Yahoo! Offers Another Avenue For SMO
Yahoo! is still full of surprises. On its Yodel Anecdotal Blog, the veteran Web portal has announced a deal with Twitter. But this deal is a bit different than the previous deals struck between Twitter and search engines Bing and Google. This deal actually offers Twitterers a way to update their Twitter status from Yahoo!
But will users actually use it that way? That remains to be seen, but I’m betting that some users will.
Still, that’s not even the best part of the deal. The real meat of the deal, and the part that offers the best social media optimization benefit, is this:
Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter.
What I think this means is that Yahoo! users will soon have more ways to expand their social networks. I see a day when marketers will spend most of their day and their marketing efforts updating their statuses on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo! and their other important social networks. Or, they could just head right to Yahoo! and update all of their social networks at one time. In the near future, you’ll at least be able to update your Twitter status and take care of a few other social actions from Yahoo!
How’s that for a heightened sense of social media optimization?
Will Social Media Overtake SEO As The Primary Driver Of Web Traffic?
An excellent article on social media by Greg Sterling got me to thinking. In the second paragraph he says:
One day in the very near future Facebook is likely to supplant Yahoo as one of the top two Internet destinations, the other being Google.
At first, I didn’t think anything of it. But then I got to thinking on it. He’s right. Facebook and Twitter continue to grow (though Twitter is a long way off from overtaking Yahoo! in traffic while Facebook is within driving distance). It is quite possible, and maybe even likely, that Facebook will become the second most trafficked site on the Web. And if that happens then it is feasible that it could become the No. 1 site as well.
Spammers continue to bombard the search engines with bad results and the search engines find it more difficult to filter the spam out. Several popular SEOs have pointed this out. Given that, the mood of the public could shift from confidence in search to confidence in social media. But when will that happen? Could that happen? What do you think?
Why Viral Marketing Isn’t Bad
Mention viral marketing in a crowded room and you are likely to create a stampede. People will run to get away from the virus. But viral marketing is not bad. It won’t make you sick and it won’t spread to make anyone else sick, though it might spread to make them happy.
In a word, viral marketing is simply a method of getting the word out about what you have to offer that utilizes other people’s resources to spread a message quickly. The latest tool that has been used for this kind of communication is Twitter. This social networking tool has been used for everything from selling products and services to warn people of impending disaster, or spreading the news about disaster that just happened. It’s a powerful tool.
Though Twitter is a powerful viral marketing tool, it’s not the only tool that can be used for this purpose. Other social networks like Facebook and YouTube can be used as well. When you use these types of services to spread your message to others and persuade them to help you, that’s viral marketing. It’s fun, it’s catchy and it’s good.
How To Use Twitter For Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is gathering information on your competition that can help you be a better competitor. You should know that there are legal and illegal ways to gather this information, ethical and unethical. Twitter presents a great opportunity and is an ethical, legal way to spy on your competition.
When you set up your Twitter account, be sure to follow your competitors so you can keep track of what they are saying. Use a desktop application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. Create a panel just for your competition and add your competitors to that panel so you can track them more easily. This allows you to see the tweets that your competition put out without being mixed in with all the other tweets you see in your tweet stream.
Another way to spy on your competition, and this works if you want to be clandestine, is to set up a dummy account on Twitter. Your dummy account should have an innocuous name that doesn’t connect any way to your company. In other words, don’t use your company name or a variation for the Twitter account name and don’t put your company’s URL in the profile. For e-mail, use a separate Gmail account. You don’t want the Twitter account traced back to your company in any way.
Next, subscribe to all of your competitors. Don’t subscribe to anyone else. Just subscribe to your competitors and keep an eye on what they are tweeting.
That’s two ways to use Twitter to spy on the competition. What tools do you use for gathering competitive intelligence.
A Web Design Tip To Keep You In The Social Loop
If you are a heavy social media user (and I highly recommend that you be) then I have a hot web design tip for you. Add a widget to your sidebar or a prominent position on your website that shows your latest tweets and social media activity.
These widgets are relatively easy to make. If you use WordPress as a blog or CMS then you can add a plugin that does this for you. If you are designing your website with straight HTML then you can go to one of the many widget websites and create a widget.
