Google and Bing announced they will be pulling Tweets into the serps

This is a really big deal. I knew it was coming but I didn’t think it would happen so soon. Now Twitter has become a legitimate necessity to any marketing you do. You need to start really looking hard at your tweets, make sure they are keyword rich and RELEVANT. Whats also interesting is that I was just told that it is now a bad idea to cross pollinate your twitter and Facebook page because your Bing rankings will suffer.

No one knows how Google plans to do this, what rules they will use, and if they have some sort of an authority model worked out (I can’t see how they could), but you need to get on it now. I predict that Tweets will be similar to blog posts being indexed in the main index. They will pop up quickly but have a really short shelf life. Just a hunch.

Twitter as a marketing tool? Is it right for you?

So you finally signed up for Twitter because everything you read says that Twitter is the new gold mine, you have to use it. Now you have a twitter account, can you condense your stories, memories, or pearls of wisdom down to 140 characters? Honestly I wish most people I meet were able to do that.

Twitter ettiquette says that you should follow people who follow you. With that in mind, the reasonable things to do would be to run out and start following people with the expectation that they are going to return the favor. Maybe they will, but in most cases – if they do, who really cares? Just because someone is following you does not mean that you are on their radar.

I am still having a really hard time coming to terms that Twitter is an effective marketing tool for ‘everyone’. I can see in certain circumstances where a direct line to someones ear would be a good thing, but you need to be realistic about yourself. Are you interesting? Do people tend to ask questions when you tell a story or do they just glaze over?

If you listen to the internet marketing gurus like Perry Belcher, you can create a million dollar empire overnight with a Twitter account and an internet connection at Starbucks. What Perry doesn’t make a big of is that he has a list of millions of people, so when he sends out an email telling people to follow him on Twitter, they will. They would probably cut their thumbs off if he said it was going to be an ‘over night cash machine’. I’m rambling.

I don’t know enough about Twitter to tell you how to use it effectively for business, which is actually a good thing. Because even without knowing much about it, I do know how to get followers and I will share it with you. Here it is. Tweet. I have set up my content hub to automatically post to Twitter whenever I make a blog post. I haven’t been posting about Twitter, I haven’t really even posted anything that interesting, but every time I do post, my Twitter account is notified and a link to my post is sent out. Every time I do this, I pick up 5 followers almost immediately.

My last couple posts have been about affiliate marketing and about my love affair with SENuke, nothing special. It’s clear that the Twittersphere is full of marketers who are searching for keywords and automatically following the author. What does this mean? Nothing. They are following me in hopes that I will return the favor and follow them, and I do, but they aren’t reading what I am writing. They are just taking a gamble that I am going to read what they are Tweeting about and that I will visit their site and buy their product, and I won’t. I don’t read other peoples tweets and in most cases people don’t read mine. Essentially what you have is a giant room filled with people, all talking at once, to no one. Occasionally there will be someone interesting but in general I find that the only people I actually pay attention to are people who I have actively gone looking for. Courtney Love is a good example, her Twitter account is like watching a car crash in slow motion. Its interesting in a really morbid way.

Twitter, to me, is the obvious electronic culmination of our innate narcissism. We are our own biggest fans. But Twitter is also necessary. Twitter is the beginning of true real time search, the new breed of search engines are pulling data in real time and using it to determine search importance. Spammers are already figuring out how to game it like we used to game lycos in the late 90′s. Twitter is a place that you need to be, even if you don’t know why. Again, rambling.

So now you’re sitting in front of your Twitter acccount, feeling obliged to write something but don’t know what to Tweet about. Let me give you a few very basic pointers to get you on your way. And as simple as these seem, people are charging for this information.

1. Customize your profile. Make sure you at the very least add a picture of yourself. Fill out your profile, be compelling, be interesting. Don’t be overly salesy

2. Don’t pollute your tweets with a bunch of garbage, if you do happen to make a Tweet thats interesting, people will see the rest of your tweets about your cat and they won’t follow you. Keep in mind that the people who do actually read what other people are tweeting about are following hundreds, maybe thousands of people, they don’t have time to sift through garbage.

3. Check out some of the applications like Tweetdeck for following your favorite people

4. Make sure that you include keywords in your tweets that pertain to your business. Those are going to be what put your Tweets up on people radar.

5. Make sure before you follow someone that is following you that you check out their follow vs followers, if they are following 50,000 people and have 100 followers, it’s a spammer.

