Forum

[faradina]

Google and Bing (MSN, Live) have both made deals with Twitter to display tweets in search engine results. This was announced today in major news channels.
So it is more important than ever before to tweet about our sites and activities.
Bing has also closed a similar deal with Facebook. Updates on Facebook will show up on Bing search results.
See ya all on Facebook and I look forward to your tweets!

 

[jpastorizo]

Fara,

The percentage of spam on twitter (and maybe within FB too) have the possibility of rising because of this development.



Renato

 

[faradina]

That would not be just a possibility; it's a certainty. Pros and cons go hand in hand in anything new, as with everything else. I have faith in the search engines' quality control measures, though, because they do strive to protect users. Users' search experience is very important to them because a positive one means that a user will keep coming back to that particular search engine. That is the reason why SEs are strict on quality.

 

[jpastorizo]

It would be interesting to see the control measures they put in place for this. =)

 

[esolutions]

The value of twitter is way overrated. I've spent months building a strong following of non-spammers (real people interested in my niche), but even with this no hoards of traffic going from twitter to my site when I tweet about a new article, product, etc. I've found twitter to be better for making industry contacts, not sending buyers to my site.

There are other things, such as article writing, that have a much better effect on getting people to a site.

 

[jpastorizo]

I agree with you on that.

 

[MarkLincoln]

esolutions, I use Twitter heaps, for business and personal, and I see masses of value in it. I actually speak at conferences on the use of Twitter for creating brand awareness, building relationships with communities and sending traffic through to websites.

Article writing is definitely very important ... but if you're writing an article, why not use Twitter to promote it as well? You can even connect Wordpress to your Twitter account to automatically "tweet" your new blog posts. It'll just mention the headline and include a link to the blog.

With no extra effort, you've increased the reach of your article exponentially.

There's then an easy facility for those Twitter people to share the link with their own followers and thus increase the reach even more (plus there's an element of trust in the info if the link is passed on by someone who is known for generating quality content themselves).

For some actual figures, I basically get an extra 50 to 100 hits to my blog articles in the first few minutes of mentioning it on Twitter. And that's just in terms of actual hits on those links, not to mention people who visit my website because they've seen me on Twitter or been referred to me by another Twitter user. Yes it's probably quite a small number (it's all relative) but that's 100 people who may not have seen my article otherwise.

So yeah, I hope you manage to get some better results from Twitter! Don't give up on it just yet. Feel free to follow me: http://www.twitter.com/marklincoln and I'll have a look at your Twitter account. Or are you actually on Twitter with the same name? If so, it certainly looks like you're doing well in terms of follower numbers! It'd be good to build how many lists you're on as well though.

In summary, I really think that if you have a blog or post regular content directly to your website, a Twitter account is an essential tool.

 

[esolutions]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for your reply. I'm actually not esolutions on twitter, but I have an account for one of my niche sites which I keep updated.

I do have wordpress setup with a plugin that automatically tweets my blog posts, it's a great feature, however the click throughs are much less than fantastic. Granted, I only have around 200 followers for this account, but they are all highly targeted to my niche, I don't just follow people for the sake of following, I study each one to ensure that they are indeed interested in my niche before following. I have also used twitter to make contacts and have started some good industry relationships.

So I'm sure that my followers are interested in what I have to say, but I still don't see much of a traffic benefit to my site. Maybe because twitter is overrun with spam marketers and also because a lot of people these days follow thousands, have thousands of followers and most things simply get lost among the huge amount of updates.

 

[MarkLincoln]

Gotcha. Yeah you're absolutely right in that there are plenty of spam accounts on there. It's getting worse too, to be honest. Just recently a scam account has hacked a massive number of Twitter accounts. Everyone is getting direct messages from trusted people that they know with something like "Hey is this you in this video? bit.ly/fdjfs" and if you click on the link, your own account gets hacked or it's some kind of marketing scam.

I still see a lot of use in Twitter and can only hope that they fix these problems and improve the functionality further down the track.

 

[esolutions]

So what lesson can be learned for everyone?

DON'T SPAM TWITTER.

Not only is it worthless (follow a ton of people, spam a ton of crap, get zero results), but you just make it harder for yourself and anyone else trying to make an honest living online by turning people off to internet marketers.

 

[JasonDodd]

The QDF principle (Query Deserves Freshness) really does apply to social media content - it may not have the reliability or trust factor that a PR7 site has but it gives the user fresh content, and search engines 'follow the crowd' and the crowd is (at the moment) on FB and Twitter.

It doesnt replace the need for quality content but it can be another string to your bow.

 

[MarkLincoln]

It can also work as a simple mini-newsletter as well. It's just one more way that people can subscribe to your information and stay in touch.

Most Wordpress themes allow a plug-in that shows your latest Twitter updates. People visiting your site see that you're on Twitter and posting the latest reviews/info from your site. If they have a Twitter account (or just use RSS feed readers) they can subscribe to your Twitter content.

You've now got a simple and free system to create a loyal following of people interested in hearing about new content on your site. Instead of Twitter being used to bring new people to your site, you're using it to encourage repeat visits from people who already know your site's worth and want to stay in touch.

 

[superaff]

Many interesting thoughts on Twitter.

Twitter should be used to make contact and to stay in touch with others in your industry. Whether they are your customers, mentors or potential customers.

Plus it also gives some juice to your website.

Tip: since it's all about social media, it's better to get people to your blog from there. Blogs inspire trust. Just write interesting articles in your niche, and retweet will come like crazy.

But do not spend all days long in Twitter, Facebook and others. It can lead you to have unproductive days or even week.

Keep the good stuff coming.

Franck

 

[simoni]

Hi,

Which plugins do you use to post from your wordpress blog to twitter?
Is there one that you would recommend for facebook?

Simon

 

[Ampie G]

Matt Cutts just posted a video on how PageRank flows from Twitter and Facebook. You may want to check it out:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/follow-go ... n-twitter/

 

[michellerana]

Which plugins do you use to post from your wordpress blog to twitter?

Some have suggested using WP Twitter plugin, FrendFeed and Tweet my Blog.

 

[michellerana]

Is there one that you would recommend for facebook?

Facebook WordPress plugins:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordbook/
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ind ... -FBConnect

 

[skiddy66]

Thank you for the helpful information I want to use twitter but was not sure until now how to do it properly.

 

[DSedov]

Isn't Twitter and Facebook no-follow?

 

[jmpruitt]

people need to get off of not getting NOfollow links. if all you care about is search traffic, you are leaving behind 60% of the people using the net.
Twitter and facebook are great sites for building a social following. Yes, they are no follow links, with little SEO value, but since I get more traffic/day from fb and twitter than from google...