Search Marketing Sage

You may have seen “The ____ Daily is out!” tweets popping up everywhere lately. This post will help explain what the paper.li papers are and why you should consider creating one. I’ll also review the paper.li types, how to choose users for your list (if you choose a list format) and how the papers are created.

Today I was checking my @ replies to find out who was involved in a discussion I had on Twitter about tracking RTs – I couldn’t remember their name off the top of my head, sadly. The image shows the results I got as I reviewed my @replies. As you can see the replies jump from Sept. 8 to Aug. 9 to May 24, then to Feb. and Dec…that helps me a lot (not). I had conversations with at least a hundred people between September and December. Come on, Twitter…could you try to be just a little consistent and at least show me my information for the past 2 months properly? When data I’m searching for is randomly missing, I am not a happy camper.

My advice about tracking RTs follows, since I couldn’t directly contact them on Twitter… :/

Here at Search Mojo, we recommend that all of our SEO clients tweet, regardless of the nature of their business. We’ve been recommending this practice for about a year now – Twitter should be used as an SEO tool. Here’s an example of how one of our clients is impacting their ROI with Twitter – you can follow their lead and do the same thing.

PerfectDisk is a disk defragmentation software that is available for download for both consumers and businesses online. From time to time they’ll offer sales promotions for their product. Creativity struck just as the Washington, DC earthquake did, and a SHAKE25 promo was born. For a limited time, they offered their product download for 25% off by using the SHAKE25 promo code. They shared this promo on Twitter, and the tweet landed them a spot in the Washington Business Journal.

Finally! 11 grueling hours later, John Isner emerged as the winner of the longest match in the history of Wimbledon against Nicolas Mahut with a close 70-68 score.  As the news quickly spread, Twitter feeds were streaming in before they showed up on real-time Google web results. Why does this happen? Although Google wants to be the source for live, instantaneous news, it takes more time to put a blog on a website and then index it than to simply tweet it. The results showed up about 5 minutes later, but with Twitter’s edge, their data publishes instantaneously.

Society thrives on finding the latest, most up-to-date information presented through search engines and social media. Both Google and Bing realized that people want the news as fast as it happens and created features to address the need for real-time search results. On one hand, Google emphasizes that their real-time results are built into the middle of the regular search page and they include the latest updates straight from news services, blogs, and social media. Alternatively, Bing showcases their real-time feed on a separate page and includes the latest updates from only Twitter and Facebook. Both search engines introduce another crucial component in the SEO world to which businesses must address.

Some level of privacy must be considered if you’re active on social networks. But with some networks, the “openness” is the whole point. That said – private Twitter accounts have no place in the marketing world. Unless you have a private personal account just to use for family and friends etc, Twitter accounts should be open when it comes to networking, personal branding and general marketing usage. I continuously stumble upon private accounts where people are obviously *trying* to network, but failing miserably. Without an open account and sample of tweets, how are people supposed to decide if they want to follow you back? Regardless, there still are privacy issues to be discussed in this open network of Twitter.