Tag: Twitter

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Have You Been Twitter Hacked?

This has just happened to three of our client accounts and I wanted to share the information with you. First be very careful what applications you give Twitter access to on your account.

This is the situation. On one account a user actually direct messaged us and said did you know you sent me a money making scheme tweet? We never tweet about things like that either personally or for clients. In several of the applications we use for Twitter like TweetDeck and HootSuite this tweet from us never showed. But when I went to www.Twitter.com to the account tweets I uncovered links to videos and other tweets that I know we did not do.

Here’s what you should do if this happens to you to.

1. Change your Twitter password immediately. As I could do this, it told me that an individual had not hacked the Twitter accounts, but rather an application which I had allowed access to was using my Twitter account to sneakily send out their own self serving links and tweet. Hmm, this is very bad.

2. In the Twitter account connections tab, I disabled all connections and shut off the access for all applications. When you do this you break the connection for all applications. Make sure if you use HootSuite, Social Oomph or TweetDeck, make sure to update your account with the new Twitter password or you will not be able to use those applications.

I am not sure but I suspect either TwitterFeed (hate to think this may be true) or more likely Twellow. All accounts were not spammed seriously but even one tweet that we don’t write that promotes something we have not approved is not okay.

The bottom line is be very careful with Twitter. I love the application, the reach, the viral opportunities, but do not allow others to access your Twitter following and sabotage what you are doing for their own sneaky and selfish use. If I find out which application has done this, I will for sure post the information so we can encourage their blacklisting. For more information from Twitter on what to do if you have been hacked visit the Twitter Hacked page on Twitter.com.

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How Do You Grow a Twitter Following?

You don’t need to buy a white paper or an e-book to understand how to grow your Twitter following, but you can benefit from some of my own tried and tested techniques that I will freely share in this post.

First let me share with you some statistics from client accounts showing their actual growth over time.

Client One: start=0, 8/13= 187 followers, 9/1=308 follower, 10/241 566 followers

Client Two: start=0, 8/13=89 followers, 9/1=220 followers, 10/21 371 followers

Client Three: start=0, 9/1=64 followers, 9/14=117 followers, 10/21=320 followers

To put this in perspective here is the traffic for a client account we started but did not provide services for in the same time period showing natural growth as a control.

Client A: start=0, 8/13=5 followers, 9/1=11 followers, 10/24=18 followers.

That’s a pretty big difference 303 to 547 followers versus 18 in the same time period.

So how do we do it? Here are my tips:

  1. Tweet a minimum of 5 times a day.
  2. Tweet 5 days a week.
  3. Schedule your tweets to start at 8:00 am and then space them out to about 4:00 pm.
  4. Include tips and trivia in your tweets as well as links.
  5. Become the authority in your area – share your knowledge.
  6. Interact a minimum of twice daily with followers of people you follow through direct messages or @’s
  7. Thank people for retweets.
  8. Send comments to others about their tweets – I really liked what you said about …
  9. Use bit.ly to track your clicks. Once you see that people do click what you link to you will know the value of the time you invest in Twitter.
  10. Get professional help if you don’t know what to do. We do provide Twitter services if you need them.
  11. Make sure you follow and unfollow anyone who follows or unfollow you using Social Oomph.
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Twitter Tweets to be Indexed by Bing and Google – Wow!

This is huge news for the world of search engine organic placement and inbound link creation if you did not understand these recent releases from both Bing and from Google.

First the background:

Bing is to index Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates:

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091021/exclusive-guess-who-else-is-coming-to-dinner-twitter-microsoft-bing-deal-confirmed-but-so-is-facebook-bing/

Google is to indext Twitter tweets:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html

If you are not already using Twitter this is an excellent reason to start right away. Not only will this new decision by the search engines allow inclusion of the very freshest news and updates in their index via rabid Twitter users who want to tweet just about everything, but tweets with links will be indexed too.

At least the indexing of tweets and links appears to be in the offing at this early stage. Meaning specifically that if you link to your website in tweets, you may now be driving search traffic not just Twitter user traffic, you may build web authority, and may even now use tweets as entry points to your blog or website. Additionally if Google or Bing count the links as inbound links – WOW! Now we just don’t know for sure if the real SEO benefits mentioned will stay in the mix until tweets start to be indexed and we can really evaluate traffic and if the engines filter tweets in some way to prevent organic benefits, but the potential benefits of this announcement to tweeters is huge!

So if you are not involved in Twitter why take a change that one of the biggest new ways to drive search traffic to your site will pass you by? Build your base before there is a huge rush. Establish your account as an authority now and not a newbie that will be lost in the shuffle.

 Twitter is free but if you need professional help we have a nicely developed Twitter service program and a great track record in growing account followings. Check out our Twitter services to see if we would be a good match for your needs.

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Does Twitter Impact Your SEO Placement?

I had a colleague tell me that they have stopped blogging and now spend most of their efforts on Twitter. I was mystified as to why and found out that this person thought that Twitter would help with their organic search placement. “Yikes! Don’t stop blogging!” I said, “Twitter does nothing for SEO and blogging does.”

Twitter is great for social networking and driving traffic to your website, but for now, search engines do not index tweets so you get no SEO juice from Twitter. Blogging is still one of the very best and easiest ways to help improve your web authority and potentially your organic placement. Each one of your blog posts, unlike tweets, is indexed by search engines and builds content in your search authority profile that search engines routinely review with their spider bots.

If your blog is housed on your website server under your domain, you geet the SEO juice from your blog post. If your blog is under a different domain or at www.Blogger.com you get the links and traffic but not the SEO juice and web authority.

So, the bottom-line is even if you do Twitter, don’t stop blogging. Blogging actually works harder for you to bring you long term benefits at this point than do tweets when it comes to SEO.