twitter reach Archives by Mark Murnahan

Is Twitter Good for SEO?: Is Ice Cream Good for Hemorrhoids?

I suspect that you want to know, “is Twitter good for SEO?” Either that, or your bum is feeling pretty sore, and you are willing to try anything. I am happy to help with the Twitter part, and I am sorry about your rump. Try pistachio, but don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.

I am surprised that more people have not discussed the topic of Twitter and SEO to provide their opinion-based answers. I think that a lot of people are afraid to touch on this, for fear of giving an unpopular answer, or being wrong. Well, leave it to me to tell you this: “Yes, Twitter helps SEO!”

Twitter can help with SEO efforts, directly, as well as indirectly when Twitter users share the information in places such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, and elsewhere. If somebody tells you otherwise, you are listening to the wrong SEO advice.

I read an article on the widely respected SEOmoz.org blog today that addressed the SEO value of Twitter. It reminded me how much I sometimes forget the importance of bringing things down to a very simple level. I guess I just forget that not everybody has done this “Internet thing” to earn food for the past decade and a half. I try to keep things pretty simple, but I know I can wing one over readers’ heads some days. I try to provide useful marketing and SEO tips, but if I ever forget to make them simple, I apologize. This one should be nice and easy.

I thought that the value of Twitter for SEO was pretty obvious to most users, a long time ago. Sometimes, when I see what other people are saying, I recognize that details like this can slip by some people. Here is a quote from the recent article on SEOmoz titled “The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist“:

“So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn’t have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed [learn more about nofollow]. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it’s time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.”

The article had some good points, but it really did take me back to grammar school. Quoting the article, “Now that we know” … what? Holy hemorrhoid! I guess I assumed that we knew this kind of thing years ago. Links from my old Yahoo chat groups in 1998 helped my SEO, but is that revolutionary, too? It was kind of funny to me how much it resembled something I said in early 2009 when I wrote the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends“. Here is a statement I made in the book, and I stand by it today:

“Many search engine optimizers (SEO) will overlook the value of Twitter for improving search engine penetration. If they miss this part, they are making a big mistake. A reason many SEO will dismiss this value is that Twitter uses the “nofollow” attribute in outbound links. Make no mistake; Twitter can greatly enhance your visibility in search engine results.”

Heck, maybe the Internet is coming up to speed, or maybe I am just one of those people who are as strange as a pickled duck fart and foresee things in some uncanny way. I don’t know … maybe it is a combination.

Do More Tweets Help SEO?

This should be obvious, but the impact of more people tweeting your website content may be even higher than you imagined. Whenever somebody tweets your linked content, it creates links to your website. The quality and quantity of inks to a website are the most important factors that search engines use to gauge the importance of a website. Also, the links Twitter produces are not necessarily only on Twitter. There are a lot of services which aggregate Twitter’ed content, as well as many widgets and other syndication through RSS in which it may appear on other websites.

It will be far more important for other people to tweet your content than just tweeting your link a squillion times. Don’t bother with that, because it is not going to make you a ton of new friends. A few times is fine, but let’s not go out of the way to garner death threats, and insults about your mother.

Do More Twitter Followers Help SEO?

I am the last person who would wish to promote a “Twitter follower-frenzy”, so I almost hate to say this. Many indicators will suggest that more followers on Twitter can improve the SEO value of a tweet. Yes, a high follower count does correlate to higher SEO value, but I believe it correlates even better with the number of Twitter lists a person is on and other measurements.

I know that a lot of people want to become popular on Twitter, but before you implement some off the cuff plan, be sure to read the article titled “How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful“. If you do the things that many moronic marketers suggest, people will wish a bad case of herpes on you and throw you on a flaming bed of nails before they will care to listen to you … or buy your stuff.

The important factor is being useful and giving people what they want. Here you go … try thinking a little bit more like this video.

There is not much that I dislike more than a bunch of bad marketers out there with nothing useful to say. I think that millions of Twitter users would agree with me on this. Don’t take this as any suggestion that you go and try to gather as many Twitter followers as you can. Instead, I recommend, as I always have, that you be useful. As with anything SEO-related, being useful and providing compelling information is what matters the most. If you can do that, many of the other factors seem to magically fall into place. I am pretty sure it can also help hemorrhoids, even better than ice cream.