The best placement for your social widget is at the top of your sidebar or the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. If your social reputation is important to you then prominent placement of your widget above the fold will make sure it is visible to all your site visitors. But if you take a look at eye tracking software then you’ll find that the most looked at parts of a web page are the top left corner and the bottom right corner. People tend to scan from left to right and top to bottom starting in the top left corner.
A widget showing your latest tweets and social media activity can get you more followers on your social networks and on your blog. I highly recommend this web design tip.
Is Twitter Necessary?
Chris Crum of WebProNews interviewed Matt Bailey, who said that you can run a successful business online without Twitter. Really? I thought Twitter was all that and a bag of chips.
Actually, he’s right. You CAN run a successful business online without Twitter. In fact, everyone did before 2005.
When it comes to social media, there’s a new brand of hype. What happens is, the online equivalent of the jet set (the early adopters) do some experimenting. When one of them finds a workable formula for a new social tool they start to tell their friends. Their friends do an experiment and confirm the report. They tell their friends. Before you know it, the news steam rolls and the spammers start moving in. Hype builds more hype.
But the reality is, you can do without the hype. What I mean, don’t get sucked into it. You should start the hype, not follow it.
Hype is really another word for viral marketing. It works. When you are the subject of the hype you’ll know it works. When you are the one being dragged around by the hype, all you can think about is, “Man, this sucks.”
Well, let’s not get dramatic. Social media optimization is not about following the hype. It’s about creating it. And you can run a successful business without Twitter. Of course, you can run a successful business with it too.
Will Search Engine Marketing Move Into Real-Time?
Yahoo! was one of the companies that pioneered search engine marketing. Back then it could be called directory marketing. It was one of the first companies to use paid inclusion and the company still relies on paid inclusion to some degree. But not as much as it did in the late 1990s.
Since purchasing Inktomi, Yahoo!s search technology, and Overture, which used to be WordTracker’s main competition, Yahoo! hasn’t really done anything innovative. They dropped Google as their primary search technology provider in 2004 and that kind of sealed the deal on their own fate. It might have been the biggest mistake Yahoo!s ever made. Since then they’ve done nothing but trail and slip.
Recently, however, Yahoo! announced that they’ve incorporated Twitter into their search results, providing Yahoo! searchers with real-time results. There’s nothing innovative about that. Both Bing and Google beat them to the punch. But Yahoo! did do it a little better.
Yahoo!s incorporation of Twitter into its search results includes an algorithmic formula for obtaining relevance to the search query. You’d have thought that Google would be the first to do that. No, it was Yahoo!
Now the question is, where will search engine marketing go from here? If searchers can rely honestly on relevant real-time search results, will that spawn a whole new industry of spam, or will it lead to greater search satisfaction? Will Yahoo!s reputation climb as a result of this new industry development?
My guess is that Bing and Google will respond with a relevance algorithm attached to their real-time search results as well. Search engine marketing, in the future, will likely be real-time based to some extent. But by how much?
Internet Marketing Could Change Forever
When you survey the landscape of Internet marketing history you’ll see that certain developments over time have really changed how people conducted Internet marketing. The Open Directory Project, Yahoo! offering display advertising, Overture, the advent of Google, pay-per-click marketing, the creation of the landing page, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. These are just the big ones.
It’s enough that tools like Twitter and Facebook exist. But when they get so important that search engine monoliths like Google partner with them then you know they’ve really arrived. Google today announced that real-time search is here. That’s big news. But I think it’s only going to get better.
This could very well change the way Internet marketing is done. Marketers will likely start focusing on hitting the top search results spots in real-time. That means an increase in spam. But it also means an increase in real opportunities.
I’m really looking forward to the next couple of years of search and Internet marketing. These are exciting times. They’re about to get more exciting.
Another Take On Small Business And Social Media
Early last week we reported on how Most Small Business Owners Are Too Busy For Social Media. There are many different ways to view this problem, some of which we discussed in last weeks post. Another view that should be considered is whether or not small businesses were targeting the right social media outlets.
