The power of twitter?

[stuarty]

Certainly puts the cat amongst the pigeons!

Precisely - that's exactly what it's intended to do. Anybody on here promoting their own websites should learn by this!

This is a classic online marketing trick where you post a controversial article in order to provoke reaction on the latest craze - in this case twitter.

Bryan - A.W. is a master of spin and you just fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book. All that linking to it does is increase his links, his pagerank and increase the potential number of people to subscribe to his $100 a month course. That huge big advert didn't get there by accident after all Fair play to him - he makes his living out of his site and it clearly worked when you posted the link.

The article itself however is pretty crap to be honest and it contradicts what he said on 29th march last year.

"everything you do prevents Twitter from becoming a spam filled mess.....It is the complete opposite of email spam hype marketing....If I were to spew nothing but hollow hyped up marketing messages nobody would subscribe...From a social network and marketing standpoint Twitter is worth checking out and understanding."

(i'm not linking to it from here - google "seobook twitter" and read the article for yourself)

I've no doubt some of his paid content is great for newbies but you can get everything he sells for free on an SEO forum like digitalpoint. You could always read -> h t t p : / / googlesearchsucks.com/seobook-review-5-reasons-not-to-buy-seobook/

A.W does tend to contradict himself on his own advice. He's always jumping on whichever bandwagon is driving past at the time.

For example, he's telling everybody that SEO SUCKS and will be dead in a few years time but he's still selling his $100 a month course?

linky-> h t t p : / / w w w . internetbusiness.co.uk/07072008/seo-is-dead-aaron-wall/

The moral - don't believe all the hype you read.

[GeorgeKing]

I saw this on The Daily Show yesterday, and if you've 5minutes to kill I thought you might like it. Video nearer the bottom of the page!

'The Daily Show' Takes On Twitter (VIDEO)

[GeorgeKing]

I now Twitter myself (twitter.com/pikoDesign). Whether I have anything interesting to say or can make it work remains to be seen.....

[frockery]

Although I started off thinking of it as a bit of fun, I've been quite surprised at how it brings in traffic and my wee shop gets a fair number of hits via Twitter (been too lazy/busy to calculate conversions).

However, my new forums are getting a lot of hits and backlinks, mainly due to the controversial nature of the threads and tweets which link to them. Best ever tweet had to be 'home educators eat babies?' (which I would urge you all to go and vote for on News Biscuit!). It also encouraged a major children's charity to join the forums to try and salvage its reputation after a combined Twitter and facebook viral campaign denounced its recent (and not so recent) anti family activities.

I like Twitter, but then I am a simple soul and just bowl along merrily with my two very different accounts.

[KMiDigital]

The way we use it is to offer it to clients as part of a social networking deal and get them to let others know whats happening at an event or even a product launch. As long as they don't go mad with advertising and marketing it seems to work quite well. It's early days to know if its working or not but most of the clients love it and we can use it on our posts too.

[dotsno]

Twitter's just yet another tool in your growing communications arsenal, though for many people it may end up completely useless, or simply not worth the time and energy when compared to other forms of communicating: there are a lot of things to weigh up before deciding whether Twitter will give you any returns on your investment in it.

Think of it as a telephone where the whole world can tap into your conversations; so a message you previously had to tell individually to loads of people can now be given very easily to many people with a simple "tweet" - that's what the little 140 character messages are. Kind of like texting, publicly (though you can hide your tweets to make everything private and only visible to those you choose). Kind of like an email newsletter but in miniature.

The great benefit though - is this isn't just one-way; it enables conversations between you and others. Two way texting, publicly

No doubt another new communications tool will be along soon so hold onto your hats, the world is getting faster! But for some people Twitter is going to be the ultimate way to communicate; for others not so much so. It can be a means to converse with people, or to just keep people updated; while the theory says "join the conversation", it's perfectly feasible for people to use it as more of a noticeboard first, conversation later. I know a hair stylist that's looking at using it to flag up last-minute appointments and answer questions about hair products and styling - and a dentist that's using it as a reminder system for clients who prefer that to their existing email reminder system (which is used by people who prefer *that* to their telephone reminder system!).. not exactly what it was intended for I suppose but hey... and I'm not sure I want the world to know when I'm due for a dental check-up but apparently some people are fine with it. Curious.

Twitter was invented in the 1930s really... go check this out:
Notificator - Dead Media Archive

[findnetworkingevents]

I think the secret is to find people who are interested in the subject you are promoting, follow them and then more often than not they will follow you back.

Use something like Tweetdeck to search for keyword mentions.

Next stage is to make sure you send out relevant tweets regularly to maintain interest.

Cheers

Stuart

[Gordon N]

What I think a lot of people forget when it comes to SEO or more accurately 'online marketing' is that search engine visible links are only part of the game. My understanding and belief of how a service such as twitter is concerned is live users.

Thanks to iPhones, Blackberrys and additional apps such as tweetdeck etc a lot of tweeters now have updates firing at them from all directions - myself included. If I get a tweet with an eye catching message and a link I will follow it, and so will the majority of users. If I think any of my followers would also benefit I will RT (retweet) it, so it reaches even further!

Ultimately your site should be developed with the end user in mind first and then optimised for search engines. Google doesn't buy your services or products, people do - for all search engines are an important source of traffic, services like twitter, digg, delicious etc are still sources of real people that might just want to put some money your way.