Twitter Changed, But it is Still Useful for SEO

Although I still really like Twitter, it changed a lot over time. Twitter had a huge growth spurt, and as the new users poured in, much of the real value of the service dwindled. It is still good for SEO, but what so many people do not grasp is that if you expect people to tweet and retweet what you have to share, it had better be pretty damn awesome to be heard over the excess noise.

How much did Twitter change? I could write another book about this, but I would rather stick needles in my eyes. I will just offer this: I wrote about Twitter retweets on February 29th, 2009. It was titled “Twitter: The Tweet About Retweet” and it received many hundreds of retweets. Tweetmeme says 420, but that data is old, and it was actually many more. In another case, I wrote a really short and basic article (approximately 250 words) about Twitter username selection on April 8th of 2009. It also received a ton of retweets and 158 reader comments. Back in the earlier days, I would measure between 500-1,500 clicks on darn near any link I tweeted, within minutes. Now, a hundredth of that would buzz my radar.

Maybe I just became less “brilliant” with the things people love to share, but I am pretty sure that is not the case. Many Twitter users just don’t see it when they are trying to follow a squillion other people, with hopes of being followed back.

Today, when I tweet something from my blog, I do not count on Twitter to pass it along. In fact, Twitter directly accounts for under three percent of my website traffic. Moreover, I have measured that the website traffic coming directly from Twitter has a low probability of participating and adding their comments to a topic. I think this is because of Twitter-enhanced attention disorders which were there before Twitter. Twitter just made it even more “old fashioned” to actually read things and pay attention. My study on this is forthcoming, but let’s just start the study with whether you will take the time to finish reading and add your comment.

Since the time of these popular Twitter-related articles, I have written hundreds of very compelling and useful blog articles which far exceeded the relatively minor value of those. I can effectively measure the value of Twitter from a conversational standpoint as much lower than it was. The SEO value of Twitter and the Twitter “retweet” is still there, but if you want to break through the noise, it better be something stunning.

As I said in the article titled “Is Squidoo Good for SEO? Likely More Than You Think!“, I must add a basic disclaimer as follows:

“I do not rely on any single SEO tool too heavily, and I do not recommend that you do that, either. There is not a short list of SEO tools and tricks that will make you famously successful with search engines.”

If you came here about the ice cream, I am sorry about your bum. Perhaps you could try eating it really fast to take your mind off the ‘roids. If you came here about Twitter and SEO, please add your comments on my blog. Just type it in and let’s have a good old fashioned ice cream social.

Photo credit to weelakeo via Flickr

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Twitter is Useful but Blogging is Better

Twitter is a great place to gather useful information. It can also be a good place to find an audience of people who care about what you have to say. Twitter makes it easy to create a lot of business and personal connections. If you use Twitter with a little foresight, it can become an extremely valuable resource. If I did not believe this, I never would have spent the time and effort to write a book about Twitter, but blogging is even better. I am using Twitter as an example here, but much of this can be applied to other social media resources as well. What I wish to show is that many tools may be used for effective social media communications, and at the hub is a blog.

Many Twitter users have a blog, or even more precisely many bloggers have a Twitter account (or several). Blogs still outnumber Twitter users by hundreds of millions after all. Although Twitter can be useful, particularly in conjunction with a blog, it is not a silver bullet. I will explain this with data that I collected between March 2009 and March 2010, and provide charts to include comparisons as follows:

Twitter update (tweet) frequency and website traffic
Twitter followers and website traffic
Blog frequency and website traffic

Blogging is Better than Twitter, but Twitter is Still Useful

This is not a criticism of Twitter. I like Twitter, and I find a lot of great uses for the service. I meet a lot of wonderful people, I have interesting conversations, I learn from Twitter, and I share information with people using Twitter. However, it seems that while millions of business people have been fascinated by Twitter and a handful of other social media sites, it can be easy for them to overlook the even greater value of creating excellent website content, and doing it often. Social media can bring many people to a website, but consistent and high quality content development is key to keeping them coming back and keeping them telling their friends. This is extremely valuable to most business efforts.

In order to emphasize the importance of content creation (blogging), I will illustrate the side by side growth and reach of a Twitter account and a blog which were both created near the same time. The first blog post was on 7 December 2008 and my @murnahan Twitter account was created on 9 January 2009, so about a month apart. I used Twitter in conjunction with several other sites prior to this (copmagnet.com, stormmagnet.com, and others) but my @murnahan Twitter account and this blog create a good comparison. This is a one author blog and a one author Twitter account of about the same age.

