Facebook is a much more private social network, and although if your company has a page, it is public, growing your fan base is easier the more fans you have. This is because as the number of ‘likes’ your page has grows, the number of people’s profile pages the updates you post to your site will appear on, giving you more exposure and the possibility of accruing new ‘likers’. For that reason, you may find allocating a budget for Facebook adverts is useful for spreading the word about your page. Either way, with Facebook, until you have a decent number of fans, it’s not worth spending time coming up with the next best viral idea because if there aren’t enough people interacting with it, you won’t get the return it could provide if you wait a while and implement it when your audience has increased.

Twitter however is much more public. Anybody can search for keywords on Twitter, or use applications like Hootsuite which enable streams to be set up that do the hard work of searching for tweets featuring certain keywords, bringing them together in one place. For that reason, if you tweet about the latest green trends, you could find yourself recruiting followers who enjoy keeping abreast of green issues plaguing the world, and if you tweet about kitchen gadgets, you’ll likely find a few notification emails in your inbox telling you a few foodies have begun following you to peruse your Twitter feed. It is therefore arguable that investing more time tweeting will pay off with follower numbers growing quicker than if you just post an RSS feed of your blog.

One of the main things to remember is not to be disheartened if the number of followers you have seems to take a while to grow. If you make a heartened effort at sharing useful information, offering insights into products (not necessarily just your own as this can be a turn off to some followers) and creating a likeable persona for yourself or your company, people are more likely to enjoy interacting with you, and the followers should follow.

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Social media is a forum providing real time and asynchronous interaction, making staying in touch with family, friends, old school mates and work colleagues a piece of cake. However it can also be an extremely powerful marketing tool when used effectively.

Most people logging on to their Facebook profile will be familiar with the page layout which features advertising down the righthand side of the page, beneath the latest friend suggestions and recommended pages for you to ‘like’. The power of social media as an advertising mechanism is not confined to follow the same format as other web advertising means with skyscrapers and banner ads, however. Many businesses are embracing Facebook and Twitter with the new and exciting opportunities they provide, setting up a Twitter profile to share news about the company and to tweet about the successes of their business and creating Facebook pages that allow other users to like the page and contribute to conversations on the wall, sharing images and interacting with the companies, businesses and brands in a way that they have not been able to before.

If your company doesn’t yet utilise the opportunities that social media provides, there are some important considerations however. Just setting up a Facebook page and Twitter profile and expecting fans and followers to roll in is not going to have a large impact on your business. Users expect interaction and expect you to come to them and earn their comments and support as a follower, so the most important thing is that social media needs time, effort and reciprocal interactions to be successful. Without this investment in your company’s social media accounts, you will fail to attract followers and fans and could be wasting one of the most powerful marketing tools available to you.

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And although a part of me still thinks that, I can’t help but to see how twitter is invaluable to a company, especially an online company.

This is because Twitter is essentially a free way to do market research and in a fraction of the time.

Let me explain.

When a person ‘tweets’ they are essentially making their thoughts public and letting anyone use that information to get a scope on what twitter users world-wide are thinking.

This is possible because there are web-based applications that allow you to monitor trends or monitor how often a particular topic is discussed on twitter.

For example, one such website is trendistic.com. By using this site you can see how popular a particular topic is in a given time period.

So imagine you were to search for ‘Wimbledon’ then Trendistic would tell you that it stopped being a hot topic on the 5th of July, which means if you are selling a tennis related product then after the 5th you are likely to see a drop in sales.

This is great because it can let you know, a head of the curve, what your sales figures are likely to be and you can then take the necessary steps to counter the effects.

Another site is tweetstats.com, which gives you the top 10 tweeted topics at the moment.

All of this is great for a web site as it gives you a few pointers as what to write about (at the moment it would be Inception and in a week or two Toy Story), which from a SEO point of view makes your site more ‘visible’ and ‘findable’.

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Now, I don’t own a television – I don’t watch that much of it, can’t afford a license at the moment and I have the internet which offers me just about the same. However, one thing I used to be slightly hindered with is the news. It tends to be the olds by the time I get to it.