If your a small business person targeting a local or regional audience then you need to consider your options. It may not make sense undertaking a social media marketing campaign on Facebook or any of the other large international social media sites. Your audience is not international so why campaign in an international marketplace?
There are always local or regional social media outlets that could return much greater dividends for the time spent. Sure, they don’t have all the bells and whistles that Facebook or Twitter posses, but they do have one important factor – the users are nearly all potential customers.
As a local trader, would you advertise in the local papers or radio – or would you advertise in a big city daily or on national tv. The commonsense approach, and the cost factor, would make your local media more attractive. The same is true for online social media. Target those sites and then judge whether or not social media marketing was worth the time.
How Social Media Optimization Will Get More Complicated
The Web has increasingly grown more complicated since its inception and search engine optimization along with it. The next wave of search will undoubtedly be social media search and the result will end up being a more complicated social media optimization process.
Currently, it’s not so difficult but neither was SEO when it was first conceived. Now, however, talk to any Internet marketer and you are sure to get a list of do’s and don’ts that would make a bug go cross-eyed.
In the wake of Google’s and Bing’s near simultaneous and recent announcement that there is an agreement with Twitter to incorporate real-time search into both search engines’ universal search results as well as Google’s announcement that social search is just around the corner, it is likely that the next big playground of competition will be in social media optimization.
Not only will the search engines themselves be competing for marketers’ attentions, but marketers will be competing for an audience’s attention.
There is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook will be at the center of the social media optimization wars. But what other networks will be there? My guess is any network of any size at all will eventually be incorporated into any social search model at the search engines. If you have not already started charting your course for social media optimization then now is the time.
Search Engine Marketing’s Upward Mobility
Search engine marketing is getting better and better every year, as it gets more and more challenging. The latest news is that Bing is incorporating real-time results from Twitter and Facebook into search results. Nice. We’ve been waiting for this for some time. But the interesting thing is how they are doing it.
Tweets that are deserving of rankings evidently will be weighed by a Twitterer’s follower count. That will make Twitter popularity very important.
What I do see happening down the road is a quality score for social media content. The search engines – Bing and Google primarily – will give an algorithm-based quality score to a tweet or Facebook update based on keyword usage, follower count, retweets, and other measurements of social proof. Social proof will actually become a relevant ranking factor and added to the ranking algorithms. Remember, you heard it here first. Search engine marketing is on the move.
Is Twitter A Viral Marketing Tool?
If you are a Twitter user, or just getting started with Twitter, then you might be wondering whether or not it can be used for viral marketing. The answer – the short answer – is any tool can be used for viral marketing. Whether or not it is effective is another question. Better yet, a good question is can you make it effective?
A viral marketing tool is only as good as the person using it, and the plan. Articles make great viral marketing tools, as do videos, but not every marketer has learned how to use them. The same goes for Twitter.
Read the latest guru’s e-book and you’ll get the impression that Twitter is the best viral marketing tool since cotton candy. And it can be, but there are certain rules of etiquette and best practices that one must learn before trying to employ it. And it’s best to learn those from someone who understands the territory. I hesitate to say “expert” or “guru”, but it does need to be someone who is knowledgeable and experienced in the different nuances of the technology. Even if you do it yourself, it makes sense to consult with a Twitter consultant.
Is Twitter a viral marketing tool? Yes, in capable hands it is. Your goal should be to make your hands capable.
Viral Marketing And The ReTweet Phenomena
ReTweeting has become an important component of the Twitter experience and could perhaps create a Digg like experience for users. One gets the feeling that reTweets are now more important than the original Tweet and if the original Tweet has a marketing angle, the viral marketing angle can be tremendous.
As proof of the popularity of reTweets, Twitter is looking to add a re-Tweet function to the site. There are already plenty of third party re-Tweet options around already, each providing Digg like re-Tweet buttons.
WebProNews provides a list of the benefits of re-Tweets:
- Retweets are viral
- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed
- As opposed to a Facebook “like,” a retweet is shared with everyone
- Retweets typically give credit to sources
- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships
- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content
- Retweets can inspire further conversation
- Retweets can be good for branding
- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.
- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content
The practice of re-Tweeting is growing and as businesses start to see the value in Twitter as a marketing tool – viral marketing will bloom.
