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Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Aug

Two Nearly Worthless Numbers: Twitter Followers and PageRank

by Brandtailers

People (especially CEO’s it seems) love numbers. I suppose it’s a quick way for us to see who’s better, faster, stronger, etc. Unfortunately, the tangled web that is the world of social media on the internet has few hard and fast numbers and the numbers we do have are pretty much meaningless.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given web stats to a client and they’ve looked at the unique visitors number and asked me, “Is that a good amount?” It all depends. Compared to Amazon.com, probably not, but we’re not competing with Amazon. I’m relieved that most of the people writing about web analytics now admit that the page view & unique visitors numbers are meaningless on their own.

Here are a couple of other numbers you can safely ignore: Twitter Followers and Google Page Rank.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is the new, bright shiny object. Seems like everyone is on it and one of the numbers easily available for all to see is number of followers. Seems like more = better, right? Not really. What are you trying to do on Twitter? Are you trying to influence millions (perhaps start a new religion)? Then more followers is better. Are you doing research into who’s talking about your product? Then who cares who follows you. Are you trying to become an authoritative voice in your field (usually social media)? You need followers. Are you giving your company a presence where you can make announcements? Well, it might be nice if someone is listening, but Twitter is searchable, so those announcements will become part of the web.

PageRank

This one’s a little more obscure, but you’ll see it thrown around when talking about SEO. I’ve always been a big suspicious of it, but that may be because I tend to work with smaller websites. We rarely even show up on PageRank. What is it, you ask? It’s a way to measure a page’s popularity and authority on the web. A number created by Google that may reflect whether one site ranks higher on a search result than another site. Note that I said ‘may,’ as with everything with Google search algorithms, we’re all guessing here.

There is one time when PageRank does matter: if you’re selling links from your site to others or getting links from other sites. The ‘juice’ those links have is probably affected by the site’s PageRank.

Other than that, it’s much more important to actually look at where your site ranks for your targeted keywords (as many SEO experts have said and keep saying).

Oh, and by the way, it’s not called PageRank because it ranks pages, but because it’s named after Larry Page, at least according to the Wikipedia entry on PageRank.

Tags: google, internet, SEO, Twitter
Posted in SEO, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

Jul

Getting Started with Social Media

by Brandtailers

Most of the social media guru’s I follow have the same advice to business people trying to figure out and harness this new-fanged social media stuff: get your hands dirty and use it. Good advice, but I think it needs to be a little more specific.

Get out there and use it as yourself not your business. Seems obvious, right? But it’s an important distinction to make. The best way to learn how this stuff works is to use it like everyone else is using it: to communicate with your family, find long lost friends, follow your favorite band or sports team, don’t sign up and immediately start trying to use it to market your business, that can come later, once you understand how it works.

Let’s talk about Facebook and Twitter, two services that most everyone has heard about now, and I’ll use myself as an example. I’m a slightly different case than most people because I’ve been on the internet nearly as long as it’s been around, but all this social media stuff was just as new to me as it was to everyone else and I was a fairly reluctant participant.

I signed up on Facebook, found a few friends, wrote a few comments on my wall and kind of stalled out. Then I found a couple of old high school friends that I’d been out of touch with for years. That got me interested again. Now, I use Facebook to chat with those friends and follow what they are up to. Remember, you can put your photos up there, you can do every poll that your friends send you, you can play every game that comes along, or you can pass on all that.

Twitter’s a different beast all together (and a lot of people are trying to figure out what kind of beast it is). I follow a few of my friends that tweet; I follow my pro soccer team; I follow a few of the podcasters I listen to. Every once in awhile I tweet something, but not very often. Many people like the fact that they can have a conversation on twitter, I’m not on it often enough to do that, but I read some of the conversations of the people I follow.

So, get out there and get a Facebook account, play around with it a little. Go get a twitter account and see if any of your favorite celebrities or sports teams or authors are tweeting, follow them for a bit, see what you think. Remember, you don’t have to accept every friend request on Facebook and if you follow someone and they are inundating your twitter stream with inane chatter, stop following them.

Both services will walk you through getting started. When you write your profile, remember you’re writing about you, not about your business. Also remember that everything you’re writing is public, pretty much anyone can read it.

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

Jul

Twitter Truthfulness and Marketing Over Coffee Podcast

by Brandtailers

Just listened to a a very thought provoking Marketing Over Coffee Podcast Episode (Who is Number Six?). Lots of good discussion and information as usual and I won’t repeat the tips they gave here, go listen to the podcast (hint there are some great ones about getting people to your blog quickly and researching your competitors).

But I do want to give my two cents on their response to a question a listener had about Twitter. The listener noticed that a competitor was following their company Twitter account and the Twitter accounts of their employees.

The first advice was to block that Twitter user, but it was pointed out that’s not very effective as the person can just create a new account. And do you really want to spend your time putting your thumb into each leak in the dam?

Then they suggested that you just lie in your Tweets. Put out some disinformation. I don’t agree with that advice. You’re going to lie to all of your followers to give this one person bad information? What if you have a legitimate customer who would like to meet you and heard through Twitter that you were going to be in town, but that wasn’t true. How are you going to explain that to that customer?

This leads me to two observations, one about marketing in general (and maybe social media in particular), another about Twitter.

You need a good product.

If a competitor can “steal’ your sales simply by showing up in the same place you plan on going (the example given in the podcast), then you need to improve either your product or your pitch (if your product is already great). And by product, I don’t necessarily mean the physical thing you sell. Maybe you sell brushes, like every other brush salesman, what can you do to make the buying experience with you 100 times better than with others? What kind of service can you provide that your competitors don’t?

The social media experts that I follow keep coming back to this tenet: you need a good product. That’s what you have to start with. Then the internet and social media can put you out there, competing with the big boys.

Twitter is a Public Place.

Read that again. Anyone can read your twitter stream if you have a public twitter account. And most business accounts are public. Maybe it’s time to take a look at public vs. private accounts, though. I have three different Twitter accounts, one for me personally, one for my freelance coding business, one for Brandtailers.

All of them are public right now. I could take my personal account private, though, then I would know that only my folowers could see my updates. Might be a good idea, though I tend to tweet very innocuous stuff.

I could also see having a private business account that was just to keep on industry news, not really for tweeting any content. I may do that with my own business account, see how it works.

But, once again, most people have public accounts and those are available to anyone to read and search. So, don’t say anything in there that you don’t want the whole wide world to read and repeat. Kind of like email (that is how you think about email, isn’t it? I know a lot of high profile people don’t, but I wish they bet they did now).

My advice for dealing with a stalking competitor: be cautious about what you say, but hopefully most of your followers are colleagues or clients, concentrate on tweets that help them.

Tags: marketing on Twitter, marketing over coffee, podcast, Twitter, Twitter stalking
Posted in Twitter | Leave a Comment »