6. If the profile of the person following you has a picture of a girl in a bikini – block them, it’s spam. Think about it.

7. Do not try to sell you services in 140 characters. EVER. Twitter is about news and opinions, don’t even try to recommend your own product anonymously – it won’t work. Use Twitter to show you are an intelligent, insightful person, that cares about improving the lives of other people.

8. Be funny. Legitimately. If you’re not funny then don’t try to be, but if you are witty, try to include it in your posts.

9. Be relevant. A good way to attract followers is to Tweet about things that are in the news RIGHT NOW.

10. Be open and honest. The one thing I do like about Twitter is that it mimics life and the thought process really well. Remember that first impressions mean everything. When you meet someone you can usually tell if you like them in a 140 characters or less right? It’s the same online.

10.5 ( I really want a clean 10 things list but this just popped into my head) don’t have someone else Tweet for you. It’s OK to have someone represent your business, but not you.

I hope you got something out of this post. I actually didn’t write it for you, I really wrote it to get more followers on Twitter. I think I mentioned the keywords that I wanted enough times. This should be good for another 5 or 10 followers who are never going to read what I have to say, and I plan to return the favor.

Online Marketing for your business – Ignore the one trick pony

I am #1 in Google for online marketing Milwaukee. I am #1 for a bunch of things, but this doesn’t get any traffic. It is going to take a while to get people used to the fact that internet marketing is going through another metamorphosis. A big one. Like it or not, most changes that we have to deal with as internet marketers have something to do with Google. Yes, I know, there are other things out there than Google , but for the time being (forever) Google is going to pretty much dictate the way people get their information online.

The reason I am bringing up this #1 listing for online marketing Milwaukee, I am also #1 in the 10 pack (the groups of local listings at the top of the page), is that SEO (Search engine optimization) is not really that important anymore. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a bit more relevant, but Online Marketing or Internet Marketing is really the best way to describe what has got to happen.

Online marketing encompasses everything that is important in getting your site noticed on the internet. This list is getting bigger by the day. It used to be that all an SEO person needed to do was hit some seminars and read some groups, make sure that the rules were followed on the site and get the meta information in order.  Then build links. Not to say that this is not important, of course it is, but for the small business owner, we can get the on-site SEO taken care of with two words.. Word Press. Well its actually one word because its a company name, WordPress. You really don’t need much more than this. Google love WordPress sites, they are easy to maintain, just get the plugins you need and get going. Now you need to build links, lots of them, lots and lots and lots of them. You need to be building links constantly.

Now lets add some more to the mix.  Social media. There is some debate as to who really started social media. User generated content. I don’t know the answer, I am sure some searching around in Google and I could find it, but it’s not important to me. Social media and using it to market really isn’t a big secret. What makes it cool is that it’s a bit more like real life. However, like real life, if you don’t have the time to be active socially – its a pain in the ass (excuse my French).  Social media is based on interacting with people – having conversations, recommending things, just like real life.

Tell a friend who tells three friends, who tells three friends, etc. etc. Like real life this can work in your favor or it can rock your world with a bad reputation or slander.  I need to say this again, if you feel that you do not have time to go out to bars, attend parties, go to networking meetings, then you probably don’t have the time to focus on social networking. That’s OK. We do.

I don’t want to drag this post out, I have work to do, and its a  fact that people don’t read long posts.  My point in all this is that if you are a business owner, stop looking around for SEO companies, or PPC companies. Start looking for someone that understands what is under the umbrella of online marketing. The internet is becoming more and more like the real world,  insert some clever analogy about not relying on someone who only specializes in one area. Talk amongst yourselves. Seriously, talk amongst yourselves, it will increase your ranking.

Despite The Hype, Twitter Isn’t A Mainstream Social Marketing Tool

As intelligent, informed and chatty as I am, it’s rare that I back up my grand sweeping statements with actual facts and figures. It’s not that I don’t know where to go get those statistics, it’s really just a case of me being lazy and having a bad short term memory.

I am always happy (but rarely surprised) when someone comes along and verifies my claims, but does it in a detailed and cogent way. This is a great article to add weight to my opinion that Twitter is not what everyone thinks it is, and is more a tool for the ultimate narcissist who thinks other people really care what they have to say.

Everyone writes, very few read. Present company included.

Original article here: Despite The Hype, Twitter Isn’t A Mainstream Social Marketing Tool.