Category Archives: Social Media

How to optimize your Stumbleupon PPC and Organic campaign

September 13, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: SEO, Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How to optimize your Stumbleupon PPC and Organic campaign

Stumbleupon is tricky. You have to do lots of stumbling to have the right to add pages to the organic search which respresents 95% of what is shown on their network. So, stumble away, and add lots of content. That is what I do. I add my best content, and some of it gets clicked on. It seems that entries with really good pictures do best. Remember, on Stumbleupon people are browsing hundreds of pages, and you will only get 5 seconds of attention unless you grab someone’s interest with good graphics. If people like your content, it will get shown more. Good luck.

Be cautious setting up your account — quirks & bugs
The Stumbleupon Pay-per-click program is tricky. Be careful how many views you authorize per day. My bank account was given a ride around the block a few times. I agreed to 100 clicks, but was billed $100 and given 600 clicks. I’m not sure what went wrong. At least I finally got some fast traffic for my blog. In any case, start by bidding on 1 click per day at a low level. Start with 1 click per day, and then adjust up later. Then use the manage function to adjust your daily budget for each campaign.

40 clicks per blog entry
I would get about 40 clicks per campaign and then use your Google analytics to see how long the average person spent reading. Many Stumblers have ADD and spend only 10 seconds on your site which is not worth paying for. But, if you attract some serious readers who spend some time and perhaps visit other pages of your site or blog, then you are in business.

See which blog gets folks who spend more than a minute on your site
I would try lots of different blog entries in your paid Stumbling campaign. Try them each for 40 clicks and keep the ones that perform well with high number of pages visited, and the highest amount of seconds or minutes on your site. Most of your campaigns will probably need to be discontinued — optimization is that way if you do it right! Identify the winners, and work with them.

Optimization is 20% strategy and the rest is trial, error, watching, and noticing. Interpreting the results can be daunting.

Good luck!

You might also like:

Active vs. Dormant Followers on Twitter
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/09/27/active-vs-dormant-followers-on-twitter/

The Google Algorithm has some serious issues
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/08/04/the-google-algorithm-has-some-serous-issues/

Twitter & the American Dream: The chance to make it big is possible

September 12, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Of Interest, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I am excited about Twitter, because it has offerings similar in spirit to the American Dream. But, it is different as well. The American dream is that if you work hard, you can make it here. It doesn’t matter where you are from, what you look like, or even if you speak English well. If you work hard and take risks, anyone can make it in America — and have the house with the two-door garage, a wife, two kids, and a dog named fluffy. Twitter’s offering is a little different.

Twitter’s opportunity is similar to the internet’s opportunity. The beauty of the internet is that sites around the world compete for placement on Google and for traffic. Only one site in a particular niche can be the most popular. Twitter is a little bit similar in nature to this. On Twitter, you can come out of nowhere, and go VIRAL immediately and gain a MILLION followers overnight. It is possible, although not likely. People always dream of going viral, and marketing managers always talk about it. But, the realities are something you need to think about.

It takes SKILL to go viral. Being viral means that you tweet something, someone else retweets your content, and one or more people viewing your tweet on the network who retweeted you — will retweet you again. Being viral could land your tweet in the inboxes of millions of viewers overnight. In real life, it takes years to build up the skill necessary to be popular on Twitter. Most people do not develop that skill even if they are social media professionals — at least not to the level necessary to go viral regularly. Remember, that people who do social media for a living make around $20-80,000 per year. If they knew how to go viral, they could make millions per year and wouldn’t be working for that dumb social media company anymore, right?

I have spoken to staff at multiple social media companies. Nobody was willing to help me write tweets as a separate job description at any of the companies. None were even interested or had tips. So, I had to learn myself. I network with others to do tweet writing by the way. After almost four years of writing tweets, my tweets are finally beginning to be popular. I have written a few that got four retweets. But, what if I can learn to write material so hot that it gets a million retweets?

Twitter is wonderful because it identifies and promotes hot content. If you know how to write content that people love, you can go viral. I am at the level where I can write comments on other people’s twitters and get retweeted 30% of the time. Maybe with a few more years of hard tweeting (hard twork) I can tweet my way to stardom (Twitterdom). Wish me luck! I’m not sure I’ll make it, but at least Twitter affords the opportunity and a chance.