BUT thanks to the power of the internet, Twitter and a handy little widget shown to me by hung-over Matthew, I can keep up-to-date with notifications and opinions of Tweeters I am following.

As powerful as Google News is, news is rarely real-time as results are collated from different sources – granted some news sites such as BBC, Sky News and FIFA offer real-time updates, but you are restricted to remaining on the specific page.

So how can this help with SEO?

As has already been established, Twitter is a powerful tool within SEO, particularly in regards to its integration with Google searches and the effect of trending topics. By re-tweeting or posting updates on the news, you can get your name out there effectively, boosting your influence within the Twitosphere (or whatever it’s called nowadays).

Obviously Twitter is not the be all and end all of SEO and marketing your website, but it can be incredibly powerful in keeping you up-to-date, posting your company news updates and getting your name out there. Oh, and install Chromedbird or Echofon (depending on your browser) – they’re amahazing.

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Logically I should tie my redsauce blog today into something to do with the news; football, tennis or how one of Jedward fell and hurt his ankle on live TV (that actually was kinda funny, in a harrowing way).

Not today though, for today is the 5th July and that means ‘Arbitrary Celebration Day!‘

What is ACD? Nothing at all, but get enough people talking, blogging and tweeting about it and it becomes something. This is demonstrated neatly in Twitter using trending topics – essentially a list of what everyone is tweeting about.

Some of the top trends worldwide are #mostpopularlies, Maradona and #thereshouldbeanapp. Chances are one person tweeted their most popular lie, someone found it hilarious and it has since spread like wildfire. You can even see the lifespan of particular trends and the sudden speed with which they tend to boom.

For example, the #mostpopularlies trend began at around 3.30pm yesterday and by 7PM, approximately 1.97% of Twitter was tweeting that particular subject and by midnight, that number had fallen to 0.26%. Fickle, to say the least.

I don’t expect my ACD to get any kind of attention on Twitter – I only have 25 followers and I still don’t really see much of a benefit, but it’s interesting how one thing can spread so widely in such a short space of time.

Now to trend some SEO, methinks.

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While the Champ takes their iPad away on romantic weekends to the Cotswolds and logs their every bum scratch on Four Square, the Cynic squeezes iPhones until their signal splutters out and takes a hammer to the next needless Nano. A battle of the wits commenced over Twitter and whether or not its market is mainstream or whether it is niche.

The issue centred around how much of an audience a tool such as Twitter will gather in relation to its social media competitors. The Champ felt that Twitter was mainstream and already an important part of our social networks – in their eyes, Twitter could only get bigger and better. The Cynic was of the position that Twitter was in the mainstream consciousness due to press and celebrity followings, but that the average Joe still preferred his Facebook.

There’s no doubt that Twitter is certainly great for media types or businesses who are looking to self-promote and network with people they wouldn’t normally get the chance to, but has it succeeded in wooing the general public? Could Twitter do better to create a more universal appeal or is it great just the way it is? One thing’s for sure, the redsauce office were divided; it seems that only time will tell whether we’ll all be Tweeters or Twits.

Dare I say, you can tweet us @redsauceseo to let us know what you think!

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So one week in and let me tell you what I think.

Well, I never thought I’d say this but I actually prefer it to Facebook and that’s because it’s like Facebook but a lot faster.

Let me explain…

I don’t know about everybody else but I just used Facebook for the status updates. I checked the updates and then I didn’t know what to do, so just logged off.

But with Twitter the updates (or tweets) are faster and there are more of them, so I can just leave Twitter on in the background and wait for the tweets to roll in.

But I hear you ask: “what’s the point of that?”

Well, you can follow anyone or any subject and get up-to-the-minute news from all around the world and for journalists this means that it is a vital resource.

Take me for example, I used to scour the web or Google news to find news about office space, commerce and gadgets, which usually took over 30 minutes a day. But now I’ve got twitter I can subscribe (or follow) office news and receive it instantly without doing anything.