Viral Marketing Tip: Focused Twittering
Viral marketing gets a lot hyper for good reason. There are plenty of ways to go about running a viral marketing campaign and achieving success. Here are some tips to help you in your next Twitter marketing campaign. How to go viral on Twitter:
- Put some thought into your Twitter name. Try to get something that is easily brandable (and it helps if it matches the brand you’ve already created)
- Use Twellow, Twitter Search, and such tools to find followers in the niche that you work in.
- Maintain an active Twitter posture (10-20 tweets a day is ideal – not too many and just enough to keep your name in front of your followers)
- Ensure that all of your tweets provide value related to your niche
- Write a keyword-focused description on your Twitter profile
- Use @replies to respond to your followers and build relationships
- Retweet helpful tweets from others
- Build up a sizable following (there’s power in numbers)
- Stay away from automation whenever possible, but in light doses you can pre-schedule certain tweets that are recurring using services like Tweetlater and HootSuite
- Put a Retweet button on your blog
- Use Twitter Tools to automatically post your blog posts to your Twitter account
The key to going viral on Twitter is to build relationships with people in your niche who are like-minded and to provide value upon value upon value.
Is Twitter A Viral Marketing Tool?
If you’re familiar with the popular microblogging service Twitter then you understand how you can pick up followers and direct them to your website. But can it go viral?
Listen to the gurus and you’ll think that Twitter is the breadbasket of the Internet. Build a Twitter stream, get 100,000 followers – or, if your Ashton Kutcher, 1 million will do – and drive that traffic like cattle, Baby! Is it really that easy?
As an old sage once said, nothing worthwhile is easy. And so it is with Twitter. It is worth the effort and it can go viral, but it is work.
The key to succeeding with Twitter is to find people to follow you who are interested in what you have to offer. But how do you do that? There are tools available, such as Twellow and Tweetlater, to help you do that. And you can find people to follow by keywords, by location, or by interest. Or you can just scour the follow lists of your friends.
Twitter is not in and of itself a viral marketing tool, but it can go viral if you are persistent and consistent in your marketing efforts.
How Can You Optimize Your Social Media With DOS Attacks In The Air?
You may have heard that Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social media sites were recently struck with a denial of service attack, otherwise known as DOS. And if you’re wondering what that is, it is essentially a strategic cyber attack that induces the use of multiple computers to send hits to a particular web server, or in the case of the recent DOS attack, several servers, for the purpose of overloading them to the point that no one can benefit from the services those servers provide. In other words, the server is struck with too much to handle at one time and shuts down.
Such attacks are more common today than they used to be. It may be because there are more servers to attack or because there are more people to effect. Or it could just be that there are more bad guys who are Web savvy enough to pull it off.
At any rate, for attackers to have shut down Twitter the way they did this past week, they’d have had to have had quite a few resources at their disposal. As a result of the attack, Twitter was inoperable for a day and has been slow for most of the past week. The other social media sites attacked were able to ward off the attack successfully and weren’t affected. So you might be wondering how you can benefit from social media optimization efforts if that kind of thing can happen.
Well, it’s a real concern. But don’t fear. It doesn’t mean you have to shut down your business. Be careful who you associate with online. While Twitter’s server was affected and not your personal hard drive, if you mingle with the wrong crowd you could open yourself to vulnerabilities. Download a copy of the latest spyware or malware software and keep your firewall up and running. Be selective about who you let in on your profile. It’s business, but it isn’t monkey business.
Is Twitter Social Media For Small Business?
Twitter is the latest fad in social media, only it’s not so much a fad as it is a new development and it seems to be taking over. I think everyone knows it. John Battelle certainly does.
I think the interesting thing is that Twitter has finally offered something for small businesses. It isn’t much. But it’s something. A subdomain.
The business.twitter.com subdomain currently has an introduction book for Twitter targeted to small business owners. So instead of spending $25 on that e-book for the total stranger, start with the book offered by Twitter. It’s an html book so no download and it’s free. You can get your introduction to Twitter straight from the company.