Imagine what my businesses would be like if I had a million followers on Twitter. I would be rich and would have more time to write blog entries! Yay!!! (and a yacht with internet connection)

The benefits of commenting on other people’s Twitter accounts

September 11, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

This is very ironic, but on my outsourcing blog, we get almost no intelligent commentary. Those who comment, use spammy generic comments about how intelligently written my blog was and then a link to their site. Unfortunately, this is foolish, and doesn’t work. I will hardly ever publish this type of comment because it is obvious that they didn’t read the actual article and have nothing of value to say. However, if someone who had a link to share did publish something of value in response to my blog, then I would publish their comment along with the link which would have a good SEO value for them. Why is it that there are almost no intelligent people commenting on my outsource blog?

In any case, good blog commenting is a great way to share a link. But, what about good Twitter comments? Commenting on Twitter has many advantages.

(1) Your comment might get retweeted if it is gracefully written. But, even some dumb comments like TYFF (thanks for following) can get favorited and retweeted. Some people ain’t got no class if you ask me! Beautifully written intelligent comments are a lot more likely to gain you new followers and get retweeted multiple time which in turn gets you more exposure and more followers. If you do Twitter, you need at least 10,000 followers to make any dent in your SEO, so start accumulating!

(2) The person who the comment is addressed to might follow you. In my experience, for every ten people I write an intelligent comment to, I will get about two or three new followers. Those odds are not that bad. I might be able to sort through several hundred tweets and write about fifteen good responses per hour which translates into about four new followers for me. Getting followers manually is hard work, so make sure that the people you are contacting are a very well optimized match for your business. Make sure they have the same interests and retweet people regularly or you are wasting your time buddy!

(3) Learning value? By commenting on other people’s twitter, I learn what people like to read that I wrote. If I write a witty whimsical comment and it gets retweeted a few times, I learn that whatever I wrote is popular. I could tweet my comment as a regular tweet if it is so popular. I could even tweet it on a regular basis if it reels in the audience!

(4) If the person you wrote to writes back to you, your Twitter address will show up on their feed. You might get new followers just be being seen. Additionally, commenting gets your icon in the other person’s twitter account if people click the expand link. You can see all of the favorites, retweets, and comments by clicking expand.

I hope this article has expanded your consciousness about twitter. If not, click the expand link!

A new technique for content & blog title optimization strategy

September 10, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

I’ve read a million blog articles about content strategy and they are all interesting. I like the articles that teach you to appeal to the emotion of your readers if you want to get shared. That is so true. I try to appeal to the interest of people, by picking unusual points of view. But, here is a new strategy that is easy to implement, but actually a little bit complicated to do correctly.

The process of content creation & marketing
Blog writers typically brainstorm to find a great topic. Then, they will often put a lot of time into writing a great article. Next, the article will be promoted on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and a few others. It sounds very standard and predictable, and it is. The problem is that not all of the stuff you write will be appreciated by your users. I find that only 1% of my content has become super popular. 1% is better than 0%, but I would love to improve my batting average.

My little social experiment
So, I underwent an experiment. When I publish my own content on Twitter, I might average a little less than a single retweet. I wanted to see what happened when I tweeted content from the masters. Would I get retweeted a hundred times, or would it be about the same as my content? The results were surprising. I got a slightly better batting average tweeting content from the professionals which baffled me. Why is my content only a little less popular than theirs? Maybe because I am unique and original despite my poor writing skills and lack of graphics in my blog. The next thing that bamboozled me was that content that was in the top 10% of popularity on their blog didn’t do any better than their average content on my Twitter. I couldn’t figure out why.

Crowdsourcing and what matters
It is not predictable to try to understand what does well on Twitter and why. If you publish the same content twice, it rarely does as well the second time. If you use different tags, or adjust the text in the tweet a little bit, the results can change dramatically. So, the quality of the content is actually only 30% of what is important on Twitter. Subtle changes in wording, elaborations, a little punch or twist can make all the difference. What really matters is not what did well on someone else’s Twitter, but what my crowd likes! Even if the other crowd is one that is heavily engaged in business, marketing, and social media, their posts might not do well with my crowd which is also interested in social media and business (international business mostly.)

A spiritual element: crowdsourcing’s metaphysical realities
Never ignore the metaphysical element in social media marketing. There is a lot more than what time of the day you post, how good your images are, and how optimal your titles are. There is a spiritual connection you have with your followers on a deeper level. They are tuned into you in a way that they are not tuned into others. You jive with them and so does content that means something to you. If you publish something that is quality material that meets the niche requirements of your followers, but your heart isn’t in it — your followers might not like it either. If you publish something that means something to you — and is just you, you might be surprised at how well it does although it still needs to be tuned to the interests of your followers.

