Can Twitter Become the Newman of the Internet?

Parts of Twitters Master plan has been unveiled today, Twitter has become a data driven company, vastly becoming one of the middlemen  of the Interwebs. With the weekly email delivery of the Best of Twitter, is showing how content can be discovered through sharing by your social circle or the people you value.

The Value of Twitter Sharing

More than ever, it will be important to grow the number of people following you, grow the number of content pieces you can share, grow the real connections and interactions with your network on Twitter and grow the sharing of your content through your friends. Twitter has changed as of now, as it has become more than an activity and social news stream. Twitter has become a Direct Marketing company, curating the best content tailored to you personally!

If you want more traffic from social sharing, it has just became even more important for you to focus on sharing through Twitter and get connected! Create viral content which is easily shared on Twitter, and you will get distribution for free into the Inbox of your followers and their network!

Twitter Data Building Blocks

A number of building blocks have been in the works to make this happen for Twitter.

Data. First off is the large amount of data, behavioral; social and click data, Twitter has at their fingertips to play around with. As someone with some experience working with large datasets, and how data can learn how to make better decisions, I can only dream what you would be able to do with more than the firehose data the Twitter data science team has to play with.

Short URL's. Now that all URL's are shortened through Twitter's own short URL, t.co, clickstream data is recorded whenever you click on a shared link. This is one of the most important building blocks for a data driven company. At least Twitter knows which links you click on, who shared these, and how thee URL's spread throughout your network. See also this article on Twitter's t.co short URL's from TNW where I gave my input to focus on the data stream Twitter would be able to capture.

Tweetdeck. The broadly used Twitter client was Twitters first lab environment to try out some of the new features on the core website. Twitter short URL's were first introduced on Tweetdeck, and I bet it is a tool for Twitter to connect twitter accounts which are managed by one person.

Social Sharing FTW

With Google supposedly incorporating more social signals in their algorithm, getting your content shared through social media is one nice side effect of using Twitter. However, the direct traffic from social sharing sites can be a large first advantage to go after. And now you have a third; Direct Mail through Twitter.

With the large data set, and extreme analytics, you can only imagine how these content recommendations delivered in your inbox can get better through learning from your behavior. What Subject line made you open the email, which link did you clicked on and did the friends displayed under the link had any impact on your clicking behavior.

Nice side effect for Twitter: You will spread the Tweets again, which will generate more pageviews and more sharing on their network. Slowly Twitter is becoming the toll man of the Internet... At least one of the toll men. And like Newman said; When you control the mail, you control.. Information!

Post from When You Control the Mail, You Control.. Information! - read more about The Next Corner

After the full roll out of the t.co short URL's on Twitter last week, the preferred Twitter shorter URL's are now conquering Techmeme as the target page of an article featured on the Tech News aggregator. See the earlier post on TheNextWeb: Twitter Just Got the Respect it Deserves and on this blog: Why Twitter t.co is Brilliant

This does mean the social signals which will be captured by the Google Toolbar, the Chrome browser and any other way click stream data is being captured by the Google, will be of an advantage for the t.co domain, which is 301 redirected to Twitter.
Also, some people might copy paste the short URL from Techmeme on their own site, which will bring a huge advantage to Twitter. More data to capture.

Interesting how this will develop...

Post from Twitter Short URL’s Conquer Techmeme - read more about The Next Corner

Yesterday I spend some time on Skype with Zee from TheNextWeb.com to give my perspective on his article. He needed an SEO perspective on the Twitter Short URL roll out, and what it would mean. You can read his article here: Twitter Just Got the Respect it Deserves. The conversation was brief, as Zee was anxious to post the article. (Thanks Zee for giving me the chance to give my opinion. Ping me anytime... )

After a while I was thinking a little bid more what the increase in Twitter referrals would mean for organizations, Social Media marketeers, Twitter and the whole eco-system. I thought of a number of more reasons why this change will impact the perception of Twitter as a powerhouse in Social Media. This is a brilliant move from Twitter, as they will gain in the perception of how influential Twitter actually is, speed of feature development on partner sites, and increased attention from social media marketing teams. Let me explain...

Twitter Just Became the Toll Man of Social Media Referrals

Remember the episode of Seinfeld ‘The Lip Reader’ in which Jerry is dating a deaf woman who is skilled in the art of understanding what people say through lip reading. Newman wants to ‘borrow’ her for a small task. Jerry refuses, and Newman throws in one of his evil predictions:

When you control the mail, you control.. information !!

What has this to do with Twitter becoming the Toll Man of Social Media? Simple, Twitter will control the information flow of the links that are spread over one of the most popular social media websites breaking the news in real-time. Before this change, other URL shortners were controlling the traffic, now Twitter will be able to control every short URL which goes through their system.

There is even an added SEO benefit for Twitter here. If anybody uses the t.co short URL on their website, the page rank will first flow to the t.co domain, after which it gets redirected to the destination site using a 301-redirect. However, Twitter does control all these t.co url's, which could be re-purposed and redirected to their own domain, as soon as the target url goes dead!