Twitter Update (tweet) Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison

Many people believe that if they tweet at high velocity all day and night that it will bring huge traffic to their website. There has been some validity to this, but the landscape has changed. It should be obvious that influence is more important than simply yelling across a room and the same is true with Twitter. Here is a chart showing numbers of Twitter updates (tweets) compared with blog visits. I will add additional metrics later, but this may be an eye-opener to some people. Since lines on a tiny chart will not do this justice, I am providing the number of actual Twitter updates I sent during this period, below the chart. The high levels of traffic in the earlier part of the chart coincide loosely with a huge numbers of tweets, but then toward the more recent months you can see that traffic went back up (after I finished writing three books in 2009) while there were many thousands fewer tweets per month. Look at March 2009 with 9091 tweets compared to March 2010 with 175 tweets month-to-date.

Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar
9091	5969	1272	659	671	850	314	406	329	400	355	238	175

Twitter Followers and Website Traffic Comparison

A lot of Twitter followers should surely do the trick, right? It seems that there has been some amazing wool pulled over Twitter users’ eyes with this myth about Twitter followers. Sure, it is great to make a lot of connections, but how does that play into actual relevant website traffic? After all, website traffic is a common reason that a lot of people use Twitter. A squillion followers is a big dream for many people, but the way Twitter follower numbers relate to website traffic is not the same as some people may imagine. There is a lot more to building a brand and building website traffic than sending a bunch of tweets to a large number of followers.

I must say that in the beginning, Twitter was massively helpful in introducing people to this blog. In those days, people were retweet crazy, and it seemed that people retweeted everything I wrote. An example is an article I wrote about Twitter retweets … it was retweeted over 400 times. It was probably actually retweeted a lot more, but that is just what tweetmeme has on record.

Twitter helped to spread the word and create a lot of incoming links from many other social media sites as well. In May 2009, I wrote about how Twitter improves blog traffic (NOTE: “improves” and not just “increases”). In social media time, that was a long time ago. Twitter still holds great value that should not be overlooked or underutilized, but Twitter is different now.

Blog Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison

Twitter gets them there, but frequent content creation keeps them coming back.

Twitter can be instrumental in generating and cultivating an audience for a particular blog topic or service offering. A chart that cannot be overlooked is the one below which shows the direct relation of blog content creation and site visits. I used actual numbers of visits to my blog, so I multiplied the blog post numbers in order to be more visible in the chart. What I wanted to point out is how the lines follow a very similar course. While comparing nearly every metric of my website traffic, the one thing that relates more closely than any other is to continually create useful information for my readers. I hope that you will see this as an important focus in your efforts, too.

A blog is a hub for good social media outreach and is what keeps the machine moving. It is where you can reach more people with the information you want to share the most. All of the many related tools in your social media marketing strategy are fantastic and should be used to the best of your abilities. In the end, the tool that is expected to create more sales for your business is your website, so take good care of it and pay attention to the numbers.

If you have not already read the following articles, I encourage you to take time for these.

Twitter Like The Twitterati … But Get Me a Bucket!

Twitter Fame can come from tweeting frantically, as if your butt is on fire and Twitter will bring you a bucket of water to put it out. If you have not already learned this tactic, I will explain it. According to many estimates, there is a very small percentage of “power users” who send the majority of all updates on Twitter. How extreme is it? As a Harvard Business study pointed out, 10 percent of Twitter users account for 90 percent of Twitter updates.

Allow me to shock you for a moment with an observation.

Twitter Politics, Pandering, and Popularity

Some of the most powerful Twitter users are using old school tactics of politics, pandering, and heavy handing to get their word out. When this happens, they throw the great notion of transparency and dignity out the window.

Why do they do this? Power is the best answer I can find. It is a power that is largely more about ego than money … it is a power that some hold dear as they seek to be “King of the Geeks” or “The Most Popular” on Twitter. To their regret, it still does not return all that they hoped. They just find a few pea-brains to clap their hands and make them feel important.

Sure, you may not see this behavior, but it is just another part of my job to tell you it is there, and that it is quite pervasive. It has an impact on the whole community, and I hope you can see why it matters.

When considering that “other” 90 percent of Twitter users, I find it tragic that so many people have not yet found the great enjoyment and value of reaching out and joining the great conversation of Twitter. More tragic than that, is that it can lead to an ever greater opportunity for the “power users” or “Twitterati” to influence Twitter with a narrowed view designed to suit their agenda. Sure, you can say that it still allows for the voice of the people, but when it gets too carried away with chasing an algorithm to appear as the most popular, it is still a deception in many ways.

