Social Media ROI Coming Under the Spotlight

After the depressingly predictable social media goldrush seen this year, it appears that questions are starting to be asked of social media and its actual commercial impact.

It's probably about time that some of the heat was taken out of the social media sector. For example just take a look at the starting salaries for social media jobs, the number of self titled social media consultants cropping up around the place, and training courses available. An offshore SEO company contacted me the other day about their services, including what they now call SMO (social media optimisation).

However I recently learnt of a social media debate at Marketing Week, in which Mark Ritson challenges whether Twitter is really a relevant online space for commercial brands to occupy, or instead the preserve of celebrity driven personality culture. As Ritson puts it, social media is a "new and relatively insignificant communications tool that has limited potential for a very small proportion of brands". Ouch.

Then this morning I just read a very good post by Joe Hughes about social media ROI, which illustrates the different ways in which the value to be gained from Social Media could and should be measured. However, Hughes does conclude that Social Media can be very valuable as a brand reputation management tool.

Personally, I can see some value in social media, and feel it is worth participating in. But I am yet to find a good example of a website which has been able to transform social media activity into a core promotional tool that generates value. Twitter followers don't always mean revenue!

Useful Sites For Finding People To Follow On Twitter

Here is a really useful list of sites to help find people to follow on Twitter. In addition to this list I would add the Twellow directory.

Of course the idea of following people, it to get followers back, and so you want an auto follow thank you message in place which mentions your site and message. You can set this up automatically for multiple Twitter accounts at Social Oomph.

Google Caffeine and it's Impact on SEO

Google fully rolled our their new web indexing system, Caffeine, on June 8th this year. But what are the implications for SEO and link building?

Distribute Tweets on Twitter in Advance

Just been setting up a new Twitter account for a client, Sygma Solutions, and came across a feature of Social Oomph (formally known as Tweetlater) that allows you to schedule the advance distribution of Twitter tweets.

I've already used Social Oomph extensively as a third party tool for manually scheduling tweets for a range of client twitter accounts, but I hadn't come across the 'Distribute Scheduled Updates' function before.

It appears to allow you to schedule a batch of tweets to be broadcast regularly at intervals of days, hours or minutes (if you have a lot to say!). You can also schedule your tweets to appear within set times and on specific days of the week.

Where did Twitterfeed go?

Twitterfeed, the online service which lets you send RSS feeds to your Twitter account, seems to be having some problems.

Their site appears to have been replaced with a spammy domain holding page. Maybe the owners have pulled the site down, or someone else has managed to renew it? Also, the feeds I had set up don't seem to be publishing.

Whatever the reasons this is a real shame - I've been using Twitterfeed for months now to send third party feeds to client twitter accounts, to help increase their tweet volume.

I've been looking for replacements, and am trialling http://rss2twitter.com. It doesn't seem to have all the same functionality as Twitterfeed, like scheduling of updates of the RSS feed, but we'll see how it works - at the moment its set up to send 3 rss feeds to http://twitter.com/dressingupideas.

How Twitter Followings Illustrate Link Popularity on Google

I've been setting up some new Twitter accounts for clients like Premium Sofas and Zen Cart Web Design, and working to get them more followers. In the process it occurred to me that the relative value of different Twitter accounts based on the Followers/Following quite resembles the theory of link popularity which Google uses to assess popularity of a website.

For example on Twitter, a lot of Followers make a user look good, just like a lot of backlinks to a site look good. But look deeper and if you have more Followers than people you follow, you look even better. More sites linking to your website than you link to, also looks good (which is one of the reasons I don't tend to focus huge amounts of effort on self cancelling reciprocal links).

But then I thought about how your new Twitter account can gain kudos just by having a very popular Twitter user follow you. I mean, imagine the impact of say Stephen Fry following you, based just on the number of people who follow him (nearly 1.5 million followers at time of writing). This immediate surge in publicity is kind of like the extra brownie points Google gives your site when you get a link from a really credible and authorative website, that in turn has a lot of links which point to it.

This is why whenever clients send me a cold link request they've received and ask what I think, I always check the Page Rank of the site offering to trade links first. If it's not popular, there's little point.

In the future I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter replicates some kind of version of Page Rank (if they don't already) based on the difference between your Followers/Following, and the number of Followers your Followers have got.

Search Latest Twitter Chatter Using Google

Now here's a nifty trick - you can search Twitter traffic in real time or past discussions, using Google.

Simply search for a search term on Google like normal,  then click on “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” You'll see a graph showing the frequency of mentions of your search term on Twitter, which you can extend to a longer period of time. Here's an example on the search term 'volcanic ash'.

An amusing distraction, or evidence of the growing importance of Twitter activity?

Creating yet another mixed Twitter account

This is getting to be something of a habit - I've just been working on creating another new Twitter account for a client, in this case www.zencartwebdesign.co.uk who sell Zen Cart e-commerce add ons, hosting, installs etc.

I firstly created their new Twitter account at http://twitter.com/zencartwebsites then I found some third party RSS feeds from Zen Cart forums and sites. I plugged these into my account at http://twitterfeed.com which aggregates them and pushes the feeds to the Twitter account.

Then I went through the client's website and pulled out 30 odd products and articles, and wrote a tweet about each one, with a link of course. Then it was off to my account at https://www.socialoomph.com where I pasted each tweet in, pre sent to publish one a day for the next month (I noticed that if you pay to upgrade to the Pro, you can create a reservoir of tweets and have it publish one a day randomly).

So now we have a nice new Twitter account publishing numerous tweets daily all on its own, with each tweet  packed full of keywords so they'll appear in searches on twitter!

Now I just need to submit to some twitter directories and start following some e-commerce twitterers to get the ball rolling.

Check out Tweetfeed for Building Quick Twitter Accounts

I'm currently a big fan of Tweetfeed, a free online tool for aggregating RSS feeds from different sources and then pushing them out to different Twitter accounts you manage.

This is a useful exercise because if you want to use Twitter to attract new followers and website visitors, the best way to think of Twitter is like a mini search engine.