ sharing features. Set up Google Analytics, Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools to your site and familiarise yourself with these interfaces and their features. Again, these are all demonstrable skills that are extremely valued by employers. The idea is to show you’re keen, enthusiastic and hungry to learn and improve your skills.

Some words of wisdom from people within the industry:

I asked around from active members of the SE & SMM industry what advice they’d give to someone embarking on a career in this industry. Here’s what they said:

“The biggest piece of advice I can give is two-fold. Always be learning and get involved in the community. There’s so much to learn about search every day and the community is invaluable, people are so helpful and generous and very interesting because so many people came into SEO from so many different backgrounds. It’s a ton of fun to meet and learn from so many diverse people. Don’t ever let your skills get dusty, always test, always challenge what you’ve learned and always be open to learning from other people.” – Michael King (aka iPullRank).

“From my experience, graduates who are looking for jobs in this sector must be able to display some key attributes. Presence on the web – a Facebook profile alone isn’t enough. You have to be active on Twitter, LinkedIn etc. also it’s essential to have some other sort of project. It could be a Youtube channel, a blog or a website. Something you can show that you have an explicit interest in. Once you’ve got your first job you’re going to learn so much. Until then, its enthusiasm that’s going to get you the job you want.” – Gillian Cook

“I would suggest setting up a site of your own and doing SEO for it. It will mean you can demonstrate understanding and you get to have a play. Also, use one of the free AdWords vouchers to learn PPC. I would also consider doing the Analytics and AdWords exams as they aren’t greatly expensive and will give you a really good technical start.” – Matthew Taylor

“Employers can be a lot more selective in their recruitment process nowadays, and as a result, are always on the lookout for the candidates who have something extra to offer. Look for work experience whilst studying; put it on your CV. Look for ways to practice things in your own time; put it on your CV. Just get something that makes you look better on paper than the people around you.” - Daniel Braddock

Here are some additional resources:

beginners guide to SEO: a must read if you are new to SEO.

The Ultimate Guide to Getting a Job & Getting Promoted by Marcus Taylor.

How To Interview for an SEO Job by Chelsea Blacker.

How to impress at an SEO interview by Kevin Gibbons

SEO and Social Media leaders to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+….

As with any industry, the SE & SMM industry have within its niche its own experts who have reached celebrity-like status. I have listed some of the biggest names within the industry here as you’re sure to hear their names regularly in conversation with SEOs and Social Media Marketers.

Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land)
Matt Cutts (Google)
Vanessa Fox (Nine By Blue)
Aaron Wall (SEOBook)
Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz)
Danny Dover (author of SEO secrets)
Richard Baxter (SEOgadget)
Michael King (aka iPullRank)
Will Critchlow (Distilled)
Brian Solis (Altimeter)
Chris Brogan
Jay Baer
Scott Monty (Ford)
David Armano (Edleman)

Conclusion

I’ve tried to make this post as comprehensive and as useful to you as possible. However, if I have missed something, please do feel free to pop down to the comments section and add anything you think is relevant to the topic.

Finally, I wish you all the very best in your job search in the SE & SMM industry. I leave you with one last quote from Richard Baxter who was asked by Matthew Ogston what he bases his decision on when hiring someone new; his head or his heart?

“Most definitely my heart. It’s probably not ideal but genuinely, I look out for people I think will blend in well with the team (a cultural fit) – this can’t be measured with facts and figures, at least not in my experience. Obviously there’s a requirement to demonstrate previous achievements, but I also look for raw intelligence and problem solving over experience. SEO I can teach, attitude and aptitude I cannot.” (emphasis mine)

*Image credit: Tulane Public Relations on Flickr.

How to clean up your act and your timeline on Twitter

Rachel McCombie — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:58:39 +0000

In this day and age, it’s probably fair to say that we’re all aware of the value of Twitter – both on an interpersonal level and in a business context – so I’ll spare you the “why everyone should be on Twitter” blurb. Those ‘in the know’ will know that following the right people is important in terms of reaching out to an appropriate audience – those it will benefit you to interact with and who will share your tweets with their followers. As you build up your Twitter followers, you’ve probably done a fair bit of work to follow people who appear to share your interests. But in the process, you’ve probably ended up following a load of Twitter users who add little or no value to your Twitter experience, and I’ve discovered a great tool to help you weed them out.

Twit Cleaner assesses the list of people you follow and categorises the ones who aren’t adding much value according to a range of different annoying behaviour, including posting nothing but links, posting the same tweet several times, never interacting with anyone else and only tweeting about themselves.

Running the report on my ‘Following’ list on my personal Twitter account, @RachelsWritings, was quite an eye-opener. For any Twitter user, there are two main benefits to this exercise.

Most obviously, you streamline your timeline to ensure that you’re only receiving interesting tweets from people you wish to engage with.
You learn from other people’s mistakes by becoming more aware of the kind of Twitter behaviours that other people find annoying.

So what can we learn from a report run on the list of people I’m following on Twitter at the moment? The Twit Cleaner report gives you a neat list which looks like this:

As you can see in the screenshot, you can even unfollow the offending users directly from the report – convenience itself!

Key points to take away from a report like this in terms of how to run your own or business Twitter account in an appealing way – and how to avoid appearing on an Unfollow list yourself! – are as follows:

Post a range of content – not just links to other posts. If you only link to your own stuff it makes you look self-promotional, and if you only link to other people’s stuff it makes you look as though you can’t come up with anything original yourself (and this applies equally to people who only retweet other people’s tweets). That doesn’t mean you have to rule out links altogether – obviously not! – but make sure you throw in a reasonable number of ‘proper’ updates for your followers to engage with on Twitter itself, without being taken away from your actual tweets.

Don’t send out the same tweet twice – and if you’re accounting for audiences in different time zones, reword the tweet so that it’s unique. E.g. “in case you missed it earlier…”

Tweet regularly – don’t set up a Twitter account, get really into it for a week or two and then forget about it. I’ve seen plenty of surprisingly big businesses who’ve done this and it looks unprofessional and a bit lazy, quite frankly.

Interact – don’t just post your own stuff: reply to and retweet other people’s tweets. If you want to be a success on Twitter, you have to treat other people the way you’d like to be treated – or, as I would now like to paraphrase this old adage, “tweet other people the way you would like to be tweeted”!. If someone replies to one of your tweets, acknowledge them! There’s nothing worse than businesses who don’t respond to customers or people who can’t be bothered to take the time to reply to someone who’s taken the trouble to message them.

Avoid automated content – Twitter users want to engage with humans, whether you’re a business or not. With the amount of spam and general background noise on the internet these days, a real human voice stands out.

Don’t just talk about yourself – it’s boring! Take an interest in other people and they will take an interest in you.

Finally, and (hopefully) for a bit of an ego-boost, Twit Cleaner also tells you how you appear to the rest of Twitter. Luckily yours truly got a clean bill of health. ;-)

So if you’re in need of a wake-up call about your tweeting habits, this is where you get it!

What habits do you find annoying on Twitter? Are you guilty of any of them yourself? Let us know in the comments section below!

How to Import Your Customer Database into Google+ & Twitter

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:53:45 +0000

One thing I get asked frequently by clients is: how can we keep in touch with our customers on Twitter?

The answer is actually very easy, but judging by the reactions when I’ve explained this, it isn’t something which many people are doing at the moment. So I thought I’d list the process I’d recommend following in order to import your clients/customers into social media sites such as Twitter and Google+.

