Monday 31 January 2011

The missing guide to Twitter: Unorthodox ideas for exceptional people like you! | ZDNet

The missing guide to Twitter: Unorthodox ideas for exceptional people like you!

By Stephen Chapman | January 28, 2011, 10:42am PST

Summary

Sure, you’ve used Twitter… but have you used it like THIS?

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Stephen Chapman

Biography

Stephen Chapman

Stephen Chapman
Stephen Chapman has cut his teeth on blogging and various aspects of Internet marketing for a number of years now through freelance, consulting, and agency work. A proponent for -- and implementer of -- white hat SEO, Stephen has grown tired of not personally combating the negative stigmas often associated with SEO. Through ZDNet, Stephen aims to dispel the myths, educate the masses, and become one more positive voice for real SEO. When not focusing on SEO, Stephen happily spreads himself thin between blogging about Microsoft, writing music, photography, playing Quake Live, and much more.

As you may or may not know, Twitter is the bees knees of social media these days (where Facebook may be considered the rest of the bee). As such, if you’re not on Twitter taking advantage of the opportunities awaiting you to garner followers, traffic, feedback, et al, you are seriously missing the boat — or as the case may more appropriately be — the little blue bird. The Internet is chock-full of ways to use Twitter in the typical sense of “have tweets, will follow,” but I’m not here right now to tell you things you probably already know or will run across in every other Twitter guide out there. Likewise, I’m not here to sell you a dream. It’s easy to tell people all the ways Twitter will help them gain traffic when you have 20,000+ followers, but the truth is, those methods don’t work at a 1:1 ratio. In some cases, it’s not even close.

For instance, if you sell or a client sells boat anchors, then you’re going to have to come up with some pretty darn impressive link bait to garner interest in that product outside of the niche. Now, read that again. The fact that you have to create something other than, “hey, check out these boat anchors you can buy” to get a significant number of eyeballs should be the revelation. No matter how much you Tweet or scream, “hey, check out these boat anchors you can buy,” your just not going to get anyone’s attention who doesn’t have an immediate need for a boat anchor. Perhaps “boat anchors” isn’t the best example, but I hope you understand the point I’m trying to convey here.

With that in mind, here are some ideas for your consideration. I’ve formulated these ideas from personal experiences and observations. Once again, I’m not here to sell you a dream or make it seem like these are the be-all and end-all Twitter tips that will work for everyone. As such, use what seems viable for you or your client(s)! In no particular order of importance:

Total number of followers: A near-useless metric

Have you ever seen a Twitter account where someone has THOUSANDS of followers? Let me go ahead and clarify for you now that the total number of followers a person has is — on average — only good for serving one purpose: To gather an overall picture of how popular they are. If someone has 10,000 followers and up, they’re probably pretty popular… but how many of those followers are genuine? How many are spam accounts? How many are Twitter feeds that simply retweet information? How many of them are even active on Twitter? How many of them will see all of the content that person tweets, on average? The list goes on and on.

For example, let’s say that out of 10,000 followers, only 7,000 aren’t spam of some sort. Out of those, 500 are feeds that simply retweet everything from those they follow. Of the 6,500 left, only 3,500 are truly active Twitter users. Lastly, let’s assume only 1,500 of those people care enough to check that person’s direct feed for everything they tweet. Of those 1,500 people, what’s the actual reach per tweet? It’s subjective. Just because you gain a dedicated follower doesn’t mean they’re going to click on everything you tweet!

Now, bear in mind that this is a fictitious example and the numbers I pulled out of thin air don’t apply to every person who has thousands of followers. My main point here is that there is MUCH more than meets the eye where the total number of Twitter followers is concerned. Yes, a person with more followers probably has more reach to more actual people, but quality of content, niche/market, quality of followers, time of tweet, etc. all play a role in the subjectivity of the true value of the totality of Twitter followers. Don’t worry, though! As grim of a picture as it seems I might be painting, I’m merely creating awareness. Sometimes, finding that person with 1000 followers instead of 100,000 may actually bring better dividends your way, so keep that in mind with the points to follow. :)

Their followers can be your followers, too.

Basically, the idea here is to take the time to seek out influential Twitter users/accounts that tweet about content similar to yours. If you make them aware of your content and they feel it’s a benefit to their followers, there’s a good chance that they will retweet your stuff! (BTW, “stuff” is my word-of-the-day as Mr. Professional ZDNet SEO Blogger-Guy ;) ). Even if it’s not the page you initially tweet them to make them aware of you/your content, then perhaps future articles, if they start following you. After all, your content is potentially providing their followers with value which — in turn — helps maintain the value of that user’s Twitter stream. While you may gain a number of followers along the way, each time you can get someone else to retweet your content, their followers are essentially your followers for the span of each retweet! So take the time to find the most influential people you can in your niche/market and clue them in! Of additional note is that it may be worth your time in some cases to go through the “following” list of those who you find to be the most influential.

Use Twitter to get Google’s attention.

Put simply, tweet content you want Google to see and index. If you ask people “please RT” (which means “please retweet”), every additional tweet that follows will help validate your content in the eyes of Google since they pay attention to and index tweets. Personally, I like to do this not to get content to rank, but simply to help get content indexed and noticed in the first place! From there, you can work on boosting your page’s rank through various link-building campaigns. Oh, and as for Bing, they index snapshots of users’ Twitter feeds but they don’t currently index tweets themselves — at least, not from what I’ve seen thus far. It’s worth it to get attention anywhere you can get it, but Google’s got the most bang for your buck here (as with many other things as well, of course).

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Stephen Chapman has been involved with SEO for over 5 years and has grown tired of the popularized negative stigma that surrounds it. He has a very ambitious goal in mind: To make SEO much more tangible and accessible to everyone via ZDNet through defining SEO principles, simplifying SEO concepts, and educating the masses.

Disclosure

Stephen Chapman

Stephen Chapman is a freelance writer and SEO consultant. All work that Stephen does for ZDNet is on a contractual basis. With the exception of content populating the SEO Whistleblower blog and any off-page efforts he implements to promote SEO Whistleblower, Stephen does not currently perform SEO duties for ZDNet or any other CBSi affiliate.

It is left to Stephen's discretion whether or not to accept assignments from prospective clientele who discover him through SEO Whistleblower. Such endeavors have no association with ZDNet and -- unless otherwise agreed upon -- are kept separate and private in the interest of all parties involved. You may freely contact him for consulting, training, and/or public speaking inquiries.

Stephen does not sell links or create posts based on bribes (unless you're willing to pay him an extravagant amount of money -- just kidding). If you have a product you would like to be considered for a review, you can contact Stephen. A fully-functional version of the product is required solely for the intention of testing its full capabilities. Acceptance is not a guarantee of a review. Any review written based on preemptive measures will be noted as such within the review.

Lastly, while Stephen may accept complimentary passes, waived fees, payment, and/or covered travel costs to industry-related events (conferences, expos, etc.) as an attendee or a speaker, acceptance of such offers is not considered payment for -- or exclusive guarantee of -- any particular blog coverage of the event attended.

Biography

Stephen Chapman

Stephen Chapman has cut his teeth on blogging and various aspects of Internet marketing for a number of years now through freelance, consulting, and agency work. A proponent for -- and implementer of -- white hat SEO, Stephen has grown tired of not personally combating the negative stigmas often associated with SEO. Through ZDNet, Stephen aims to dispel the myths, educate the masses, and become one more positive voice for real SEO. When not focusing on SEO, Stephen happily spreads himself thin between blogging about Microsoft, writing music, photography, playing Quake Live, and much more.

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