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My Twitter Strategy

I have been using Twitter since the day it was made available and I have to say that I really like using it for my own personal business. I have developed over time a Twitter strategy that is really working for me both for follower growth, link sharing, and personal satisfaction.

I typically tweet on Monday through Friday and typically tweet five times a day. I cover 6:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m., noon, 3:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. There are some times when I may tweet more, but this is my typical schedule. I use HootSuite and schedule all my tweets for the day in the morning. In the morning I also respond to all direct messages, and review what my lists and followers are saying and interact back with them.

What I have found is that through regular interaction with certain people in my industry I have created a network where we will retweet and comment on each others updates. As I have over 2,473 followers on one account and 2,032 on the other, when I retweet someone to my own followers the exposure for that tweet is strong and link exposure excellent. I monitor who retweets me and know who has klout on the Web so that I can look to retweet them and know that they will retweet me. It is a win-win situation of power users in the same industry, who are not competitors, sharing the viral nature of our follower lists through retweets among ourselves.

The personal satisfaction that I receive from these interactions on Twitter is what fuels my additional activity. It is enjoyable and I learn things from others. Twitter for me is a vibrant community of similarly minded people. That does not mean that I am just tweeting to people I know. It means that I have many followers but the people I interact with the most are in my industry and my account followers get the benefit of these exchanges between power professionals.

I hear all the time from potential clients, “I don’t get social media.”,  “It seems like a big waste of my time.”, “Twitter is so far down on my list of want to do’s or things to implement.” Although they may not “get” social media, there are others just like me who get it and who are soaking up the viral community nature and new search engine benefits from strong effective interaction on Twitter.

If you don’t “get” Twitter but need someone who does to create your own Twitter strategy, I invite you to visit our Twitter services page to find out how inexpensive updates to Twitter may be for your business. They start at $170 for three tweets a day for a month to $560 for 10 tweets a day for a month including follower interaction.

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SEO Is Much More Than Code Optimization

Organic placement improvement for your website is much more than code optimization. In fact I have seen some sites whose code is not really optimized still place well. But for the typical business website code optimization is a start and just one of the pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together for better Web visibility.

First off, it is very important to understand that where you place on the search engines is now much more that what is happening back on your own website. Now it is about all these things working together:

  • Inbound links from new sites and authority websites
  • Facebook activity and regular status updates
  • Twitter activity and follower growth as well as retweets from authority followers
  • On-domain blogging to build Web authority and keyword density
  • Quality content, more than blogging, press releases and white papers are needed
  • Website code optimization
  • Regular updates to your home page and website content

What I have found is that once a site hits the tipping point by doing all of these things on a regular basis they insulate themselves from big drops in the search engines. I have seen sites stay at nearly the same search positions without additional code tweaks and even improve from just the above updates. It does not require a monthly source code update to keep and maintain position organically. I have however found that improvement from a poor position once these strategies have been implemented is slow but steady.

If you need help in these area, I encourage you to visit our website to find out how to start with an evaluation so you can create a blue print for how your website can get better organic placement.

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When Should You Update Your Website?

I’ve just this week done reviews for several clients about why their organic placement is slipping or is non-existent. There has been a common thread to each of these clients. The code on their site is bad, in some cases really bad. What exactly do I mean?

In some cases a site is so old or has so many problems that a redesign may actually be cheaper than a rework of the code to try to bring a website better performance. Here are several specifics to consider:

  1. Is your website built from a host’s template? Guess what, it may be pretty but contains code that slows page load time (which Google considers and weighs now for organic placement). Additionally there are missed opportunities to build in SEO tactics as you even name elements when you use a template.
  2. Is your site built with FrontPage and you are pasting in content from Word? Did you know that many of these WSIWYG that is What You See Is What You Get editors (not Dreamweaver fortunately) add all kinds of depreciated tags or span and style tags to the actual paragraph itself. This makes a page so very code heavy, slows speed, and makes it very hard for a webmaster to update. If you don’t update a site in FrontPage where it has been created and is how it is managed your can really mess up the webmasters syncing protocol and potentially lock them out from doing further updates. In fact, even worse is that FrontPage has been depreciated by Microsoft and so not even used by most professional webmasters. When I see code that FrontPage has created I know that the site may have been built in 2005  or about that time which is really pretty old technology.
  3. When you consider what it costs to have someone like me review and upgrade the code, rework the content to use SEO tactics on an old site or a template-driven site, a new design may actually be more cost efficient. It is simply not a good idea to spend $2,500 to $3,000 to rework a very old website, or one that is controlled by a template where certain aspects simply cannot be changed.

For sites such as this where the site owner may not have the money for a redesign, there is still hope. There are inbound marketing approaches that can be done in the meantime to help build link activity, and content creation updates that can help a site until there is the budget for a full redesign. Sometimes even just the rework of the home page can put a bandaid temporarily on the problem until there is more money available for a redesign and upgrade.

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What About Google+?

If you are involved in marketing your products and services do you need to keep a Google+ page updated along with Facebook and Twitter? If you have the time, you should consider setting up and maintaining at least a minimal profile and business page at Google+. Am I recommending that you spend the same amount of time and money on Google+ as you invest in exposure on Facebook and Twitter – no I am not. At least not at this time.

I am watching Google+ carefully, but have not rolled out a service offering on the program yet. Although I think that Google+ and Google+ Pages may be good for businesses, for now there is not enough mainstream consumer or business to business activity there yet to warrant a strong financial investment in maintaining your presence. I am mostly seeing professionals such as myself in the Google+ world. There is simply not a strong vibrant consumer or business selling presence on Google+ yet…

What I do see is that Google is integrating Google+ into nearly all of their properties as they continue to roll out enhancements and improvements to the application. The next hurdle will be the authorization of third party API apps that will allow scheduling of status updates. HootSuite is just one of the companies that Google has selected for testing. With the ability to schedule updates and manage multiple accounts Google+ will grow quickly.

I recommend that for many businesses starting now on Google+ to build a presence for the future is a very smart move. I have several clients who started using Twitter right when it came out and now have follower bases of over 2,500. These high follower bases have given these accounts an unusual amount of clout in their industry. Their updates are routinely retweeted reaching an astronomical number of readers. I expect in the long run Google+ will follow this same growth trend.