1) Export your customer database to CSV - you can do this with social media connections too – for example, exporting LinkedIn connections – or in the case of this example, exporting email blog subscribers from Feedburner:

2) Trim down CSV & add Firstname & Lastname – so that your spreadsheet looks like this one – just use fake names, as we don’t need these:

3) Import email as contacts into a Gmail account – I’d recommend setting up a contact group for this to make it easier to manage.

4) Find friends via Gmail – Google+ will automatically suggest contacts from your Gmail account and Twitter allows you to import contacts via Gmail:

I’d recommend just selecting the users who are already using the site; you don’t want to annoy everyone with invitations and obviously you need to have a good social media strategy in place (but that’s for another post!). Don’t just follow them from an inactive account and expect to see great results.

So it’s as easy as that! I’d be interested in hearing in the comments how you connect with your customers using social media?

30 Very Useful Twitter Tools You Must Be Aware Of

Tad Chef — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:46:42 +0000

There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to fun. The key to using Twitter effectively is the use of tools. Without tools, Twitter can be overwhelming and difficult to fathom. There are numerous tools that allow you to sift through this massive resource of latest news, links and gossip.

So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for advanced Twitter users?

I selected just the best of them: 30+ Twitter tools that are most useful right now. Most of these tools have been around for years so they have a sound business model. They simplify manifold tasks but have one thing in common: you must be aware of these tools if you’re serious about Twitter participation.

Standalone and Web-Based Twitter Clients

CoTweet
CoTweet is a solid and free web-based Twitter client with some useful CRM features aimed at business users. I use it quite often.

TweetDeck
Sleek Adobe Air desktop client for Twitter offering a good overview with several panes.

Seesmic
Seesmic is like both CoTweet and Tweetdeck; they have a web-based client and an Adobe Air based app with similar features. They even support Facebook and other services as well.

twhirl
One of the more popular Twitter clients from the early days of Twitter. I can still recommend it.

Spaz
Cross platform open source Twitter client for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Hahlo
Web-based iPhone (and iPod Touch) optimised Twitter app that works inside modern browsers as well.

Misc. Twitter Tools
ManageFlitter
An advanced Twitter contact management tool I can highly recommend.

Twellow
Twellow is the “Yellow Pages” of Twitter.

iTweet
This is an alternative web-based interface for Twitter, and indeed it’s a little more usable than the default one on Twitter.com.

TwitterCounter
This is a Twitter followers counter similar to the Feedburner count for blog subscribers.

Paper.li
Ever wanted to publish a newspaper? Paper.li does it on your behalf. Just pick the sources, be it people or hashtags.

Magpie
Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter. It boasts that users can make something like $50-200 a month just by tweeting.

Twitter WordPress Plugins

Twitter Tools by Alex King
I use this set of tools over on my own SEO blog and it works fine, you can even tweet from the WordPress backend and your blog address will be used as the client (software) link.

WP to Twitter
Twitter updater plugin using the SEO friendly Cli.gs short URL service for tweeting your posts.

Reliable Twitter
This WordPress plugin uses the Google Ajax API to get a reliable stream of tweets to your blog sidebar.

Firefox Extensions for Twitter

Echofon
Simple but effective and popular Twitter Firefox add-on. I have used Echofox as my main Twitter client for several years now.

TwitBin
Even simpler Twitter add on for Firefox.

HootBar
Lets you post to Twitter right from the address bar of your browser.

Twitter Social News

Topsy
Search the most popular current stories shared on Twitter. Also available this week, month or all time search.

Trunk.ly
This is a Delicious-like social bookmarking site for Twitter but it’s automated. It collects the links you share on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and everywhere, saving them as bookmarks with tags. You can share them with others as well.

TweetMeme
Find out the most popular stories as shared via the Tweetmeme button.

Twitturly
Social news-like interface for the current hot tweets.

MicroBlogBuzz
Shows you what’s most popular today, this week etc. on Twitter and across the other common microblogging platforms.

Twitturls
Shows the latest and most popular links on Twitter.

Twitter Analytics

Klout
Klout is probably the most widely used tool to determine a person’s (or account’s) authority on Twitter. The sheer number of followers is a worthless metric.

bit.ly
Use bit.ly as URL shortener and you can look up how many people clicked the actual links along with some other stats. For shortening links you can also use j.mp – it’s even shorter and does not have a domain from Libya (.ly).

TweetReach
Tweetreach is an analytics tool that estimates the number of impressions you have received, even listing the users who provided them. It’s quite biased though, as impressions by large numbers of bot followers do not mean much. So make sure you weed out the automated accounts when considering the numbers.

TweetStats
This statistic tool measures everything from when you tweet (weekdays, time of day) to who your real friends are by counting how often you address people.

Twist
Twist allows you to quickly view and compare popularity trends on Twitter. It’s similar to Google Trends.

FriendOrFollow.com
This tool compares your list of friends with your followers and shows you who does not follow you back.

These 30+ Twitter tools will allow you a seamless integration of Twitter in your daily routine, but make sure you know what you’re doing on Twitter and have some business objectives.

This post was originally published on November 14th, 2008. It was last updated: May 3rd, 2011. Numerous links have been removed and added. Many descriptions have been altered.

* Image by Noël Zia Lee

Twitter Netiquette: 10 Reasons to Unfollow Someone

Tad Chef — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:28:12 +0000

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It’s 2011 and by now I expect most people to know what Twitter is and how it works. Still, many people who should know better commit unpleasant mistakes – or rather they ignore the Twitter netiquette. They do things that make me unfollow them.

I’m on Twitter for business and I expect to get valuable information from it, as well as some serious social networking with my industry peers. What I do not want is a lot of:

noise
low quality
off-topic content
ads
automated messages.

Sounds simple doesn’t it?

In the past week I had to unfollow people for a variety of reasons. This is a shame, but sometimes a readable Twitter timeline is more important than particular users who don’t care whether they steal my time, confuse and frustrate me.

I’ve collected a few examples and generalized them in order not to point the finger at actual users. You know who you are, or least I hope so. Why? It’s not just me who unfollows someone for these reasons; other people do as well, but they don’t care enough to tell you. So what are the actual reasons I would unfollow someone?

1. Autofeeding every single Mashable post. If I want to read every post by Mashable, I can use my RSS reader or follow them. Autofeeding by itself is annoying. I want people to read posts they recommend to me manually. Posting everything Mashable publishes automatically is even worse, as there is not even a discovery involved. Everybody knows Mashable.

2. Retweeting ads using UPPERCASE TO SELL SOME AMAZING PRODUCTS YOU HAVE TO BUY NOW!!! Uppercase is the equivalent of shouting. Don’t shout at me or don’t use loudspeakers to make other people’s shouting even louder.

3. Frequently tweet old content aka “random post” or “from the archives”. Just imagine somebody coming up to you saying something like: do you already know yesterday’s news? Have you heard what I wrote two years ago? You haven’t yet?

4. Tweeting every single posts of yours instead of just the best ones. Self-promotion is OK to some extent, but by force feeding me every single article of yours even when it’s mediocre, it’s awful. I follow you personally, not your publication or brand, so don’t make your account an RSS reader or mail subscription.

5. Sending me mass DMs requiring me to vote for off-topic stuff where I don’t have even a clue what it means. I know a lot of people who do SEO and social media marketing. Heck, I do it myself! Yes, even I send some direct messages sometimes and ask for votes on social sites. I do it personally and rarely. Don’t send me three of them a week without even addressing me personally.

6. Cross posting 10 tweets in a row from Friendfeed or other tools. Using third party tools to post to several social sites is OK as long as you don’t cross post everything everywhere. Also, some tools do it wrong – they collect the items and then flood my timeline with 5 or 10 in a row. Don’t do it!