Identifying the best content
After posting a lot of other people’s material on several of my twitter accounts, I learned that roughly 7% of the material I published was super popular, and that was after I manually filtered out 70% of the posts I look through. So, if I had published every article I scanned, it would be only 3% that got retweeted or favorited more than five times on my account. My goal was to identify what the most popular Titles are, and then to create my own original content using similar titles and see if those blog entries would be more popular. Using topics that are winners might boost my batting average so that 20% of my blogs become super popular. Instead of quantity, I could focus on targeting.

The results
After finding out what was popular on my Twitter, I republished the material on my Google+ profile, and the content did fairly well on Google+ as well. I am going to write a few blog articles using the winning content ideas and see what happens. That will take longer. I can only identify one winning idea per day on a busy day, so my system for identifying semi-viral content is slow. The fact is that there just isn’t a lot of material out there that will do super well on Twitter! Good luck!

Choosing the optimal networks to source your followers on Twitter

September 9, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

Identifying the source: a guide to building your Twitter network

We all want more followers on Facebook and Twitter. The difference between someone with a big account and someone with a small account is how smart you are at getting new followers, not to mention how hard you try. I started out on Twitter a year ago fumbling around, and trying different strategies, most of which were useless. I tried using various keywords, links, tags, but my results were ineffective. My newer strategies involve tags that actually get results, and following strategies that are amazing.

Steps to grow your Twitter account
(1) Post interesting content
If you can’t think of anything good to say, perhaps you should wait to tweet something until you get something interesting. People will unfollow you if you are boring or not relevant to the theme of your account. Don’t create more Twitter litter.

(2) Retweet amazing content
It is hard to create good content. It has taken me years writing blogs, and still, the majority of my blog articles are not popular. But, to identify great content that other people wrote is easier. You need to compare hundreds of tweets before you pick one tweet to retweet. Amazing photos can go a long way too. If your retweets get retweeted, then you know you picked a winner, and you can use it a few weeks later again!

(3) Who to follow?
This article focuses on who to follow. But, on Twitter, if you want to grow fast, you should not think of following individuals. In reality, you are following individuals, but those individuals are members of groups. To find individuals to follow, you either wait for them to follow you, or you find them following some other account.

The trick is finding the perfect accounts to harvest great followers from. Lonely Planet is my all-time favorite Twitter account. However, they are too easy to find, and individuals who are not related to the travel industry love to follow them simply because they are so cool. The problem is, that less than 5% of their followers are relevant to the travel industry. The next problem is when I follow those select individuals, they follow me back only 10% of the time. These relevant followers appear to be like relevant followers on other accounts, but their follow-back behavior is completely different. On the other hand, if I find accounts with only 10,000 followers as opposed to the one million + which Lonely Planet has, the follow back rate is higher. For the followers to even find these smaller accounts, they had to be more aggressive which is not evident based on how they set up their profile.

The problem with finding followers on accounts with only 10,000 followers is that you run out of people to follow quickly, especially if you visit those accounts daily. Another strategy is to find accounts in the 50,000 to 200,000 member range to find followers on. Although, they might not be optimal in their follow-back rate, there are more of them. To me, it might be more efficient to make a long list of accounts in the 5000 to 30,000 range and visit those accounts daily and follow their newest members who have completely filled out profiles.

(4) One more point
Don’t follow people who followed someone else more than five days ago. They might not be that active on Twitter. They will be less likely to follow you back.

(5) Unfollowing
If someone doesn’t follow me back within two to four days, I have to unfollow them. Twitter allows you 10% more followees than followers once you cross the 2000 member threshold. You simply can’t follow unlimited amounts of people. You are forced to unfollow those who don’t follow you back.

So, the moral of the story here is — find accounts that you can visit to find great followers (people who followed those accounts or are followed by those accounts.) See what percentage of them follow you back. If particular accounts yield followers with a poor follow-back rate, then find a more optimal selection of accounts to harvest followers from.

“Live is cruel, so tweet about it!”

The bottom line on Twitter = clicks & customers

September 7, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Many people think that the point of Twitter is to get more followers. This is not true. It is not bad to have followers, but you will gain more from having people who interact with you a lot. I divide the metric of how many followers you have into several categories: active followers (who engage you,) relevant followers who are in a similar industry to you, and total followers. The number of active followers or interactions is what really benefits your SEO if you use Twitter a lot. But, that is still not the bottom line.