Beyond that, however, there are some things that you do need to know about Twitter. It isn’t Facebook and it isn’t Google. It has its own little personality. It’s own game rules. They’re not hard to learn, but you don’t want to break them. After reading the introduction offered by Twitter, find out about the ground rules from a consultant who knows Twitter and social media just like they know small business.
The Twitter Debate Continues
Awhile back, I posted my thoughts on the hot topic in the Internet marketing world for that week, namely Twitter. Although I jumped the gun with assumptions about the course this fad would take, I maintain my general position on the matter. I came across a post containing a bunch of reasons to use Twitter, and this sparked my motivation to post yet again about the topic. I must state that the following is only my opinion, based on my experience in the Social Media Optimization world.
While I don’t intend to mention all of the reasons along with my opinion of each, there are a few I’ve chosen which, I believe, the writer is directing toward businesses, rather than individuals. As I failed to make clear in my previous post about Twitter, my opinion was concerning the use of Twitter for business Internet marketing efforts, not those of one person or a small group of people.
Competitive – to track what competitors are doing and thinking (watch their tweets, who they’re conversing with, and so forth). Gain insights!
This is a good idea, but why use Twitter? While the idea behind competitive intelligence is to learn secrets, many companies may overlook that which is out in the open. A lot of companies utilize Twitter to market special deals, new products, and more. This is valuable information that may not be available through more conventional CI practices – information that may help other companies figure out how to market their products.
Employee Tracking – See where your employees are, and even what they’re doing. eg. If you’re a service company with contractors on the road, some have used Twitter to reveal where all their contractors are around a city, which indicates how close they are to their next service call.
Most companies that require this kind of information to operate will likely have a method of tracking already. Whether it’s a “push-to-talk” cellular service or a computer system networked into handheld devices which employees carry on them at all times, there are plenty of ways that businesses track their employees, and other things, which can carry far more responsibility than Twitter can. However, some businesses may find it beneficial to utilize Twitter for simple tasks, such as those mentioned above. It all depends on the company and how they run their business.
Branding – To build awareness, trust, and possibly loyalty. If a company Twitters good information routinely, and isn’t overly self-promotional, the profile will gather followers. The profile is then associated with quality industry news and integrity. Frequency and quality of posts then breed familiarity, and eventually trust.
While the effort put into regular Twitter posts would may be more effectively spent on blogging, there is an advantage to the micro-blogging that Twitter offers. In many cases, posting to Twitter to a loyal following makes it easier, not just for the business to get the information out there, but for all of those potential customers to find it. Utilizing Twitter broadcasts and feeds on company websites, blogs, and other SM profiles make it easy to put that information in sight of thousands, instantly. However, any company planning to use the Twitter service to reach users should be careful of how often they post, and what they post about. The key here is regular, consistant information. Like anything in the social media realm, offers go a long way, and good information is priceless when compared to the mundane onslaught of Twitterers posting about what they ate for breakfast.
Reputation Management – to learn about issues and problems people are having with your company, so that they can be corrected. I’m a firm advocate that every problem is an opportunity, when viewed from the right perspective.
Again, the effort put into reputation management would likely be better spent on other means, but a company large enough to have a lot of Twitter users bashing it’s good name might do well to solve the problem before it leaves Twitter. However, the last thing a company needs for its reputation is one who supposedly represents the company arguing with a group of Twitterers about whether or not they were correct in their opinion about said company. Opinions are out there, and always will be – while a company cannot correct every false one, they can make efforts to put the right one in as many places on the Internet as possible - and Twitter is one large group of people to which it makes sense to get the word out.
Twitter is a valuable tool for friends, families and aquaintences to utilize in order to keep in touch and up to date, as well as it can be for businesses. We should never forget that there are plenty of opportunities elsewhere that have been proven to be effective, but where appropriate, Twitter can be used effectively. Just don’t push those boundries too far, or Twitter may eventually suffer the same fate as SM sites before it’s time. The target audience for your business marketing efforts on Twitter is made up of users, not other companies, so if companies abuse the Twitter service like many have been abused before, users are likely to switch to the next big micro-blogging site, and leave the companies to re-tweet themselves.
As the writer of the aforementioned article states: “…the key is in showing restraint in the initial months so that one does not ‘burn out’ on the experience.”