The tactics that some seemingly “valuable” Twitter users will use is to play a role to make others believe “how Twitter really works” and what is “important” to the Twitter community. Fine, call them “leaders”, and in some ways, they are. I want to remind you that it is easy for many people to fall into a bad habit and think it is the right thing to do because “everybody else is doing it”. Your parents surely posed the question to you something like: “If all of your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you do it, too?”

Some of these “valuable” users (often called Twitterati) try to promote getting more Twitter followers, and others will try to manipulate and even threaten others to promote their message. I saw the latter in a really ugly way when somebody who previously unfollowed me and blocked me then joined into a petty power play asking people to unfollow my Twitter feed, hoping people would stop listening to me. It was totally political and childish, and it was not because I was poaching whales or beating up little kids. I was simply being honest, and being me … many people sent me messages of respect after that rant.

It was not too long before this person came to seek me out and talk up their respect for me while asking for favors again and asking me to retweet their latest promotion. I guess my retweet was valuable, but yet, not quite valuable enough to treat me like a real person, but rather a megaphone.

Quick, Twitter … Get Me a Bucket!

The type of user I am talking about will often tweet like their butt is on fire and somebody should bring them a bucket of water. They try to send enough Twitter updates to be sure that everybody will see their name, without regard for whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. I would never complain about somebody tweeting a lot, because I do that, but I try to keep it interesting, relevant, and a two-way communication. However when people just send a rapid-fire barrage of popular links from Google Trends, Digg, Stumble, and Alexa Hot Urls with some advertisements for their clients who hired them for their amazing social media acumen mixed in there, and sent with hopes and demands for others to retweet it for popularity, the relevance and value of Twitter suffers. Then they will retweet some random thing that you sent, just to remind you that you should be retweeting their agenda, and if you do it, you may get even more of their favor of retweeting something you sent that they never even read or cared a damn about. It can even be worse with an innuendo that if you do not cater to them, they will badmouth you and tell people to unfollow you. It all gets far too High School-like. Now, I have a different reason for asking for a bucket … See the video below. 😉

If you liked this article, please share your comments. This also goes well in line with the subject of two of my blog articles titled: “Do You Tweet and Retweet Seeking Favors?” and “Twitter Follower Frenzy“.

If you really liked this article, please order my new book, “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends“.

Twitter FollowFriday SPAM

Do you really think that sending a virtual wall of Twitter usernames at everybody you know is going to be read? This may help you to realize a bit of what you may not have known about the Twitter hashtag #FollowFriday. First, you should know that retweeted FollowFriday endorsements do not count, but if you don’t know what I mean by that, you should read the rest of this before you send a single FollowFriday tweet.

Where FollowFriday Began

FollowFriday began as an idea for endorsing other Twitter users who provide value to your network. Here is the blog post showing where it all got started. At the time, surely nobody suspected that it would cause such a clutter for Twitter users each Friday, the way it is today.

How Does FollowFriday Really Work?

In short, the real benefit of FollowFriday only comes if you are heavily endorsed. It is measured, and it is tracked at TopFollowFriday, TweepleRank, and perhaps others. It can surely not be presumed that you should try to follow each Twitter user that comes to you with a FollowFriday hashtag, as that would be impossible. However, I have wondered what relatively new users, or those unfamiliar with these ranking sites must think when they see that wall of names that is circulated each Friday.

Where is FollowFriday Today?

FollowFriday is largely comprised of Spam. I cannot imagine that you do this, but I certainly do not go through each FollowFriday that comes to me and try to frantically follow each one of those great treasures who received an endorsement. I use TweetDeck to filter out the FollowFriday hashtag. Otherwise I would miss all of the important tweets from friends and colleagues that I wish to read.

Maybe some people try to keep up with all of the so-called endorsements, but surely not for very long. There are following limits set by Twitter regarding how many Twitter feeds you can add in a day. Surely nobody who follows many people can even conceivably follow all of those Twitter feeds, much less actually look at each profile to see what they are getting into.

The hard cap set by Twitter allows you to follow 1000 new people per day, and not to exceed 110% of the people following you. If you have under 2000 followers, the cap for following is the greater of 2000 users or 110% of those following you. Understanding this cap as it relates to the volume of FollowFriday spam, you can see how this becomes unsustainable. FollowFriday becomes as much a crap shoot as just choosing from a random selection of Twitter users.