The bottom line
If you use twitter a lot and accumulate a huge following, that’s great. But, the numbers don’t do you any good unless they click on your links. Imagine that one guy has 1000 followers and they each click once per day. That is 1000 clicks to his blog. The other guy has a million followers, but only gets 500 clicks per day. The guy with fewer followers and more clicks is the one benefiting more!

Customers
Some people use Twitter as a way to gain customers. You can contact viable prospects one by one on Twitter. You can get to know them a bit before your first phone call to them. Customers who pay you money are one form of bottom line on Twitter.

SEO benefits.
You also get a lot of SEO benefit when people respond to your interactions. So, even if you don’t get a single customer from Twitter, Google will reward you if you impress them with your Twittering skills. If you interact with others, and they answer you back in large numbers, Google will give you a lot more organic clicks.

Social Media Quiz: What types of posts do best on a G+ business account?

September 6, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Many of us love social media and are addicted to it. But, how many of us are good at it? Most people publish unattractive photos, dumb articles, and make useless comments. One social media lover calls this, “Twitter litter.” I have been using social media a lot for the last year and a half and have learned some interesting truths.

Social Media is great for SEO
I run an outsourcing directory. To promote my SEO for my directory, I use a lot of social media. Google rewards people who use social media effectively. What constitutes the most effective use includes having meaningful dialogues with people on Twitter, getting lots of shares, and interactions, but your total number of followers means very little even though that is what we think we want most! So, I created a few Twitter accounts, a Facebook account, Google Plus, Stumbleupon, and will soon do Pinterest and others too. But, what does really well on my Google Plus account?

It is hard getting followers on a business G+ account
I have been using Google+ for a few months. It is hard to get followers on a business account. My personal account is much easier as I am allowed to follow about 200 people per day which is about 6000 per month. About 12% follow me back which makes it easy to gain some fast growth. Growing the personal account is easy, but growing the business account takes real skill. You can’t gain followers by following others with a limit of five follows per day. So, the only way to gain followers is by posting really good content and commenting on other people’s posts.

Interacting, Plussing and Posting, which is better?
So, every day, I plus around 100 interesting posts on other accounts. I also make comments, especially on the posts of people in the VIP circle who are generally interesting. I gain a few followers from my interactions, but that is slow too. Interacting is not enough, so I post interesting content, but you would be surprised which content does the best.

Most of the outsourcing content out there on Google+ is just not interesting. Most is self-promoting nonsenses that isn’t well written and is not informative. Then, there are some boring articles to supplement the “advertising” articles. The outsourcing articles on Googleplus’ feed generally do not get a single plus, and hardly ever get more than one or two plusses or shares. I try to select only the best outsourcing articles, but my articles don’t do much better than the trash out there. So, I turned to other sources. The truth is that there aren’t that many good outsourcing articles out there. Google’s regular search engine search results sometimes have a few really interesting outsourcing articles. I have learned that outsourcing articles written by highly professional entities such as the New York Times are much better written than the other articles out there. However, some of the smaller bloggers have good content too. It is a question of sifting through a lot of content to find the good stuff.

My findings:

Outsourcing Articles
If I choose the top 1% of outsourcing articles out there, I might get a handful of shares.

General Business Articles
For some reason, I get more shares for articles originally posted by Wall Street Journal. I feel that knowing what to share is less than half as important as finding a good source for articles or photos to share. If you have a source that is popular with your users, you would get much more reliable results. General business is semi-related to my main theme of outsourcing, so it is worth posting in moderation.

International Business Articles
The closest thing to an outsourcing article is one about international business since outsourcing is generally thought of as being done offshore. Some international business articles do okay on my profile.

Success Articles
Success is a theme that typically does well on social media. There are success quotes on Twitter, and success articles. Which success article will be the most successful on your profile? You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. Some articles are more business oriented while others are lighter in nature. Try to figure out what type of crowd you have.

Spiritual Articles
I am working on finding out more about this, but I had very good luck with a post about the benefits of meditation.

General News
It is best to publish general news that has some relevance to your main theme, or that might appeal to your audience. I have had mediocre success with general news. I even tried publishing hot news like the Charlie Hebdo disaster and that didn’t do too well either.

Coffee
Coffee has absolutely nothing to do with business. But, since I learn a lot from watching, I learned that some of the top marketing professionals out there integrate coffee, snacks, and pet themes into their marketing articles. I posted some really good articles about coffee with stunning photos and they did really well on my G+ profile! Posting about coffee will really “perk” up your social media campaigns!