7. Retweeting bad news throughout the day. I don’t want to read about war, the latest plane crash or some other awful news. Don’t tweet it unless you are yourself in the earthquake. I try to limit bad news as much as I can. It’s not that I am ignorant or I don’t care. It’s the other way around. I care so much that it breaks my heart. I sometimes feel downright devastated by all the bad news. Please don’t make feel like that at work.

8. Posting off-topic messages in large numbers. I’m on Twitter as an SEO, social media optimization specialist and a business blogger. I blog and tweet about these topics. Occasionally I add something amazing, like the discovery of 1235 potential new planets. Adding off-topic tweets all the time is too much though. I most probably follow you because of the topic you blog about, so don’t change it.

9. Tweeting in other languages too much. I’m from Poland, living in Germany and working for an English publication. I socialise with the international SEO industry in English. I have a few followers from Germany and even some Poles follow me but I try to limit my German tweets so that people can understand me. Tweeting in a different language from the one you have chosen is really rude. Just imagine talking in German at a party when barely anybody can understand it.

10. Tweeting dozens of links a day. While in a way it’s part of my work to use Twitter, I don’t use it as a full time job. Posting more than a few links a day really overwhelms me. If you post more than 10 of them, I’ll most probably have to unfollow you just to stay sane. I’m on Twitter to find out about the few gems, not to get bombarded with every single post someone has written on a given day.

I know some people have unfollowed me due to my brutal honesty. I told them that I can’t bear the Mashable automation so they unfollowed me as well. This is killing the messenger. I am not your problem because I might sound rude. I’m the guy telling you what the real problem is. Twitter netiquette is not rocket science. Keep it in mind and Twitter can be very valuable for business people.

* Image by Benson Kua.

30 Ways to Use Social Media for Business People

Tad Chef — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:36:50 +0000

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While we Web professionals may assume that virtually everybody is using social media these days it’s far from the truth. People use social media but businesses don’t. A recent study shows that 94% of businesses actually do not use social media even for the most obvious task it’s good for: Getting feedback. That’s akin to not using cars, phones or electricity in the first half of the 20th century.

So of course another study shows that those businesses not using social media fail to compete.

Also getting feedback from your customers is a crucial benefit but it’s just the most obvious and must have use case for social media. Thus I compiled a list of 30 ways to use social media for business people.

Get feedback: There is even software for that like Uservoice, GetSatisfaction or OpenMind. Or simply listen to what people say on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums. There are also tools for that.
Create demand: Better than simply reacting is proactively informing about upcoming products, features or services. This way the demand is there before the actual product arrives. Apple is doing it all the time.
Offer discounts: Once you have an account on Facebook or Twitter or even before you gain a significant following the best thing you can do is offering discounts. People will follow you then and they also will buy. Dell has been selling computers on Twitter for years.
Get attention: Sounds simple doesn’t it? Say something of importance and then you migt get attention. Why? Well, on the Web not money is the most valuable good, it’s attention. It can be turned into money but you earn more money in the long term by trying to get attention repeatedly.
Spread the word: Tell the people about you and your business once you have established a connection with your following by getting attention over and over again and again. Announce changes on your blog, promote your next appearance at a conference or like mentioned above present your new product.
Build brand loyalty: Brand loyalty is self-explanatory isn’t it? People like your brand and then buy from it in the future again. How do you make them loyal customers? Either by providing formidable goods and services or you provide something for free, be it information or community.
Establish a community: The Web is a great place for creating communities. Why? People from all over the world who are obsessed about the same weird hobby can virtually meet with other like-minded individuals. You can establish a community of fans of your brand right there on your blog, feedback site or Facebook group.
Answer questions: People as questions all the time on the Web. That’s why start ups like Quora try to be next big thing while Yahoo Answers had more traffic that Twitter up to 2010. replay and answer questions, be helpful, whether you are dealing with your won products and services or the niche by and large.
Provide support: sometimes people have more than questions. They are annoyed, angry or even desperate. Your product or service may have caused that suffering. A simple tweet can help. Just this week I tried to install open source analytics Piwik and failed miserably. I voiced it on Twitter and the official Piwik account replied with a very simple solution. It took them one short look at my installation to find out what’s wrong.
Get clients: Of course you get clients or customers this way as well. When Yahoo announced that Delicious will be discontinued i and many other were scrambling to find an alternative to rescue their bookmarks. I got contacted by at least one other company.
Improve CRM: Does your company use customer relationship management tools like Salesforce? Well, many CRM tools already support CRM features to manage relationships beyond customers or rather before they become customers. Even simple Twitter tools like CoTweet provide CRM features. You can view past conversation with each Twitter user you interact with.
Empower staff: In Germany we have a drugstore chain infamous for being stingy. Their shops are small, look shabby and they don’t even have a phone to prevent staff for private conversations. Thus these drugstores get robbed regularly as staff can’t even call the police. Likewise many companies forbid Facebook, Twitter etc. on the job and isolate their workforce. other companies empower their staff and win customers or clients on social media.
Monitor trends: You can find out more on social media than just who is talking or complaining about you. Many tools allow to watch trends unfold. You determine what’s cool and where the demand is almost instantly by scanning Facebook and Twitter with simple tools like Topsy.
Identify influencers: Topsy also allows you to find out who actually tweets about your business. You can check how many clicks these people brought to your site via bit.ly or Twitter’s own stats. Indeed Topsy even marks important users “influential” or “highly influential” based on their activity.
Reach out: Once you know who likes you you can reach out to these people. blogger outreach is even an established industry term by now. Contact them, simply express your gratitude, invite them to your next product presentation or sen them your products for testing purposes.
Discuss features: Feedback is great but as long as it’s a monologue by disgruntled users complaining about you it isn’t very helpful. Often users can already suggest solutions. O you can try to explain how you’d like to change your product or service. A discussion will often yield far better results than just simple feedback.
Facilitate testing: social sites are not only for talking aka conversation. Some sites like Clue e.g. offer user testing as a free service. Usability testing is not only a task for experts you always need real people do the testing as well. Approach them on social media and simply ask to perform a short test.
Debunk myths: People are often complaining about you in public on social media in an exaggerated way. They may misunderstand your product or go way over board out of anger. These people will make look like the worst hotel in history or the most expensive car dealer in the country. Just counter these allegations with numbers, customer feedback etc. Often people complain about your brand even without trying it just beacuse someone else said “it sucks”.
Market offerings: Yes, indeed, you can market your offerings as well. It’s not like marketing elsewhere though. You don’t appear on the social media scene and start shouting about you and your offers. All the actions mentioned above and below are part of the marketing. People like you when you do all of or at least part of it right and then nobody will mad at you for just mentioning your offer even without it being new or a bargain.
Forge relationships: Did you know that people don’t want to talk with companies, they want to talk with people. So they really want to have a relationship with you. They want to know who you are, where you live and that you are a human being. People don’t want to talk to anonymous call canter agents they will never again talk to because there a hundred more any each time you get another one randomly. social media users want to follow a CEO, a public figure, a visible representative. Rad Fishkin, Matt Cutts and Lee Odden are perfect examples of this in the SEO industry.
Develop authority: A real life person telling the truth, being helpful and sharing valuable information more than once is on her or his way to develop authority. Isn’t it logical? So having a recognizable representative over time can make your company exec or spokesperson become an industry authority important beyond the position s/he has in your company.
Build links: That’s funny, I almost forgot that! As this here is an SEO blog: You can get links on social media and even likes and tweets counts as votes on search engines these days. So building links on social media is a wonderful side effect. You don’t want to submit your site to “10000 social bookmarking sites”. That’s spam. I mean building links doing all of the above.
Raise funds: Your business model doesn’t have to be selling something. Maybe you don’t even have a product or you work for an NGO. Social media is an excellent fundraising tool. There are even sites that automate that process and promote your projects. It’s called crowdfunding: Kickstarter is quite well known by now but only open to hip elite projects. Other sites like Kapipal do not have such high hurdles. Also there is P2P credit where real people can lend you money for your business idea.
Get publicity: What’s the difference between getting attention, spreading the word (I mentioned both above) and getting publicity? Well social media is used no only by bloggers but also by old school journalists. Social media press releases and giving away the news to bloggers can result in publicity beyond the social media sphere itself.
Watch the competition: In case you are not on social media your competition probably already is. You can watch their steps and try to learn or mimic them. As long as they excel on social media you have to do that. Than you can just watch them like you watch your overall industry and mentions of your brand. Google Alerts is your first love to do it but plenty of other tools assist you here.
Find talent: I don’t need or want a job, I value my freedom. A few years ago I still was open to job offers but nonetheless I get headhunters who are contacting me on LinkedIn and Xing. I got my writing gig here on SEOptimise via Twitter back in 2007. So looking for talent is one of the more evident ways to use social media sites.
Organize: Do you know Anonymous? It’s a group of Internet activists who are really a pain in the back of the corrupt and powerful these days. You might not condone their methods or goals but their mode of organization is simple, it’s social media. You can organize your workforce all over the planet using social media.
Create value: These days value is often ephemeral. Stocks and money are often virtual an traded at the speed of light. Real value as in gold or made of steel, brick and mortar are rare. Assets are often data and knowledge. It’s very easy to create value by sharing and thus multiplying information. Resources lists I often compile on SEOptimise are an example close to home.
Locate markets: Do you know the idiom “big in Japan”? It refers to artists or musicians who have been overlooked in the US, UK or Europe but who are hugely popular in Japan. Likewise some products and services flop at home but are all the rage elsewhere. On social media you have people from all over the world listening. When your market is crowd you can discover another somewhere else.
Meet peers: Watching your competition is not the best thing to deal with other in your niche or industry. They are your peers. Of course you compete with them a bit but at the end of the day hooking up with them will be more beneficial to you and them that solely competing. In the SEO industry we share our knowledge all the time. I haven’t seen anybody going bankrupt beacuse of that.