What is the ROI on Social Media

The move from Twitter to use their own t.co URL shortner is allowing every website owner to track better how Twitter is contributing to the total traffic referrals. Tracking where your users coming from is essential to understand how effective any marketing campaign really is.

In my last job, working for the very large e-commerce website eBay, there were many occasions any marketing program would need to submit estimated ROI numbers to secure the budgets. Loads of times there were more marketing programs submitted than there was budget available. Any smart organization would make decisions on budget allocation based on maximizing ROI of their investment, and eBay was no-different.

So, when you cannot even track what the return on investment was for a Twitter social media campaign, the teams would not even be able to secure the budget needed to kick off the campaign.

Every Social Media Marketing team is trying to defend their investments, campaigns or budgets, especially when the economy is going south. It’s hard to justify any budget for a Twitter campaign, if you are not able to proof there is incremental traffic, conversion or revenue coming out of the investment.

But now, with the increased insights of the Twitter referrals, the social media marketing teams will be able to point out how much incremental traffic was driven through the Twitter campaign, and what the ROI is on the budgets invested. The changes are a big win for any social media marketing team fighting for to proof their effectiveness, especially those in large corporation with a lot of processes and red tape.

Feature development on large websites

This argument is along the same lines as the previous one, however it’s got more to do with the actual product development needed for feature enhancements on large websites. With the increased insights of how Twitter is contributing to business growth, more product features focused on deep Twitter integration might make the priority list of the product roadmaps.

A deeper Twitter integration will benefit Twitter in a big way, as the team at Titter will get their hands on more data to play with, more feedback from other product teams on their API’s, and probably more ideas on what features Twitter would need to develop to grow further.

Conclusion

I’m sure you can come up with more reasons why this move from Twitter is a big thing, and where Twitter and others can benefit from the increased insights of how Twitter drives traffic to your websites, who is the influential person spreading your links on Twitter, and how much incremental traffic your Twitter social media campaign has brought to your business. I wold love to hear your thoughts, where the comments are open for feedback.

Me, I’m diving the rest of the day into the analytics of the sites I’m responsible for, and will send out a number of updates to my team with the new insights. It’s going to be a busy, but fun second half of the year...

Post from Why Twitters t.co is Brilliant - read more about The Next Corner

Twitter can be very helpful in a world where SEO SERP’s are changing based on location, personal preferences or keyword search sequence. If you have a question, you can get Instant Twitter Feedback if you simple ask your question on Twitter.

I was very surprised to learn today, when I did a search for Black Hole SEO, that this site was ranking on the first page on Google.com. At least for me it was ranking on #3…

As I was logged in, and was using my usual browser, Firefox, I quickly launched Chrome and did another search on Google.com. This time, my post about Black Hole SEO was not ranking on #3, but lower on the page. Still the post was ranking on the first page of Google.

Instant Twitter Feedback Needed?

...Twitter to the Rescue...

As I had been Tweeting all day, I quickly fired a request on Twitter, with the hope more people could confirm what i was seeing:

Can anybody check if they see my blog: thenextcorner.net on P1 for this query: http://bit.ly/jXiitC

And within minutes I had positive sightings from all around the US and the rest of the world. I got instant feedback on my question, where friends checked my request, and saw my blog post ranking on the first page for Black Hole SEO:

@Yoast: @TheNextCorner i do, but logged in and see your +1 (update; yoast.com)

@Basvandenbeld: @TheNextCorner its on 3 here (update; StateofSearch.com)

@Neyne: @TheNextCorner yeah at #7 (update; seo-scientist.com)

@KeriMorgret: @TheNextCorner number seven for me on an iPhone. (update; Strikemodels.com)

@ToniCarr: @TheNextCorner #3 on the android tablet. Also shows that you shared it. (update; Tonicarr.com)

@Jcolman: @TheNextCorner It was #3 for me. I +1'ed it, tho, so expect the "Colman Bump" to move you down to #4 reeeeeal soon. (update; Google profile)

@Olafdepolaf: @TheNextCorner check. Op plek 7 (update; linkedin profile)

Twitter Real Time Q&A

Through Twitter, you can get answers on questions in almost real time. But what is more interesting is that you can use this feedback also for more purposes. Like:

• User testing. Does your website work in a different browser or Operating setting
• Stimulate searches. If you rank high on a keyword, why not stimulate people to search for it
• New RSS subscribers. When your followers don’t know you write a blog, they might start reading you on a regular basis.
• And maybe more…

Anyways, it was fun for me to do a little experiment this afternoon to get Instant Twitter Feedback, and I thank the feedback givers with a simple link..

Post from Instant Twitter Feedback - read more about The Next Corner

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted:

I just ordered a customized #FailWhale coffee mug at http://bit.ly/c2lfUz through @YiyingLu supporting the artist is key!

Yiying Lu is the artist which created the picture of the Fail Whale, which became a well known pop culture phenomenon on the Internet due to the fact the Twitter team chose this drawing as the standard picture for when Twitter was down or over capacity.