Animals
The most popular photos I’ve posted so far were of animals. Cute cats taking naps, or looking in the mirror, kangaroos, meercats, doggies, and other animals are a crowd pleaser. Most people love animals, and marketing experts understand this.

Travel Photos
In general, people like photos of beautiful places. If you want to attract a large crowd fast, find some viral travel photos and post one per day on your social media account of choice. Boring travel photos don’t work well, and photos that include humans generally don’t win a prize, but stunning scenery wins the game time after time with almost any crowd.

Articles that mean something to you
As a general rule, if something fascinates you, your enthusiasm can influence how the post does on your profile through the metaphysical rule of attraction. Additionally, your profile is about you, so publishing a few articles about what you think is interesting do in fact belong on your profile even if they are off-topic.

Summary
Unfortunately, I am very sad to say this, but my serious posts about relevant business topics have not done that well. Although I try to pick the most interesting articles out there to post on my account, at best, they only get a few likes. At first I was worried about relevancy — whether general business would be appropriate on my account vs. purely outsourcing posts. Unfortunately, I learned that articles about coffee, pictures of beautiful animals and photos of stunning natural scenery are more than ten times as applealing to my business oriented audience than practical business posts. So, I don’t fight it. I publish a mixture of outsourcing, international business, general business, and other types of posts. I get tons of likes every day, and hopefully my accounts will continue to grow!

Google+ suspended me, but I learned something

September 5, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Google+ has many members because gmail automatically gives you an account attached to your gmail account. So, the number of users on Google+ is deceivingly high if you look at this top-line analytic. The total amount of active members has also been manipulated. The total number of members who login several times a month might be low, and the total number of members with accounts with 1000+ followers would be a much better analytic for comparisons.

Google+ makes it hard to grow
It is hard to grow a business presence on Google+ by using Google+. If you put a G+ button on your already popular website, that is the easiest way to get followers if you already get big traffic. There are many people using Google+ in social media, travel, and programming. But, other industries have a very sparse presence. Basically, there are very few good accounts to follow. Additionally, Google+ limits the number of accounts you can follow in a day. On Twitter to gain followers, you follow lots of others and then they follow you back. On Google+, only 10% of the relevant people I follow, actually follow me back. It makes it very hard to grow.

Moderators can get you lynched
Posting on Google+ communities is a fast way to get clicks. I posted lots of relevant content in the programming, social media, and outsourcing communities. The content I posted was 100% relevant to each community and hand-picked. I published about 20 pieces per day, and was rejected by seven moderators in a period of a week. This was the biggest reason why I feel I was shut down. So, you can’t follow a lot of people without being stopped, you can’t post content without getting in trouble, what can you do?

The Google Gods can shut you down permanently
If you decide to use Google+, it has some nice features like circles. It is fun, and might make a difference for your SEO rank. But, if you invest heavily in your profile, beware! If you do something that the Google Gods don’t like, they can shut you down permanently. They will probably warn you and suspend you a few times first. But, they are the ones in control, not you. Your investment of hours of your time can be completely wiped out on a whim of the Gods! So, use caution.

I wasn’t informed of what I did wrong
I spent two hours on hold calling Google to try to figure out what I did wrong. Nobody answered and no information was furnished. I used the G+ help feature and got an answer from an answer-giver who didn’t sound like he worked for Google although he was knowledgeable. He said that he was once suspended too, and that they refuse to tell you what you did wrong because they don’t want you gaming the system. I was given a list of policies of what behavior they don’t allow — however, I didn’t feel that I broke any of their guidelines. My only crime was following too many people, and not being popular with a bunch of anal moderators.

How, can I plan my future with G+
I am still allowed to use the “+” feature and have gotten a few new followers using it. Maybe plussing is the way to get ahead on Google+, and not following or posting? It is all a big mystery to me. If you have a large following, then posting on your account will get you lots of exposure, but I only have 150 followers. What to do? I plan to share a lot less on communities. The communities I do share on will be ones that have never rejected a post in the past. I will look carefully and un-join any communities that have moderators that block my posts — ever! I will also post more on my own account since that is safe. I will probably do more plussing since that is also safe. I’m not sure how I will reach the magical 1000 mark where your SEO dreams supposedly come true. Maybe my new techniques will work. What I really want is to find an expert. I have been looking around, but with no luck.