Do you want more? this list could easily go on forever. Add your ideas in the comment section. The best ones will be added to the list. After all we’re social, aren’t we?

* Image by Leo Seta.

Top 25 Tweets & Tips from a4uexpo London 2010

Kevin Gibbons — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:34:28 +0000

Having been at a4uexpo London for the last couple of days, rather than try and read through my notes I thought I’d do a recap on the top tips during the conference. Plus it’s a great opportunity to demonstrate one of the social media tools I recommended; Blackbird Pie:

Interesting idea from @patrickaltoft - combine the sum of brand anchor based inbound links vs non branded in link profiling #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 3:45 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@richardbaxter

Richard Baxter

Evil :-) ... -> RT @kevgibbo: Great tip; unsettle competitor employees by posting their CVs to job boards! #a4uexpo Neg SEO

October 12, 2010 10:23 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@mediadonis

Marcus Tandler

Patrick Altoft: "Don't ever assume that Google will penalise big brand competitors if they pay for links - it won't." #a4uExpo

October 13, 2010 4:10 pm via Seesmic for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@rouninmedia

Rounin Media

Interesting point by @markofmac @ value attribution session. Allow affils to select the remuneration model they work on. Like it. #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 3:52 pm via Echofon ReplyRetweetFavorite

@HelenMarie21

HelenMarie21

Easy ways to build Brand Authority links: Press Release, Article Syndication, Syndicateed Blog Networks, Guest Posts #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 3:58 pm via webReply RetweetFavorite

@rishil

Rishi Lakhani

Research and Analysis Tools for link building - Yahoo Site Explorer, Opensiteexplorer.org, MajesticSEO.com, Excel, Wordle.net #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 3:48 pm via HTC Peep ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Affiliateforum

Aart Wallet

Microformats tip: Use hCard to markup location address & hReview for ratings @RichardBaxter #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 8:43 am via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@kevgibbo

Kevin Gibbons

Build a "brand authority" first, THEN concentrate on KW anchor text #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 3:57 pm via webReply RetweetFavorite

@rishil

Rishi Lakhani

Reverse Engineering Trick - sign up to Adsense to see what Google thinks your site is about #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 3:40 pm via webReply RetweetFavorite

@state_ofsearch

State of Search

Recommended copywriter outsourcing sites: Elance & TextBroker #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 12:33 pm via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@kevgibbo

Kevin Gibbons

Get people to "like" your web site on Facebook to increase position in Facebook search results #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 11:31 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@geoffblog

GeoffBlog.com

Anchor text shouldnt always be exact match for targeted keywords - try breaking the keywords down and use synonyms #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 11:22 am via webReply RetweetFavorite

@state_ofsearch

State of Search

40% of consumers would abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 10:08 am via Echofon ReplyRetweetFavorite

@fi_robertson

Fiona Robertson

@davenaylor kicked off #a4uexpo and recommended using httpfox, showip, and searchstatus as useful firefox plugins

October 12, 2010 8:59 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@ruudkok

Ruud Kok

faster speed will improve crawl rate (we've seen this in many occasions with our clients!) #a4u1416 #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 8:13 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@onetomarket

Onetomarket

Dave Naylor also recommending good META descriptions - now a ranking factor (possibly!) #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 8:27 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@geoffblog

GeoffBlog.com

Utilise Google instant: pick a term you want to target & see what appears rank - sometimes easier and sometimes harder #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 11:33 am via webReply RetweetFavorite

@state_ofsearch

State of Search

Site architecture general rule; keep content no more than 3 clicks from homepage @RichardBaxter #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 1:36 pm via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@kevgibbo

Kevin Gibbons

@davenaylor recommends majestic seo, linkresearchtools and syntryx (if you have the budget for it). #a4u1416 #a4uexpo

October 12, 2010 8:41 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@martijnbeijk

martijn beijk

58% of lastminute.com bookings have interaction with multiple media channels #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 3:16 pm via Echofon ReplyRetweetFavorite

@fi_robertson

Fiona Robertson

Affiliates struggle to gain natural links unless they are a brand @patrickaltoft #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 3:08 pm via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@kevgibbo

Kevin Gibbons

Sanjit Atwal: "The average number of fans on a UK company Facebook page is currently around 3500." #a4uExpo

October 13, 2010 2:02 pm via Seesmic for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@rouninmedia

Rounin Media

RT @state_ofsearch: % of top 5 search affiliates who received a Google slap in the past year: 100% according to Tradedoubler #a4uexpo #a4u24

October 13, 2010 1:38 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@martijnbeijk

martijn beijk

Use Twitter competitions to promote affiliate sites & make sure you reward top customers @michelledewbs #a4uexpo

October 13, 2010 11:21 am via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@kevgibbo

Kevin Gibbons

Dixon Jones: "Check your site is Search Engine friendly from the start. Many tools exist, e.g. Spydermate, SEO Automatic & DIYSEO." #a4uExpo

October 13, 2010 1:31 pm via Seesmic for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@rouninmedia

Rounin Media

There’s also some great takeaways from both day 1 and day 2, written by GPMD – and I’m sure they’ll be plenty more recap posts once the hangovers have cleared up! :D

Stop Chasing Traffic – Practice Human Powered SEO

Tad Chef — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:46:05 +0000

Image: Catching up by M.Danys.

While working on an extended review of the new social news community for SEO, SERPd I had a realization. Thus the review will have to wait till next week. First I have something more important to say. Listen up SEO people: Stop chasing traffic!

