3 Simple Ways to Integrate Twitter and SEO Strategies Consumers discover online. They discover services and products, they discover memes and cartoons, they discover ideas and thought. And they discover all of this through online search. And if that’s how people are discovering, that’s how businesses need to focus on being discovered. Earlier this week, I launched an ebook, Learning SEO from the Experts, that helps businesses learn how to do exactly that. The experts featured come from HubSpot, SEOmoz, SEO.com, and Distilled. The first section is specifically on keywords. 1. While your business should have a set of keywords or key phrases it wants to rank for, all those keywords may not translate over seamlessly to Twitter — especially if they’re long. 2. Twitter allows 160 characters worth of information to be displayed on your homepage. 3. As if the constraint of 140 characters isn’t enough, here’s a little more limitation. Happy optimizing! Photo credit: mpcstudios.com
Twitter Brings the Kenyan Mall Attack to the World As events unfolded at the Kenyan shopping mall, the world was given a front row seat to the terrorist attack and the Kenyan rescue assault as they transpired. In a perverse game of “Whack-a-Mole,” the terrorists used Twitter to provide running commentary and video from the mall as they were killing the shoppers and merchants. Twitter kept suspending their accounts, but new ones kept popping up to carrying on the terrorists' self-coverage. Meanwhile, the Kenyan government used its Twitter channels to keep Kenyans and the world updated on their brutal rescue assault; updates on the terrorist attack were provided by the Kenya National Disaster Operation Centre (@NDOCKenya) and live updates on the Kenyan Defence Forces rescue mission were provided via @KDinfo. In Kenya, we saw both sides using Twitter to try to control the public narrative. What should we take away from this tragedy with respect to the role of Twitter (and social media, generally)? Connect: Authored by: Alan Rosenblatt
Twitter Automation vs. Personalization Being authentic, honest and influential on Twitter is a key to Twitter success for brands big, small, and personal. The question is: where do you find the time to be efficient and take care of branded tweets and followers all in a day's work, assuming tweeting is not your full-time job? One thing is evident about this balancing act: walking the fine line of automation and personalization takes talent, skill and a mixology of tools to get the right results. (Just starting out on Twitter? You might want to take a step back and read "How To Optimize Twitter: Be Real, Profiles, RT, Hashtags & More".) The Mad Science of Twitter Timing "The best use of Twitter is as a broadcast medium. Wait... The Battle of Personalization vs. There are pros and cons to both and Twitter influencers have varying opinions. How can you be authentic and also automate some of your messaging? "I don't use automated services. Is there a yin and a yang when it comes to automation and personalization?
This is why you must use Twitter If you’re like me, you probably hated Twitter when you first tried it. The first tweet I ever received was “It’s 4 a.m.” – confirming this was the stupidest idea ever! In fact, it took me months to “get” it and unless you’re immersed in this platform, it’s pretty difficult to explain to another person. Instead of SAYING these things, I wanted to SHOW you. Two weeks ago, we had a line of dangerous storm cells and tornadoes marching through our area. Through Twitter I have connected to hundreds of inspiring people from around the world but none perhaps as loyal and dedicated as a young man named Muhammad Saad Khan, who is using Twitter and the social web to learn about social media from his home in Karachi, Pakistan. Twitter was essential to cutting through the chaos at SXSW. Among my first Twitter friends were Billy Mitchell of Atlanta and Amy Howell of Memphis, who have become close personal friends in real life.