Twitter also allows me to do a shout-out which essentially gives me my own 11 year old boy shouting “read all about…”. Whenever I write a blog or an article I can use Twitter to self-advertise and raise the web presence of my writing.

And by following key users or key topics I can get noticed and develop a following. Last night alone I gained 10 followers and I’m pretty sure that’s all down to who I follow myself.

Now if I link to one of my articles and just one person follows the link, then isn’t Twitter worth it?

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So, its here, we have to ‘deal’ with it.  This will be the view of many SEO companies.

Is it something to be embraced or is it a chore?  How will SEO companies manage to take social media and actually make it a beneficial service for their clients?  They have a few options, of which some are here:

1. Pass on the work to genuine social media experts, admitting that its not their core service
2. Pretend that they know what they are doing and sell it anyway
3. Bury their head in the sand and ignore it
4. Get learning fast and become a premium service provider of social media marketing

One thing is for sure, if ever we at redsauce.com can feel smug about something, its that content is – and always will be – the cornerstone of any successful site.  Why do I say that?  Well, social media marketing, or social media optimization, however you want to describe it (even tho its two different things), HAS to have behind it some great content.

Are you listening, SEO agency employees?  Attempts at swaying social media is futile unless there is something genuinely of interest which is referred to, or linked to.

So not only does it mean that SEO companies will have to pull up their socks regarding social media optimization methods and practices, but also with the production of great content, which most SEO companies are not exactly famous for.

In the next few months and years, we will see the social media world have thrown at it hundreds if not thousands of ways to try and game the system, much like the early days of search, and this particular author is hopeful that it will be interpreted correctly by Google, with the slant very much focussed on rewarding great content, rather than automated twitter accounts and various other social media account automation.

Time will tell of course, but we are definitely moving in to the age of content, of a humanisation of search engine results, whether you use Google to search, or whether you use other means.

On that note, have you searched for things recently using twitter?  Its now become quite a viable alternative to the mighty Google hasn’t it?

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America’s oldest federal cultural institution has announced plans to start a new kind of archive and each one of us could have already become unwitting contributors. What is this exciting, highbrow, intellectual archive ermm archiving I hear you ask? Wait for it…. drum roll please…… tweets!

Yes, those 140 character glimpses into the mundane and exciting world of the lives of Twitter’s 100 million+ users worldwide are to be documented and will go on general display at the world’s largest library for the world and his wife to see. OK, maybe I’m going over the top here…

In reality the archive will contain all the tweets sent (and with over 55 billion posted a day they have a lot to choose from) but is only likely to show prominent tweets from key figures. Major tweets include those posted by Pesident Barack Obama on the day he was elected and the first ever tweet from Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey.

“I think it shows the tweets are an interesting part of the historical record,” said Twitter’s Alex MacGillivray.

“This project however is not about us, it is about our users and the fact they use the service to chronicle these amazing events. President Obama actually tweeted after he was elected. That is a big deal and it’s something he did.”

But what’s the point?, I hear you cry! The bods from the museum believe the tweets could help us to learn more about human behaviour and peoples’ reactions to major events. Clever stuff eh? So, next time you’re tweeting about how burnt your toast was at breakfast or how the man sat next to you on the bus should really have showered this morning, remember you could be re-writing history! Oohh, get you!

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Basically the new system is designed to make Twitter more integrated with the web. So rather than going on a site or blog, then clicking on a ‘follow me on Twitter’ type button and going to their Twitter page, logging in and following them, it will all be integrated in a more simple way.They also plan to integrate Twitter onto sites such as YouTube, you could tweet about a video whilst you’re watching it, without interrupting the video or opening other windows and tabs. Or on a you could follow a journalist from your favourite online column in just one click, direct from their site rather than searching for them on Twitter itself.

Other sites planned to be using the @Anywhere tool inlcude Bing, eBay, Yahoo! and The New York Times. Any sites wishing to give @Anywhere functionality just simply have to drop in a few lines of JavaScript.

Twitter’s winning formula has always been it’s simplicity and openness, this further enhances that rule for its users, by making the process of ‘tweeting as you’ more quick and simple, as the site intended. Sounds like a good plan!

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