On the Web today traffic is a side effect.

Traffic can not be your goal. Also once you have the traffic it’s just a milestone on your way to conversions and ROI. SEO is complex these days. Depending who you are and who you work for SEO can be anything and everything that makes a business more profitable on the Web.

SEO may be web development, SEO may be PR, SEO may be usability. We all know that, I hope at least but SEO is also relationships with other people. You know, all those

influencers
connectors
bloggers
journalists
industry veterans

ultimately decide who you are and where you are. Of course you can ignore them and do your own thing but it’s far easier to be part of the larger social sphere you belong to in the first place instead of just being a lone ranger.

SERPd fills in the void Sphinn has left after they discontinued voting. It’s still nascent, sometimes buggy and the design isn’t as polished as one would expect these days. Also SERPd is just a tiny social news community. It may have around 300 members now. This reminds me of course of the early days of Sphinn when I started out there as an enthusiastic contributor.

Sure, Sphinn has proved be a great targeted traffic source at the end. A frontpage appearance on Sphinn was good enough for a thousand qualified visitors. It never was the main motivation though. The most important thing Sphinn has given me were the relationships with my peers. Living in Germany I haven’t met most of the individuals I converse with online about SEO. So I have to use the Web to be part of the international SEO community. These days I mostly do on Twitter but in the early days om my international blogging career I did mainly on Sphinn and partly on StumbeUpon.

The sites change but the people are still around.

They still know me, who I am and what I stand for. I managed to insult some people over the years. They don’t like my anymore. Some people have disappeared altogether. Either they moved on from SEO and social media to something else or they don’t socialize that much anymore online. There is a huge number of people who still there and more people show up all the time.

It’s how you interact with these people that determines your future SEO success.

It’s your peers who link to you, it’s the social media users, it’s the professional bloggers.

It seems that I am the third most active user on SERPd right now, the other two are the people behind the project. I didn’t even try very hard. I just went there and contributed to the budding community. A community is like a garden, you have to plant seeds first to reap later. This post is not about Sphinn or SERPd though. It’s just an example.

The main point is that you need people. You must go after the people not the traffic.

Be kind, supportive and part of the community and you will get the links, the traffic and the support in the future. Of course you have to deserve it. You won’t get it without a good blog, great content and some true expertise but being there and being part of the community is crucial.

When I started out on Sphinn nobody knew me, my blog was new as well and I only had been around some forums. Within a short time frame I managed to get a substantial amount of attention from the industry as well as from a wider audience. Throughout the years I had many other opportunities. I got clients, job offers, software providers ask me to review their tools etc. etc.

Never underestimate the power of relationships. Stop chasing traffic. Practice human powered SEO. You will be faster by bike than by car during the rush hour to extent the metaphor.

New Digg Review: Is Digg V4 the Next Twitter?

Tad Chef — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:37:17 +0000

Typical Digg comment thread.

Last week the new Digg version 4 has been released and I have tested it ever since. Back in the days I was a staunch opponent of Digg and an avid supporter of competing services like StumbleUpon and Mixx. That was years ago though. Both Mixx and SU have stagnated over time. So I decided to take a look at the new Digg. Maybe it has been fixed now?

Most business people have been either expelled from the first wave of social sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Mixx or moved on of their own accord to more mature sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn that don’t discriminate against business users and are not full of NSFW images.

Digg has deteriorated over the years to become a cesspool full of sexism and a battle ground for teenage boy’s flame wars.

It’s not as bad as competitor Reddit which ended up being the place for hate-mongers and rants though.

With version four Kevin Rose, known for his misguided antipathy against the SEO industry, tries to save what’s left of an originally good idea: social news. Can he beat Twitter and Facebook and most importantly his own community that has made Digg the hellhole it was until now?

Following

Digg seems to aim at both Twitter and StumbleUpon. It’s very similar to both services. You have to follow users or publications and see their activity.

Similar to Twitter main stream “blogs” like TechCrunch or Mashable have an overwhelming advantage this way. They have already tens of thousands of followers who vote anything up they see. Understandably many people don’t like this feature as some major publishers can dominate the frontpage this way.

On the other hand the follow feature revives “old” and not yet popular stories on Digg. Until now only front page stories could get substantial traffic from Digg. Most of these visitors were terribly untargeted though and left in an instant so that you got a huge server load while not getting much in return. Unless of course you got links. Thus Digg has been used by many for link building for years.

Once a story has hit the fp it could garner a substantial number of links. This is still true to some extent but with Facebook and Twitter getting more popular you don’t get as many links these days anymore.

I got notified about someone following me. That’s why I joined the new Digg in the first place. Sadly most follwoers do not see your submissions it seems. Everything you do gets shown to them so that submissions get overlooked when you digg other people’s submissions and comment.

Comments

The most dreaded and for some people entertaining (in a freak show kind of way) part of Digg was the comment section. As Digg adds no other value beyond the selection of stories and commenting many people read those. Unfortunately especially women and business people were appalled but the blatant sexism, aggressive NSFW battleground that comment section was. In V4 of Digg the site attempts to clean up the comment section.

The most approved of comments get displayed on top if you select the right option in the preferences. Some flame comments by trolls are below the display threshold and can only be seen on click. You can hide comments below a certain number of votes. I strongly approve of this measure. Can you use Digg again during work hours and even without watching Fight Club first? Not really.

A comment that disagreed with my opinion started with “F**k you!” and got at least 14 votes so that no threshold could have stopped it. My comment containing no swear words has been of course buried. My sin? I expressed my sadness about homeless people protesting for cheap meals in the US while at the same time their government can afford wars and military bases throughout the world. Being from Germany I express often unpopular views for Americans so that most probably I still will be verbally attacked and abused on the new Digg it seems.

Bury button

The feature that was perhaps the other most devastating one for Digg was the so called “bury button”. Using it a self proclaimed Digg police blocked whole topics, e.g. SEO. So basically you weren’t allowed to talk about SEO. The only SEO related posts that were acceptable on Digg were SEO bashing postings. This perpetuated the ignorance on the Digg platform to the point where everything posted on an SEO publication has been boycotted.

At the same spammers have been using Digg to submit their SEO adverts all the time. The bury button led to the effective exclusion of high quality SEO resources while low quality SEO and downright spam about SEO services has been prevalent on Digg. Just search Digg for SEO and you’ll find solely crap submissions, mostly not even in English.

Digg V4 has no bury button anymore. This way resources about SEO theoretically can get popular on Digg again as there is no direct censorship anymore. I doubt though there are enough people interested in the subject. I’m optimistic though that search marketing publications can get exposure on Digg for general technology and Internet postings. Search Engine Land is already on Digg.

The removal of the bury button is an overdue measure to restore democratic voting patterns on Digg. Until now a small minority of maybe a few dozens people have effectively blocked SEO related resources.

The new Digg has a report button instead. I reported myself for instance when a story accidentally got submitted twice by the system. I also reported a submission consisting of dozens of stolen images. We’ll see whether the Digg staff will act on these.

Will I stay on the new Digg?

I don’t know yet. I’m probably not masochistic enough to let people shout at me for expressing my opinions which are quiet common sense (like anti-war) in Europe. Maybe I’ll use Digg as a combination of both Twitter and Facebook. I’ll follow my favorite users and publications and ignore the frontpage and comments altogether. Instead I will “like” their submissions by “digging” them. On the other hand I’m not convinced I need another site to follow them.