Don’t Retweet FollowFriday Endorsements!

Retweeting FollowFriday endorsements is where the real spam comes in. First, you should know that retweets do not count toward the measure of FollowFriday popularity as I described above.

By following over 11,000 people on Twitter, (and I mean following … if you tweet me, I will see it) I have a pretty good perspective on FollowFriday. Retweets, in my experience, account for about four tweets to each one endorsement. I find from a random sampling of FollowFriday tweets that many of the people presumably endorsing me are not even following me nor do they know a thing about me. How is that an endorsement? It is NOT! That is why I call it spam.

FollowFriday Done Properly

If you want to give somebody a proper FollowFriday recommendation, make it clear. Include why you think they are a good person to follow. Say something clever or meaningful and make it original. If you see a FollowFriday endorsement from me, it may just say something like “Follow Yoon (@yoonhoum) because he is sharp as a pitchfork”.

It is best if you do not include more than one or two, but maximum of three people in your endorsement. Sending a tweet full of usernames will not do your friends any favors, and it will not make you more popular with most people. Please note that with over 20,000 public tweets sent and 1000 direct messages per day, I use Twitter enough to make this observation.

I welcome your FollowFriday endorsement, and I consider a real endorsement an honor. On the other hand, I consider it a disrespect of the purpose of Twitter as a communication tool when I see a huge wave of tweets from people retweeting something they never even reviewed.

Please Share Thoughts on FollowFriday

I want to hear it from you. What do you think of FollowFriday? Has this changed your perspective any? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Share it with the rest of us and leave your comment here on the blog. Also, please be kind to your fellow Twitter user and click here to retweet this.

How Twitter Improves Blog Traffic

Nearly anybody with a blog or other Website that is worth reading has heard of Twitter by now. The bloggers who use Twitter efficiently may already have realized some of what I will share here, but from what I have found, many bloggers have not. To say the least, I am shocked just what a small percentage of blog owners and authors are actually using Twitter, and even more shocked by those who are not embracing the synergy the two can produce when used properly. Note that while I say “blog”, this is completely interchangeable with “Website”, so don’t be confused.

Twitter-Improved Traffic: A Simple Example

As a simple example of how Twitter can improve your blog readership, I will use the blog you are presently reading. While looking at my statistics to find how many people arrived at this fledgling blog via Twitter, I found that an estimate of nearly 15,000 unique readers arrived by way of Twitter over the past 30 days. I say estimated because it is challenging to provide an exact number due to the many readers arriving by way of Twitter clients not providing an accurate source (although my numbers will be much clearer in May). This is more than the number of subscribers to my Twitter feed, which is presently just over 11,000 but was far fewer last month (ref TwitterCounter). So how did that happen? In short, people read it, talked about it, and retweeted it.

Blog Traffic Numbers: The Real Scoop

I will write more on this later, but I find that too many people find it convenient to try and lie about the real traffic of their blog. Let’s face it, this stuff is trackable. Some people may say that traffic estimates generated as a result of Twitter is bloated or that it is not so great, but just a simple look at Compete.com or Alexa.com will reveal a lot of what I am telling you. Of course, these are usually a bit behind and do not reflect an exact accounting, but they are usually reasonably close. I share this with you because I want to provide a real example for the purpose of this article.

When considering these numbers, let’s weigh in the facts that this blog was launched in December 2008, and my Twitter account only had 78 followers on February 7th of 2009, and it is a targeted blog about social media marketing and search engine optimization. I am not seeking everybody to read my blog, but rather the right people to read my blog. Be sure to also look at your own blog / Website and review the numbers and percentage of increase. It is pretty eye-opening what Twitter can do when used properly.

The traffic and level of engagement prompted me to question how Twitter has changed blogging. Here are just a few things that i found.

Twitter-Improved Reader Engagement

I will show examples of blog reader engagement separated into three parts, but this remains only one of the three areas of benefit derived from Twitter discussed in this article. There are many ways to determine reader engagement with a Website. Some ways blog authors have traditionally found valuable to measure the reader’s engagement are as follows:

Time on Page: The average time the user spends on a page is a good measure of whether they are actually reading what you have to say. This is clearly subject to the type and length of content you provide, but in any case, readers who are not interested will not stick around very long. A minute is a very long time for many internet readers. What I have found in the measure of time on page is that readers initially engaged by Twitter will spend more time reading my blog, totaling about three minutes per page view. This is a significant increase over users arriving from other sources, and is longer than any other source.