A month after the fact: I have been reinstated on Google. I’m being a lot more careful now. I seldom post on groups as that was what got me in the most trouble (I think.) But, I posted a very helpful article from the best social media account on G+ on one a very relevant community page and the moderator removed it. I’m beginning to think that perhaps G+ makes it hard to grow until you get critical mass of around 1000 followers, and then they help your material get noticed a lot more. I guess I’ll find out. I’m at 200 members now.

Tags on Google+ cannot be used the way they are on Twitter

September 4, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Leave a comment

Twitter and Google+ are both fun, but can’t really be used the same way. Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters while Google is more flexible. Google+ will let you write posts much longer than 140 characters, but will only show the first 400 or so characters before you need to click the “see more” link. I think Google’s attitude about letting you post longer posts adds a lot of flexibility to their social media venue. If only they had the volume of active users that Twitter does (technically they have more active users that Twitter, but it seems like they only have 10% if you look at active members of groups or people who post regularly).

Google+ rewards you more for the words at the top of your post.
This is actually very smart. I give Google points of intelligence. I learned that in Google+’s search results they reward you more for words closer to the beginning of the post. So, if you want to stress one or more particular tags, put them in the first line. I noticed that words near the bottom of my opening paragraph did help me show up on search results, but several notches down — to the point where you needed to scroll a bit to see them. I’m not sure if the necessity to scroll hurts you a lot or a little, but it could hurt you a lot, so keep this in mind!

Google+ tags don’t do much good unless…
If you tag a post with a keyword that doesn’t appear in your verbiage, you might not show up at all on keyword searches. If you have a popular account with many followers, or you pick a very unpopular tag, you might still show up. But, for the rest of us, you need to make sure your keyword shows up in your text, no matter how awkward it is to fit it in there.

Twitter just lets you tag and show up
Twitter lets you write about anything, and put any tag you like. If someone retweets you, especially if it is a retweet from that particular keyword’s tag feed, then you might show up better under that tag. But, the flexibility is much greater with tags on Twitter even though you are limited to very few characters.

What really matters in the end?
I’ve retweeted popular content on Google+ with really mainstream keywords. However, these prominent retweets didn’t get any plusses despite the fact that they were from excellent sources. I retweeted content from Harvard Business Review and many of the prominent players in the social media arena. It seems that proper tagging on Google+ might get you a little bit of popularity, if that. What seems to matter is having people who come regularly to your page, and share your content. What also matters is having high quality original content that people really like.

I gasp as see my Twitter clicks go from 2 a month to 42

September 4, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter is a very simple, yet complicated social media platform. It is easy to tweet. Any idiot can tweet, but the problem is that most of the people who do tweet — are idiots. I looked at my analytics for previous months and years on Twitter. As I see my evolution unfold, I am painfully reminded of how I used to not have a clue of how to effectively use Twitter. Effective use of Twitter is like an art form. You get gradually better at it over time, but nothing happens all of a sudden.

Many novices are fooled by the top line number. They think that having lots of followers is a good thing. More followers is not bad, but it doesn’t translate into any SEO realities either. The key in Twitter is to have good tweets going to good content that your audience likes! Our worst several months we were getting only about two clicks a month. After I started really taking Twitter more seriously and spending more time creating more artful tweets, my click rate went up a bit. But, after I hired a professional comedy writer, that is where I saw the real results. We peaked at 42 clicks a month and had over a dozen different people retweet us.

I used to count straight retweets, but now I am more interested in how many different people retweet us. I retweet myself from my various accounts, but that means very little to me, and even less to you. I take pride when strangers retweet my content at least once a month. If the same guy keeps retweeting me, but nobody else does, then I lose interest.

Honestly, my twitter analytics for the outsourcing site are very poor. I often question whether it is worth it to even continue with such small numbers. I want hundreds of clicks and hundreds of retweets, not a dozen new people retweeting me on a good month. My Notary Twitter on the other hand is getting thousands of clicks using the PPC program. What works for one account doesn’t necessarily work for the other. So, I’m going to have to strategize here about what to do.

My gut feeling is that it makes more sense to create more content and let Google do the work rather than slaving away trying to create great Tweets and wondering why the retweet rate is so low!

Tweets:
(1) Effective use of Twitter is like an art form. You get gradually better at it over time.
(2) The key in Twitter is to have good tweets going to good content that your audience likes!

You might also like:

Social Media Optimization: Checking the effectiveness of each of your campaigns
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/12/20/social-media-optimization-checking-the-effectiveness-of-each-of-your-campaigns/

Your last four tweets count the most
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/12/09/your-last-four-tweets-count-the-most/