People in the SEO industry still push their infographics, lists or other linkbaits on Digg, I guess 1/3 of Digg’s content are linkbaits while the rest are mainstream blogs or publications plus funny or “awesome” images. As I don’t like most of these and SEO publications have no audience there I don’t think it makes business sense for me.

In case you’re into linkbaits, just take some almost naked female celebrity pics or something “Apple”, put it on your blog and the Digg audience will still love it. Digg even says in its meta keyword tag that it’s about “celebrity news” among others.

50+ Advanced Web Analytics Tools for Business Use [2010 Edition]

Tad Chef — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:30:43 +0000

Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online. In case you don’t know who and why visits you, buys your products and talks about you, you are blind on the Web.

Web analytics goes beyond simple SEO metrics.

It’s about

usability
conversions
branding

among others.

Additionally, with the huge influence of social media, it’s more important than ever to monitor social media buzz. While some people still assume that there are no social media measurement tools there are already dozens out there.

So check out these 50+ advanced web analytics tools for business use. It’s the updated 2010 edition. Of course I assume that you know by now the industry standard solution Google Analytics.

This list has been first compiled in February, 2009 so I decided to update and republish it 18 months later. I’ve removed, added and changed numerous links.

Make sure not to miss the Social Media analytics solutions at the bottom of the list.

Free and/or Affordable Analytics Solutions

Search Analytics

Heat Maps and Usability Tracking

Enterprise Analytics

Hosted/Server Side Solutions

Twitter & Facebook Analytics

Social Media Analytics

Enterprise Social Media Monitoring Tools

Thanks to the colleagues of @GuavaUK for suggesting CoreMetrics and Unica on Twitter. Also thanks to SEMPlanning.com for providing a huge list of social media buzz tracking tools I used while researching.

This post was first published on February 26th, 2009. It was last updated on August 20th, 2010.

When Not to Blog

Tad Chef — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:01:57 +0000

Grumpy Face by ellie.

I’m blogging all day. Most of the time at work I spend blogging. I write for four flagship blogs. Plus I have a private Tumblr blog as well. Two of the flagship blogs are about SEO, this one here and my own blog. The other two are client blogs covering two different topics. So basically I have to be up to date about at least three subjects, industries or niches. This is not an easy task although one person alone can handle up to 5 flagship blogs at the same if you ask me.

As I enjoy blogging very much I never experience the so called “writers block”. The contrary is the case, I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things I want to write about. I do basic research for 5 to 10 postings and write only one of them after deciding which one to write.

Of course there are times when I’m not inspired enough to blog. Recently I experienced such a phase of approx. one or two days. While at it I was seeking inspiration from my Twitter followers. I even got a great ideas by one of my followers, the person tweeting for our colleagues over at Sorbet Digital. She asked me to write about SEO project management and I politely declined.

I’m not a project manager or SEO manager, I’m not even doing SEO myself most of the time (after all I’m mostly blogging). So I bet there are other people who could cover that topic better than me, Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise probably for instance.

Long story short I decided to write about my doubts as I haven’t written the SEO project management post and other postings as well.

The main question of this post is “when not to blog” though. I’ll tell you when.

When you’re angry, grumpy, tired, hungry.

I sometimes angry, more often grumpy and two of the main reasons for being angry or grumpy are being tired or hungry. Some people don’t notice either of these states but I bet their coworkers, families or other people around can sense it. Even if you’re completely alone at your desk you can find out by asking yourself the following question: Would you like to shout or sneer at somebody for writing something?

Flame wars are pretty common online because people get easiyl alienated on the Web. Take a break, go for lunch or a walk. Blogging doesn’t often work when angry. For me it sometimes works but often you don’t understand yourself afterwards. Blog later. You can get quick traffic with a rant but often people who were your peers, fans or potential clients might get ostracized.

When having a tunnel vision.

Another typical issue when working on the web is tunnel vision. You are so focused on getting things done fast that you just race like a rat. Again the solution here is pretty simple. Step outside and get some input from real life. Be it the coworkers, your family or even random strangers.

For instance I like to chat with the local shop owners around here. They are often Indian, Arabs or Turks and their different point of view can remove your tunnel vision quickly. I don’t talk about SEO with them I only ask them how their business is going. Just small talk. That’s often perfectly enough. Just by trying to imagine being in their footsteps you get open minded again. The tunnel vision vanishes.

For instance my favorite Indian restaurant around the corner is most often empty. The food is excellent and the prices are low but they are quite hidden and they are not of the cool restaurants. I often think how they could improve their business. This in itself inspires me.

Without having value to add.

When you are sure that you can’t add any value to a given news item or topic don’t do it. Just regurgitating news everybody else has written about is not only boring it also scares away your regular readers.

They won’t come back as often anymore or they might even quit returning when they sense that you too often publish low quality posts with no substance just for the sake of blogging. Wait until you find a unique angle or you collect a few more similar resources to compile a list. Or just drop the idea altogether and wait for another one.

When being not an expert on a topic.

This is the example I covered above. Project management is not my cup of tea so writing about it would be rather guess work and low quality. What you can do of course is research or actually testing some project management software.

I’ll probably do that beacuse I think I van improve my project management skills but I won’t teach you about it yet as long as I’m not skillful enough. You don’t have to be an expert to blog about something but you need a certain amount of time to prepare then or you invite an expert to speak about the topic.

When being in a hurry.

Blogging in a hurry is no-no as well. While we’re always in a hurry somehow, we want to finish a task, move on to the next one, catch up with someone or simply leave there are cases where there is just not enough time to write a blog post that makes sense, proof read it, add some links, find an image for it and share it on social media.

In this case you better don’t do it at all or just do par of it. write a draft today and add the rest tomorrow or even later. A quality post tomorrow is better than a quick and dirty post today IMHO.

There are probably more reasons not to blog for a certain reason but I don’t want to discourage you any further. blogging is fun and it makes money so we should blog all the time except the few cases cited above. So let’s go: but don’t blog around clock!

Make sure to blog when you’re fresh and inspired. I the morning is often a good time to blog. Don’t check your emails first in the morning. Write a blog post instead. Reading too many emails can make you angry, grumpy and result in tunnel vision. Afterwards you lose any sense of value you could add and need a brake.

Btw. do you want to know what other topics it were I decided not to write about this time? It was the intriguing popularity of black hat SEO on StumbleUpon and the actual Facebook search options and services. I might write about them next though.

How to Write Highly Popular 30+ Item List Blog Posts to Get Links and Traffic

Tad Chef — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:57:19 +0000

Time flies by. It’s more than two years by now that I write the highly popular “30+” list blog posts to get links and traffic for SEOptimise. I’ve often tried to abandon them, to write tutorials or other types of postings but list posts with around 30 items still rule. They get the most

shares on social media
links
attention
traffic

for several reasons.

This year some of the big guys in the SEO blogosphere started doing 30 something lists as well, SEOmoz does them, SEL compiles them. They even surpass my lists in some cases as they spend obviously more time on them than I do. Their success with this technique has just confirmed to me that 30+ lists work. That’s why I will tell you how to write them.

In the web design/web development niche even more people publish lists like that all the time.

Why 30?

For some reason 30+ lists are better suited for the Web than top 10, 20 or wahtever lists. I have a few ideas why that is the case but these ideas are just speculation. What I do know for sure is that the so called task ROI of most 30+ lists is higher than the top 10, whatever or top 100 lists.

One crucial success factor is that people tend to think in dozens not necessarily tens IMHO.

The decimal system makes us read and write top 10, top 20 or top 100 lists but the more “natural” way to count is by using dozens as in twelve hours. That’s why a number like 36 sounds better to many of us. Even though 30 is two and a half dozens this number just seems to entice people to read.

