All posts in twitter

Retweeted Starbucks ad aka promoted tweet. No sign of it being an ad.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Last week we have witnessed a lot of news about and from Twitter. The most important one seems to be the appearance of Twitter ads aka promoted tweets. From now on you can

buy your way to the top of Twitter search results.

I’ve written about the uselessness of Twitter search just a few days ago. This is just the last nail in the coffin of Twitter search if you ask me. This may be just my opinion though. Thus I’ve collected some insightful articles dealing with the emergence of Twitter ads.

Several other more or less troubling news around Twitter have been prominent last week as well. Some of them sound quite positive but also have significant negative consequences.


Twitter search results for SEO. Very relevant, aren’t they?

Last week the new Twitter search “ranking popular tweets on top” went live. It’s a huge disappointment. It only shows two or three seemingly popular tweets on top of the latest tweets not ordered in any manner, just like hitherto.

Also the “popular tweets” seem to stem from some form of limited static white list of websites. Recently our hugely popular Google Analytics list didn’t even show up while other less popular but more reputable sources did on the same day.

Cyber Girl by WebWizzard

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Today’s topic: The vanishing value of retweets due to the attack of the Twitter bots.

In this edition of our weekly Twitter column I’d like to ridicule Twitter search. Yes, no mistake here. We know now, after I’ve predicted it a few weeks ago that

Twitter search will finally rank tweets

instead of just showing the latest ones.

Search Engine Land asked when the news Twitter search ranking will get live but they received a “no comment” kind of reply. Twitter search is at least 10 years late when it comes to search technology so a few weeks or months sooner or later do not matter. Also, who needs Twitter search?


I’ve mentioned third party Twitter search engine Topsy in the past. Topsy is the IMHO best Twitter search engine around. Topsy already rates or ranks tweets according to several factors like most  probably the number of tweets and the influence of the Twitter users.

Numbers and statistics are never true by themselves, it always depends on how you interpret them. On the other hand, without numbers you have no idea what’s going on. Thus we have to study statistics and all other data we can get to stay in business.

Here I’ve collected 35 crucial SEO, Twitter & social media statistics for business people to get an overview of what’s going on actually.

The Community Participation Pyramid courtesy of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter distrusts everything you say.

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

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

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

SEOfilms 1

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

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

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

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