Tag: Twitter

Posted on

Twitter Moves to a Visual Look

Looking ahead to Twitter's new look.
Looking ahead to Twitter’s new look.

In our new visual and video saturated world where images, pins, and cover photos are all the rage, Twitter has stagnated with their text-based layout until now. Coming soon to your Twitter profile is a “Facebook-like” look that has a much more interesting visual look and feel.

I hardly ever click into my Twitter profile as I almost exclusively use third part apps to build and send my content three times a day to my various Twitter accounts. With a new image-interesting profile coming to Twitter accounts, Twitter may soon become a platform-venue like Facebook. All the better for Twitter to promote ads on a page if they can attract users back in to view profiles of people they follow or for that matter to spend more time actually “on” their profile then sending things “to” their profile.

Here’s a great article to give you some visual previews of the Twitter’s new look. When you see the huge cover, ability to post more images and video, favorite posts, and to create more visual interest you’ll say just like me, “wow this sure looks like Facebook!”

I’ll be updating my Twitter profiles with the new look in the weeks ahead, as I do, I will create a tutorial so you can update yours too.

 

Posted on

The Changing Landscape of Social Media

Are Twitter heads reading your Twitter feed?
Are Twitter heads reading your Twitter feed?

With recent changes Facebook has made, renegotiation of the Google-Twitter contract, and Google’s announcement that it does not include social signals in its ranking algorithm, business owners and SEO’s are struggling to find where social media fits into a strategy for web visibility.

Although I still feel that social media still has a place in a mature business’ overall marketing plan, how to go about using social media for visibility is now drastically changing.

It used to be that having social updates posted to Twitter and Facebook was a strategy that all businesses on the web needed to embrace, now our recommendations are different based on this changed landscape.

For new businesses the validity of starting a Facebook or Twitter account with no followers and paying a writer to post updates has lost value. It is by far better for this new business to invest in AdWords and blogging for a long range content and visibility plan than to be on social media platforms.

For established mature businesses whether to post to Facebook or Twitter really now depend on the business’ community. Some firms have a vital Facebook presence and to continue to post there makes perfect sense. Additionally for these businesses to use Facebook’s options to promote posts to a wider demographic is now becoming an attractive option. For right now Twitter continues to be a smart place to be, but this may change rapidly as Google and Twitter redefine their relationship in the months ahead.

What is becoming more and more attractive than a Twitter and Facebook as a marketing strategy is activity on a personal Google+ profile tied to a rel=”author” tag with high quality content pieces and Google+ Community creation and moderation.

This next year will be strategic for how businesses use social media. I am predicting that more activity will be in Facebook  promoted updates than in regular content creation and that Twitter will need to continue to reinvent itself to stay relative in this new landscape.

Posted on

Google States They Do Not Use Facebook or Twitter for Ranking

Matt Cutts, the lead Spam Engineer at Google revealed just this last week that Google is not using Facebook or Twitter posts or profiles for index ranking. This is very big news and a change in what Google has stated about how social impacts their algorithm.

You can watch the full YouTube video here.

Here’s the bottom-line about using social media and Google rankings:

1. Google is not ranking your site based on the activity you have on social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter.

2. Google does look at links that are shared on these social sites just like they look at content pages when they can spider the content.

3. Google is concerned about using social profiles to create “identity” as this may change or be blocked over time.

4. Google is not recording, for their algorithm, the number of likes or followers a social profile has.

5. Matt Cutts states that he personally likes social profiles for sharing and driving traffic, but does not recommend using them as an avenue to impact Google search placement.

This is an interesting change for Google as previously Google has stated that it did include likes and follower numbers as part of social signals and that these social signals impacted organic placement.

My recommendation is to continue to use Twitter and Facebook if it makes sense to do so. Some businesses have a rich forum on Facebook and should not abandon their followers just because they now don’t get SEO juice from activity there. But for SEO’s to encourage social media interaction now appears to be just one more SEO tactic that Google is clearly disavowing as a way to get organic placement.

Posted on

SocialOomph More Than a Twitter Client

 

I have been using SocialOomph for quite awhile. It used to be TweetLater. Over time the application has morphed into much more than an excellent Twitter client. It has now become a social networking power tool.

Now SocialOomph allows you to schedule and post to Twitter, Facebook, your blog, and to even create a custom RSS feed you can use in a number of creative ways. With the ability to save drafts to reuse, scheduling capabilities, and the ability to use bit.ly API to track your click stats, SocialOomph.com has become a very valuable tool for professionals and those serious about promoting their products and services using social networking programs.

I use the free version, but SocialOomph.com offers a professional version. The professional version charges a small monthly fee but offers many unique “power tools”. They even offer a free test drive. One thing that I think may be worth the extra charge is the ability to bulk upload tweets. Even if all you use initially is the free version, make sure to check out some of the features that the professional version offers, they are really astounding.

I have been using SocialOomph for quite awhile. I like it for the ability to schedule tweets and reuse tweets you have saved. In fact before any other application offered advanced scheduling Social Oomph had that as a regular feature. Another thing I like and use SocialOomph for is to send a welcome message to new followers. I can even set up to automatically unfollow a follower on Twitter when they unfollow me. I have used the vetting system as well, but no longer vet followers as this can really slow the growth of followers in your Twitter account. With many unique and time saving features, SocialOomph.com may end up being the only Twitter, blog, and Facebook client you end up using.

Please note that if you click any of the links in this post and buy access to the professional application version I will be paid a small commission, enough to buy me lunch at McDonald’s. But truly that is not the reason for my post, I use and like the application. For some clients it is the application of choice over HootSuite and TweetDeck. I routinely use SocialOomph.com for the clients for whom we are providing ghost Twitter Executive services.