Also most people are tired of top 10 and 20 lists, they have been overused. Here again 30+ sounds more natural.

Last but not least you simply can’t compile a list of 100 items without broadening the topic or lowering the quality of the list.

Most lists are comprehensive enough with around 30 items.

More items would often be redundant or less relevant. A top 10 list also implies a personal selection of some kind. You have to choose “the best” 10 while 30 items cover a subject in depth.

That’s why I sometimes even reduce the number of items in a list, at least in the headline. One of my favorite lists has been the one about advanced SEO which contained 55+ links but only around 30 items officially.

Delicious

I collect great posts from SEO blogs in my Delicious account onreact.com and I tag them according to a set of rules. I add mostly tags I’ve used in the past to categorize these posting in relevant groups.

Then from time to time I take a look at some of the tags and those that contain more than 10 or 20 items get my attention. Sometimes they are almost thirty already so I just have to copy and paste the links. I delete the unworthy ones and add some from outside my Delicious bookmarks but the bulk of the work has been done while reading social media, search and SEO news in the morning each day.

Sometimes I have to combine several tags into one trend. The brutal thruths about Google, SEO etc. have been such a list. It was clear to me that there was a trend in the industry to write about the less glamorous parts of the SEO game but I couldn’t name it. Then the inspiration came out of nowhere and I have found the common ground to add it up to a list.

In some cases I don’t use Delicious at all. I simply get inspired and write down approx. 30 items from the top of my head.

Twitter

From time to time I use Twitter to crowdsource list items. The SEO FAQ list heavily relied on input from my Twitter followers. Also the black hat SEO techniques list has grown with a little help of my friends.

You have to ask the right questions and offer incentives though. The SEO FAQ offered both backlinks and content for those who took part. I asked my Twitter followers about the black hat SEO techniques their arch enemies use. Otherwise people would probably mostly stay low key.

Link list or item list?

A simple link list is not the best kind of list. Sometimes I just have to compile a list of resources and link them beacuse there are so many of them. Such a list can overwhelm though. Many people like lists because they want to have a quick overview about a subject, not a huge reading list. Therefore a combined text item list with added links for further reading is the best option. This way you get both kinds of list readers, the save for later bunch as well as the quick overview group.

A simple link list will not be as popular as an item list with added links to prove the points. Still both list formats are highly popular. A 30+ list post done in 4h will get more traction on the Web than a tutorial that took 6 or 8h to write.

Linking out

Another key factor leading to the overwhelming success of my lists posts in general is the massive amount of outbound links. While many SEOs are still stuck in the past and attempt to hoard PageRank and trap users like the news media do I rely on linking out for SEO reasons.

We already know that Google prefers sites that link out

(after all they need outgoing links to determine their PageRank algo) but have no proof yet that they affect rankings directly.

What’s obvious though is that people who you are linking to will link back to you, spread the word on social media and support your blog or even business in the future.

So at the end of the day the fact that I link out to dozens of other blogs get me traffic and links in significant numbers.

Contrary to popular wisdom SEOptimise has improved in rankings in recent years ever since we link out in large numbers. SEOptimise ranks in the top 10 for some of the most competitive search marketing terms while being a relatively small agency compared to the competition.

Also the lists themselves tend to rank quite well. SEOptimise ranks top 3 for [advanced SEO], [SEO techniques] or [social media statistics].

The secret is our broad, organic backlink structure build up by business blogging utilizing these highly popular 30+ items list posts.

Will Facebook Search Become the Dominant Player?

Tad Chef — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:44:05 +0000

In recent months I have been reading all kind of material on Facebook, search and SEO. I’m not here to predict the future or to hype Facebook as the new better search. Instead I’d like to analyze the clues we already have.

Others have done great work on Facebook SEO by now.

Moreover I’d like to combine these clues with the statistics suggesting that people trust their friends when it comes to products, services and other recommendations while at the same they by now distrust social media in general.

Facebook search is still in its very early stages so this post is only guess work but to me it seems that Facebook search will become the dominant player sooner or later.

This might sound very vague but let me explain why I think so. Just yesterday Twitter founder Biz Stone announced that they are bigger than Bing and Yahoo together as a search engine. So why won’t Twitter become the next search engine of choice? Well, they’re results suck. I’ve written about that already more then once. Also they have a huge bot problem. You socialize with bots not people in case you autofollow Twitter accounts. It’s really hard to find the real people on Twitter these days as the bots pollute Twitter with their automated retweets.

IMHO, there are far more real people on Facebook than on Twitter. People trust people they know. So Twitter has the same problem with bots as Google has.

Automated content farms scraping their content from all over the Web or fully automated Twitter accounts, both have no trust and real people wouldn’t “like” them or share them on Facebook, at least not using their real names.

Even if spammers start to build Facebook bots that click on like buttons it won’t really mess up Facebook search as you’d still see search results provided by your friends, most probably real people with real names.

Already my search results for SEO on Facebook are almost perfect, after all they match my choices.

I get the companies and resources I like on top, plus those who have “SEO” in their name and the most friends we both share. While I dislike the “on page factors” taken into account here because they can easily get manipulated the first 7 results I got were really great.

Searching for a smartphone, netbook or such I get the results most people recommend on top. You can manipulate that too but in this early stage it seems either not many people do it yet or Facebook has reached critical mass and thus ensures search result quality.

Google has also customizable search results and results by friends etc. Still you get the anonymously linked up resources on top. Twitter shows the most popular ones but only at a given moment, plus you get main stream crap like SEO jokes on top when you search for SEO.

When I search for SEO I want to see the sources I trust on top not Wikipedia or stupid rants by Derek Powazek. Both Google and Twitter rank not the best results on top but those most contentious, for whatever reason. As most people don’t understand SEO they either look it up on Wikipedia or dismiss it. This works as long as there are enough links or tweets by real people. Otherwise both Google and Twitter will offer you automated crap. So it gets from bad to worse.

Am I too optimistic here? Will Facebook search soon deteriorate? Or will it become even better at finding out what truly matters to me and you and thus dominate search in the future?

I mean if Twitter search can become bigger than Bing and Yahoo together it would be no problem for Facebook to become ten times bigger. After all it has roughly 10 times more users and unlike with Twitter most of them are real people.

The Twitter Hype is Over

Tad Chef — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:52:50 +0000

Dear Readers, at the end of last week I haven’t published the “Twitter weekly” column. This time it was no poor time management issue. I did it on purpose. The week before I had written a highly popular “Twitter weekly” post but it was the last of its sort. Why?

The Twitter hype is over!

Twitter has peaked usage and traffic-wise in January, or maybe even earlier. That’s not the main reason though. Also Google Trends still shows an increase. We had started publishing the Twitter column when Twitter traffic had been far less significant. No, the real reason are Twitter news or rather non-news.

The week before last week I really had to deal with baseless rumors and to spice them up with some exaggerated colloquial language. While it was fun I realized that’s it’s not a tabloid here. I don’t want to sound like a jerk just to hide the fact that there is nothing of importance to report or analyze.

Sure there are Twitter news and developments you could write about but they are daily business of a second rate player.

Twitter is big but not as crucial as Google and Facebook

and by now I have the impression that the time spend on covering Twitter is unjustified. I will keep on writing concise posts about Google, Facebook and Twitter or whomever will be most deserving at a given moment. There is no need for a weekly Twitter column anymore though.

That’s OK. The Web landscape is ever changing and you have to react quickly. My nickname wouldn’t be “onreact” if I would ignore the changes.

Is Twitter negligible now? No.

Will I quit Twitter? No. Does Twitter marketing and SEO still make sense? Yes.

