Thunder SEO

So you finally signed up for this “Twitter” thingy you’ve been hearing so much about on CNN, and now what?! Who do you follow? What do you Tweet about? Who’s going to care about what you have to say anyway? Relax. Twitter is a huge neighborhood with a niche community for everyone. Yes, it’s true that you shouldn’t only Tweet about what you had for breakfast (yeah, there’s a #hashtag for that), but don’t be afraid to share a blog post you found interesting or your thoughts about  the new restaurant on the corner. Keep in mind though, people don’t respond well to self-promotion. Instead of broadcasting your daily activities or your company’s special offers, make Twitter a place to build relationships with the people and profiles in your space.

In early 2009, Twitter launched Twitter Suggestions to facilitate activity on new profiles. According to founder Evan Williams, “The reason we created this feature is because lots of people sign up to Twitter but aren’t following anyone, so we’re trying to help get them started.” The last page of the sign up process automatically directs you to a list of 500 profiles you “might” be interested in, and allows you to follow all 500 with the check of 1 box.

At first glance, this seems like a great feature. Some of you might be thinking “Wow, now I can follow all of these great updates from Shaq, Starbucks, and look, even The White House is Tweeting these days!,” but this process seems to threaten the organic nature of Twitter. When Twitter first gained popularity, people starting following profiles they were interested in. So whether they were getting updates from a frustrated roommate or tweets about the best cable service provider deals, they were following these profiles because the Tweets were providing value. Does following these suggested profiles make people Tweet more? Probably not. Do the suggestions promote a give-and-take community approach? Nope. Are these profiles going to follow every Joe, Jim & Sally back and “ReTweet” their posts? Never.

Don't Make Homer Facepalm by "Following" Twitter Suggestions!

Here are a few reasons Thunder SEO doesn’t suggest ‘Twitter Suggestions’ when implementing your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: Read more

An example of a useful site badge

Site badges are images hosted on your own server that come with pre-made markup for your fans to use on their own sites that link back to you. Site badges are most successful on sites where your fans or users have incentive to link to your site. For example, users have incentive to link to their own profiles on twitter.com, because they are promoting themselves and thus creating a link to the domain.

This is probably the most hands-off link building strategy you can use. It takes a few hours for proper setup, but then becomes a passive way to get links to your site. If it’s done right and easy to find on your site, can get you a lot of high quality links over time.

3 important steps in creating site badges:

1. Designing the Badges
2. Html Text Areas
3. Javascript One Click

Designing the Badges

When designing the badges, think about your user base.

• Are your users already immersed in all of the major social media sites? Then think about making your badge more of an icon style to fit in nicely next to their twitter, facebook, del.i.cious, myspace and YouTube icons.
• Are your users or fans of a mixed demographic? Then make a wide variety of badges for different settings.

Just make sure to keep the branding consistent so people recognize the website if they click through from the badge.

HTML Text Areas

Not only are you going to be providing an image for the badge, but it’s best to provide the HTML you want the link to use. That way you can choose the title, the alt text for the image and the page the link goes to. Use the html tag textarea to define an area where you can write the html for the badge that a browser won’t parse. This area is then copied by your fans and pasted into their own sites.

Example text area:

Type your badge’s html here

Javascript One Click

This step is the one most often forgotten. you need to add a short line of javascript to the text area to select the all of the html within the textarea in one click. According to seomoz.org, this greatly increases the number of people that will actually add a badge to their own site. Remember, we are a convenience driven society, so making an entire area highlighted with one click means less work for the user.

In the opening tag for the textarea add this markup: onclick=”javascript:select();”

So your textarea opening should look like this:

<textarea onclick=”javascript:select();”>

Try it out for yourself, click in the box to see the entire area select with one click.

It’s also important that you make it easy to find the badges on your site. If you create a whole page for badges, make it easy to find in the navigation, and don’t be afraid to tell people about the badges. The whole point of creating them is to get people to use them.

A great example of badges we did for a client is at Natural Baby Pros. Here, there is a wide variety of badges, and to get links across the site, we made each of the badges link to a different URL.