Page Views Per Reader: The number of pages each user visits is a strong reflection of the user’s interest in your industry, beyond the single topic of the initial page they viewed. I have noticed an improved page views per reader coming from Twitter, up .5 page views per reader compared to other sources, which is a significant sign of reaching the right audience.

Blog Comment Volume and Quality: An important measure for the blog author is in how many comments, and the quality of comments the blog post receives. When writing something relating to Twitter, I have witnessed great results for blog comments, on this blog and others. One of my recent blog posts relating to Twitter usernames has received upward of 140 approved comments. I attribute much of this to the fact that many readers already have some knowledge of the author, and are already a part of a conversation. A blog is one way that they find out more information and continue the conversation. I think many bloggers would agree with this finding.

Assessing the reader engagement of Twitter users, both on a blog and on your Twitter feed, can also be measured by the comments received in reply to the posting of the blog link to Twitter. I find that some people will respond to the title of the tweet. It seems that every day I see somebody respond to the text of a tweet in a way that I know without question they have not read the blog post linked to the tweet. A great example of this was when I tweeted a blog post titled “Will Oprah (@oprah) Ruin Twitter?” and I received a lot of comments in defense of Oprah Winfrey’s use of Twitter. That was kind of silly, because the blog discussed the changes that may come from the inevitable increase in traffic and how a large influx of new users may change how we use Twitter. This absurdity should always be considered a measurement of engagement of your Twitter following and not of your blog. What it also points out is that Twitter users who do read your blog are likely truly interested in what you have written. If your Twitter account is managed properly and you spend time to get to know your followers and let them know you, blind comments should largely only happen with your newest followers.

Twitter-Improved Search Engine Optimization

Many search engine optimizers (SEO) will overlook the value of Twitter for improving search engine penetration. If they miss this part, they are making a big mistake. A reason many SEO will dismiss this value is that Twitter uses the “nofollow” attribute in outbound links, thus, no increased Google PageRank. Make no mistake; Twitter can greatly enhance your visibility in search engine results. This can come from many outside factors related to Twitter, as well as Twitter itself. I will just name a couple, but here are some ways SEO is enhanced by using Twitter. First, I should point out that Twitter’s Search is a Search Engine! As more people use Twitter search to find information, using Twitter will help many people to find your information. Aside from just Twitter searches, the likelihood of particular tweets being listed in other search engines referencing a Twitter tweet or one of the many Twitter-related applications along with your link are improved. Be sure to realize that each person who reads your blog also comes with a voice to further spread your blog in many other ways. Thus, each reader who finds your blog in any Twitter-related way has the potential to further propagate your message in search engines as well. It all adds up to make a significant end-result.

Twitter-Improved Call to Action

Along with the added benefits of brand recognition and brand loyalty, comes the greatest benefit of all … an improved call to action. This means that the message you distributed has gone beyond just readership, and the reader has heard and responded to your call to action. In my case, that literally means that they have made a call to reach me and discuss improving their market reach. For you, it may be that they enter their order for your product, apply for a job, donate to a cause, or many other possibilities.

How I measure a greater call to action from Twitter: It has become standard that I speak on the telephone (direct line *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*) or on Skype (username murnahan) to a minimum of five different inbound callers per day as a result of Twitter users who also read my blog. In addition to inbound callers, I also call at least five people I meet on Twitter to simply make an introduction and to get to know them better, so this certainly works both ways.

I make it my practice to reach people beyond the singular communication tool of Twitter, and expand my communications to other tools. This means that not only has Twitter greatly impacted my blog readership, it also goes far beyond blogging to reach people I would likely have never met otherwise.

How Does This Apply to You?

Surely some people reading this do not have a blog or Website, and may not have a great importance of reaching out to other people, but I think those numbers are fairly small. Most people who read this have a reason to reach others. If this is the case, you should not neglect the value of Twitter for reaching a very important audience.

Reaching a larger and more valuable audience is what I do for my clients, and what I am paid for. I have found Twitter to be an extremely useful tool. If you are getting frustrated and you want to see better results for your blog or other Website, please reach me to explain how I may help you.

Don’t Just Comment on Twitter!

If you made it this far, I hope that you will give me the honor of reading and responding to your comments right here on the blog. Yes, of course, your comments are also always welcome by way of Twitter, too. Please tell me what you think!