I will keep on using Twitter daily at least once daily but i want exclusively focus my writing habits on that subject. The hype is over. That’s a good thing. Covering Twitter’s business consolidation is no fun though.

They keep on alienating users, developers. They hide their numbers and practice corporate newspeak (like “promoted tweets” for ads). I’ve searched Topsy for the most popular results on Twitter in the last month and I couldn’t find something really relevant. So I’ll shut up. I won’t try to revive a dead hype myself.

Why Google Won’t Buy Twitter & What They Will Buy Instead

Tad Chef — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:42:14 +0000

Welcome back to the infamous “Twitter Weekly” attack where I dissect the hype around Twitter like a mad dog on crack. This week I will ridicule the baseless but nevertheless highly popular gossip about Google aiming to buy Twitter.

First off I tell you one thing: Guess what? Google won’t buy Twitter!

I don’t have to disturb Eric Schmidt’s fiancé’s privacy to know that. There are plenty of reasons not buy Twitter, especially if your name is Google. I personally hate those “Gazillion reasons why x will y” postings so I will tell you only a few of them and never disclose the actual number of gazillion reasons.

Twitter is humongously expensive. Yes, indeed. Twitter has so much vulture capitalist (term coined by Aaron Wall, not me) cash that they are worth more than BP probably by now. Facebook offered 500 million $$$ back in 2008 already and Twitter refused. Last year the were estimated at 1 billion. This year they might be worth a gazillion and a half already!
Google gulps your teeny weeny tweets already via the so called Twitter firehose. It’s cheaper and less messy. You don’t have to deal with the FTC for getting hacked each other day and such.
Google has already digested a microblogging service, Jaiku. They needed only 15 months to actually throw it up. Now how effective is that! Google sucks at social like a newborn baby. Google’s performance at microblogging is like BP’s performance at stopping oil leaks. No matter whether they buy a third party service or they do it themselves, any attempt to make a microblogging product that didn’t implode almost instantly is hopeless. Be it Jaiku, Google Wave or Google Buzz. Why? Google consists of mad scientists. Never sleeping geeks playing with life size Lego toys. They are anti-social.
Google doesn’t need to buy Twitter to enlarge its penis/overcome the competitive advantage of Twitter. They just need a quick and dirty third party service on the cheap which enables Google to better better spy on you and assess tweet reputation and authority. Thus they are far more likely to go on a shopping spree in the already disgruntled Twitter developer community. To me it’s just a question of when and which service will be acquired. I guess they will swallow Topsy. Otherwise it will be TweetMeme or BackType. Those three services have some clue. They might buy bit.ly as well as the guys down there will go bankrupt soon anyways beacuse of t.co and will desperately seek an exit right now.

Now what do you think? Will Google gurgle down Twitter or some other poor souls? Now don’t be shy, I don’t bite.

Twitter: Big in Japan

Tad Chef — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:20:12 +0000

Welcome back to the “Twitter Weekly” column. This week I want to talk about the phenomenal success of Twitter in Japan. Of course I refer to the AP article that was widely circulated this week.

It seems that Twitter is huge in Japan, 16,3% of Japanese Internet users tweet, especially compared to Facebook which is only used by 3% of the Japanese Internet population. The AP story includes some ideas on why Twitter is so popular in Japan. Techcrunch has listed many more last year already. I’d like to add a few thought of mine.

Japanese Internet users are quite different than western ones from the US, UK or Europe.

While we tend to brag about ourselves and make our names known the Japanese are rather timid or humble. They prefer to stay anonymous. They don’t do it out of fear or only for privacy reasons. In Japanese culture not the individual counts but the group, be it the family, the company or the sports team. So the Japanese do not try had to stand out but rather connect with other people and act together to the benefit of all. While the Western cultural paradigm is the hero, a man who saves the world on his own, Japanese culture rather emphasizes a group of people, like the Samurai fighters or the Geishas. While the Japanese youth is more about pop musicians than Samurai they still share the the traditional understanding of social relations. Japan’s pop icons seemingly love Twitter.

Standing out on Facebook is not the way to go for the Japanese. Being part of a social context on Twitter without having to be overtly exhibitionist is much more acceptable.

Also Twitter has done some things right in Japan earlier than elsewhere in the world. They added a mobile Twitter app quite early. Also Twitter has an innovative business model in Japan: Users can charge their followers for reading their tweets. Twitter gets 30% o the revenue. This is ingenious. Instead of annoying people with ads users pay for what they want, direct access to celebrities or business pundits. I can imagine many girls paying for Britney’s tweets and also tech zealots paying for the inside scoop by early adopters.

Twitter is not Google.

Seeing ads in search results where we actively try to find something to buy is much more useful than seeing ads on Twitter where we expect current events or trends to show up. Twitter is experimenting with “promoted trends” aka ads in the popular topics section. That’s like buying a frontpage appearance on Digg. What’s not popular organically isn’t popular at all, it’s an annoying distraction. The Japanese model might be the solution for many current woes not just the lack of Twitter revenue. I can imagine readers paying for the latest breaking news on Twitter from the NYT or BBC. Also micropayments never went prime time because the platforms were always dark horses with a low adoption rate. A Twitter connected system might change that. So listen up publishers. Maybe Twitter is the future of paid content, not the closed iPad sphere.

Watching Twitter growth in Japan will offer even more unique insights in the future.

Twitter and t.co: All Your Links Are Belong to Us!

Tad Chef — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:39:22 +0000

Oops, you’re on our blacklist!

Welcome back to Twitter Weekly, our Twitter column: Today I’ll rant about the latest move by Twitter to monopolize the real estate of their own service. Twitter will in future reroute all links posted to Twitter via it’s new t.co shortener. URLs in tweets won’t display as shortened links anymore, regardless which service you use, you’ll always see the domain you head to.

Now isn’t that good news? No hidden scam, affiliate and crap links? Well, think again. Twitter just said: All your links are belong to us!

Last time we looked at the ban of third party ads in streams. This week we see how Twitter plans to ensure no other services advertise in streams. Twitter will control all links posted to the service.

That’s not big deal you might say, Google or Facebook do that too. They control links on their services and block some of them. Also Twitter filters scams already. So this is just a nice user-friendly feature. Well, what about some competition then? bit.ly will probably fold. I assume that most of bit.ly traffic is from Twitter. Also the bit.ly statistics were a useful set of tools but no more. Twitter will offer statistics with t.co as well but for business aka paying users. Twitter says that

you still can shorten links

and “share” them using other shortening services but not on Twitter. That’s similar to Google saying “if you don’t like us use Bing instead”.

So basically Twitter will sell back your links to you. The links you submit will become a Twitter commodity you have to pay for. Even in case bit.ly will still work in this set up I expect this step later. In recent months Twitter has shown that its business strategy revolves around monopolizing features: Be it retweets, stream ads or links.

There is no need to reroute all links through a Twitter owned service. Not for security reasons and not for any other reason I know aside money-related causes. You could either use third party security tools to verify the security and validity of a link or you could show the destination without using t.co – some Twitter clients like PowerTwitter already do that. You see the link you’re heading to, not the URL shortener link. Indeed Twitter will do that, use a third party blacklist in the background, after rerouting you.

The bigger and more important a company gets the less friendly innovative startup it becomes.

Hard core business analysts take over and do everything they can to ensure profits. That’s the way it is. No surprise here. We’ve seen it will all cool startups becoming big players. Likewise the users have to take that into account. Business users whose money depend on a service without constraints should take care of their assets first. You still don’t see a problem here?

Like Digg Twitter could decide that all links regarding SEO are advertising and block them. Regular censorship is also possible or rather can get implemented with ease once a rerouting of links takes place.