Facebook vs Twitter for Business to Business (B2B) Networking | Social Media Chimps Whether you have a brick and mortar store, or operate an e-commerce store, online networking can really help grow your business. One of the effective ways to network online is by participating on a social networking site such as Facebook or Twitter. With a limited amount of time to invest in online business to business networking, should you spend your time and energy building a large following on Twitter, or Facebook? To help you make a more informed decision here are a few strengths of the two social networks: Facebook Strengths Facebook Ads On Facebook you can purchase ads that target an extremely specific audience. Personalization Facebook provides lots of options for personalizing your business page and profile. Twitter Strengths Going Viral A tweet sent at noon can end up on the evening news that same day. Easy to Set Up
Twitter partners with Datasift to unlock tweet archive 28 February 2012Last updated at 03:37 ET By Dave Lee Technology Reporter Companies will use the service to target marketing efforts among influential users Companies are now able to search and analyse up to two years of Twitter updates for market research purposes. Firms can search tweets back to January 2010 in order to plan marketing campaigns, target influential users or even try to predict certain events. Until today, only the previous 30 days of tweets were available for companies to search. UK-based Datasift is the first company to offer the archive. Its existing customers will be able to use access "historical" tweets from today, the company said. "No-one's ever done this before," Tim Barker, Datasift's marketing manager, told the BBC. "It's a brand new service that we're bringing online - it's a massive technology challenge because of the amount of data that is pumped out every single day." Private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site.
Twitter Brings Promoted Tweets and Accounts to Mobile Apps | Epicenter On Tuesday, Twitter announced that sponsored tweets and accounts would soon be rolling out to the timelines, searches and suggested follows seen by users of the social network's mobile client apps. Promoted Accounts will appear immediately in user searches and suggestions with the latest updates to Twitter's official mobile apps for Android and iOS. Twitter's Promoted Products are the primary way the company earns money, each a kind of contextual advertisement that aims as much as possible to blend into the service's overall flow. Promoted trends have had a bad reputation on the mobile app, at least since L'Affair Dickbar a year ago.
Fitting Twitter into the Digital Marketing Budget Tweets about the Oscars reached more than 2 million during the three hour show, according to TweetReach's calculation. That was one-and-a-half times more than the 2011 show, which generated 1.27 million Tweets (via The Next Web). Such buzz about the tool inevitably prompts marketers to wonder if they are using Twitter as much or as effectively as they can. Clearly ad opportunities are available on the site, which just rolled out a self-service platform for small-to-medium sized businesses, not to mention reaching a 500 million registered user benchmark last week. Projected Ad Revenue Twitter's projected ad revenue in 2012 is $259 million and its projected ad revenue by 2014 is $540 million, according to Brian Solis. Another factoids of interest to marketers, says Solis, who gleaned his data from an infographic created by Infographic Labs: 11 Twitter accounts are created every second and 4. 1 million accounts opened every day. A Greater Portion of the Budget Longer Tweets get more clicks.
What Metrics Matter in Twitter and How You Track Them While it seems that some people are obsessed with social media metrics, those metrics can be useful for gauging the success of your Twitter marketing efforts. The problem is that there so many metrics that you can look at. There are only a handful of Twitter metrics that really matter. And they’re probably not the ones that you’d think about tracking. The Metrics that Matter If you look at only one metric, that metric is engagement. Another is your influence. Finally, don’t discount reach. You might be thinking that engagement, influence, and reach are the same. Tracking Those Metrics You have a list of metrics. The number of followers that you have isn’t an accurate measure of engagement. Another way to track your engagement is with the number of link clicks. Tracking your influence is fairly easy, but it can also be a bit misleading. Another way to track your influence is to calculate your respect ratio. Just as important is the need to look at the other people on those lists.
Twitter Makes Room for Your Ad Dollars It used to be that advertising on Twitter was limited to large companies and brands that could afford it and with whom the microblogging platform chose to work. But come late March, any business or brand -- regardless of its size -- can promote their product or service on Twitter by using a new self-service tool similar to the ones offered by Facebook and Google AdWords. To kick things off, Twitter announced a partnership with American Express late last week to give the first 10,000 eligible Amex merchants and cardholders who sign up online initial access to the advertising program. Amex reports that the program is still open to interested businesses. All other businesses are expected to be able to advertise on Twitter by late spring or early summer. Before you sign up, however, it might help to know how your message might get across on Twitter. So, is Twitter a good place to spend your advertising dollars? Still, small businesses and brands should proceed with caution.