Tag: Twitter

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Social Media More Than Fluff

Danny Sullivan, a pillar in my industry and writer for SearchEngineLand, just interviewed Google and Bing engineers about what they use from Facebook and Twitter in regards to signals that may impact organic placement. I found the article extremely interesting and I think you will too. You can read the full piece here.

The huge take away on the article is that both Bing and Google evaluate and use information, popularity, and activity on both Twitter and Facebook. This is particularly good news for clients of ours who were early embracers of social media and have now built up popular accounts and do regular status updates. The pay off of social media has not been fully realized yet, but the impact on future organic search placement is huge.

Both search engines are now evaluating both PageRank and now SocialRank or HumanRank or SocialRank. Neither have determined a name yet, but are clearly watching, gaging, and weighing social media activity of businesses on both Facebook and Twitter. It is now boiling down to Web Authority and Social Authority (how many updates you do, frequency of updates, number of followers or friends) will now appear to impact positively organic search results.

Both search engines revealed that the links on Twitter and Facebook, even though they are nofollow, do mean something to their search algorithms in regards to Web Authority. Twitter links may in the very near future even be considered as some version of acceptable link building program.

If you are not involved with Twitter or Facebook at this time, you had better take a careful look at this insightful analysis that Danny Sullivan has done as I would recommend at this point you get in the game and do so quickly. Early embracers should give themselves a big pat on the back for seeing a trend and the importance of it and acting to take advantage of the new technology which has now given them an edge over their competition.

We do offer social media services at very affordable rates. We invite you to review our own Twitter and Facebook services.

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HootSuite Moves To A Paid Model

If you are serious about social networking and social media then you are probably using HootSuite already. If you are not, HootSuite is our application of choice for our various writers and to house our myriad of client accounts.

HootSuite has been free for the last two years and we have enjoyed and really used the service. In fact is wasn’t until Facebook chopped Fan Page posting by third parties that we really found out just how much we depend on the application to manage our growing social media enterprise.

In the next seven days if you use HootSuite, you will be forced to choose either the free restricted use option or will have to move to the Pro paid option that is based on a pricey fee structure for team members. You get yourself free and four more team members for $15 each. Add another member and it is $30 per member up to a cap. Ouch that can get expensive for certain businesses ours included.

Social media is here to stay and our service offerings and number of clients is steadily growing with HootSuite, even the paid Pro version we can quickly and effectively do the work we need to do. I consider HootSuite and integral part of our service offerings.

Please note HootSuite will pay me a small commission if you sign up for a Pro account, but that is not my reason for writing this post.

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Top Social Media Tools for Teams

If you are doing team work on social media accounts what are the most effective tools to use? For me, I like HootSuite, but I have looked at others. This post features three services you may want to consider for your own team’s use.

HootSuite
This is by far my favorite and then one that my team of six people uses to manage clients’ social media accounts. HootSuite used to be totally free, but now has a paid option. For personal users, you can still use HootSuite free, but for business team users such as myself you will pay based on the number of team members. We will soon be paying just a little under $100 a month for access to this online service. But we have many accounts and six team members working on the same account. You can check out HootSuite now.

CoTweet
This is a nice online application that is free as well to consider if you have just one or two team members and need to load multiple Twitter accounts. It does not offer Facebook Business Page features, but great for Twitter. The interface is easy to use and does allow you to review pending updates and sent updates as well as your streams. You can check out CoTweet now. Although I do not like the interface as much as I do the one at HootSuite for small teams using Twitter only this would be adequate and totally free.

I have looked at other applications but this post is about team social media work so TweetDeck although popular is not a good fit as it does not allow team collaboration. If you have one you really like, leave the name and link in the comments.

Please note that HootSuite will pay me a small commission, but only if you sign up for a Pro account.

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The Social Networking Phenomenon – Now a Must Have for Your Marketing Arsenal

If you aren’t advertising your business via social networking, you are really missing out a terrific way to sell your services and products to new customers. There are still a number of people, who are skeptical about the power of Twitter and Facebook. Some feel that these platforms are not viable for lead and sale generation. But I recommend that you take another closer look!

Facebook just recently beat Google’s number for visits per day and Twitter announced it’s popularity numbers recently. Twitter has over 105,779,710 users with 300,000 added each day. The reach and power of social networking sites can simply not be ignored and should not be a part of any Internet marketing program.

The growth pattern for Twitter has not just been consistently strong; the number of Tweeters has literally been astronomical. As of May this social networking megastar was topping out at two billion hits per month – the breakdown on that is more than two and a half million tweets per hour. That is a whole lot of opportunity to have your products and services exposed to potential new customers.

Though Facebook may not have the rapid fire succession of short communication that Twitter has reached, this social networking powerhouse actually managed to oust Google Search from the number one spot on the list of most visited websites in May. If this doesn’t speak volumes about the capabilities of social networking sites, nothing will.

The world of effective advertising as we know it has changed quite a bit over the course of the last few years, and with the emergence of social networking it will continue to change with each new day that passes. The old adage of spending money to make money may still hold true, but in terms of advertising it may no longer be the dollars you spend but the amount of time you spend Tweeting or posting status updates to your firm’s Facebook Fan Page that will make the difference for your future business growth.