I ordered a Coffee mug through the website of Yiying at Zazzle, which probably has an affiliate link attached. At least I hope so for her . Yesterday, I got my package with my personalized Coffee Mug:

Post from Drinking Coffee out of the Fail Whale - read more about The Next Corner

Here is why you should cover all of your bases cleaning up anything you might have been doing which violated the Google Webmaster Guidelines, before you do that re-inclusion request.

To B.B., the SEO/domainer on Westfield Avenue in Elizabeth, New Jersey: do you really want to be on my radar that much? Maybe not.

You don’t want to get a manual review from Matt Cutts himself! If you have anything to hide, stay under the radar!

Source: Twitter

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Thomas in my team has beaten me in the # of followers on Twitter. And even better for him, he is quickly leaving me in the dust, adding new followers every day at a rapid pace.

Thanks to Twitter Counter to keep track of all of this!

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Over the years, I have not yet grown my number of Twitter Followers over 1,000. But I managed to get two reasonable bumps in number of followers. How? I used a guest post on a Twitter blog to go from 140 to 600, and this year, an Interview on a well read blog pushed me over 700.

Guest Blogging to Gain Followers

Too many blogpost and video’s have been written how well guest posting works to build your brand, get more followers or RSS readers or get more comments on your own blog. I will not expand on the existing materials from better experts than me. I will just link to some great resources out there at the bottom of this blog. No, what I would like to highlight here, are just my own experiences with guest blogging, and how it helped me to get more Twitter followers.

I wrote one guest post only at the end of 2009. I didn’t wrote my post for a blog focused on anything I usually write on. No, I wrote a guest post for a blog focused on Twitter. As Twitter was about to break into the mainstream media and for the bigger public, I wrote a post on Why Twitter will go mainstream in 2009.

The whole purpose of my guest post were three fold:

1. See if Darren Rowse would except my post. As I’m Dutch, English is not my first language. And as some commenter's pointed out my bad behavior of relying on spell check, I was happy the quality of the post was good enough for Darren to post it on Twitip.
2. As I only had a low number of people following me on Twitter, I was guessing the guest post would add a bunch of new folks to follow me.
3. Guest posts are not only nice to get yourself out there, usually you also get the chance to get a link to your own blog. As Darren had started Twitip not that long before, the blog was not fully established from an SEO perspective if you would compare it with his other sites. But I knew he would make it big. An old link from an authority site would help me in the future.

After the post was published, I logged in to my email account, and was stunned about what I saw:

The Interview Effect

Over Christmas last year, I did an email interview with Aaron Wall. He asked me if I would be interested to do this, to get my perspective on working on a large site like eBay. As I’m a long time reader of SEObook, I was honored I would be featured on SEObook.com.

I got a lot of nice comments from people about the content, and obviously I also was interested in the effects on the number of Twitter followers. Now using Twittercounter, I could see the number jump up right after the interview was published.

The good news from this jump is, most of the new followers are working in the same industry as myself. This creates new opportunities to ask or give feedback on certain tests I would like to conduct, or changes in the search landscape that I see.

Presentation for Influential Mom Bloggers

Although the two biggest jumps in the number of followers came from the guest post on Twitip and the interview on SEObook, I also got a smaller jump just recently by doing a presentation for a number of highly influential Mom Bloggers.

These ladies have it going on, and Twitter is definitely not new for them. As I was checking out their blogs, Twitter and Foursquare updates, I made sure I had my Twitter handle in the last slide. I saw a small jump in the numbers as you can see from the graph above here.

Conclusion

There are a number of ways you can gain followers on Twitter. The key, however, is to keep them, and get value out of the conversations you have.

As promised, here are some resources I highly recommend on guest blogging:

• How to guest post to promote your blog
• How to be a good guest blogger
• guest blogging; the ultimate guide
• 5 reasons why guest blogging is a good idea

Post from Grow Your Followers, Turn Your Inbox into Twitter Follower eMail Spam - read more about The Next Corner

Wow, how can you piss me off more than sending me a direct spam message on Twitter directly after I returned the favor of following you. Resulting in being followed and un-followed within 5 minutes. New record for me! Follow Un-Follow Within 5 Minutes.

Post from You only lasted 5 Minutes; So Disappointing! - read more about The Next Corner

Today all of a sudden  I encountered some problems whenever I tried to load my website. See screenshot below.

I didn’t change anything to the set up of plug ins which were installed and activated. So I was wondering if others would see the same thing as I was seeing. The only problem when you are working in the middle of the night is that you cannot call anybody, as they probably are sleeping.

So what do you do… you post a message on Twitter…

anybody seeing a error message popping up when loading my site? http://thenextcorner.net/ message

It didn’t even take 2 minutes or I already had 5 replies back, with the first one within 30 seconds reporting nothing was wrong.

After the fast feedback I realized it could be the updated Y!slow Firefox plugin which was causing trouble. I immediately de-activated the plugin and tried again. Result: Error gone!

Nice, now can I go to sleep. Thanks to @Cifip, @cianW, @astrid0210, @suzannepronk and @martijndevrieze

Update: error message is still persistent. Seems to be an image I pull of the DIYthemes server for the affiliate program. I have removed the little banner in the footer, the site just needs some time to clean it's cache.

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