Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Using Twitter to Generate Buzz on Your Sales Site

By Dominic D. Johnstone

With just 140 keystrokes, people send a brief message to friends and followers to answer the question, what are you doing right now?

Who could have imagined that a social network like Twitter.com would become so prolific with the online community?

We all know why Facebook is interesting! Its because we can see snapshots into the lives of our friends. They show us what they want us to know, and we consume it rabidly. We can see their photos, read their daily status updates and even play games like Scrabble. Who would have imagined that a social website dedicated soley to the commonplace status update would become so widespread?

As you know, Twitter is a very future minded website. It is becoming the rage with people young and old, and has captured the eye of online marketers around the world.

No matter how trivial or mundane the concept appears to be at first, it is very popular. A few years ago, very few people would have thought anyone would care if say for example - I am going for a grande chai latte at Starbucks with Joel. Nowadays, people are very interested in the minutia of one anotherss lives. Well add that to the explosive growth rate of memberships on these viral social networking sites, and it introduces a very powerful marketing tool.

You see, Twitter.com allows you to post as many updates as you can and want to in as short a time as you feel like. Most people dont want to be annoying or spammy with their posts, but many people do add multiple updates per day.

hats more is that Twitter allows you to post hyperlinks to your site via links that you post in your updates. If they are long hyperlinks, they use tinyurls but if they are just domain name, then they will post as is. Either way, Google regards inbound links from good neighborhoods as a good thing. As you gain notoriety online, your profile may be seen as good by Google too.

Just have a look at the profile page of Chris Knight. Chris Knight is an editor at EZineArticles.com. His page is http://www.twitter.com/ChrisKnight. Many thousands of people subscribe to his updates. He subscribes to thousands more. His profile page is ranked 5 by google which is quite an accomplishment.

The implication of the second facet is that Google will identify numerous inbound links from higher page rank pages, to your website. While your own page rank itself is not a critical factor, it is important to have links coming in from highly regarded web pages.

In summary, Twitter.com is a new and fairly rudimentary website at first glance. Yet under the surface it is clearly a very effective viral marketing tool. When you consider the considerable growth experienced by sites like YouTube.com and Bankrate.com due to the introduction of viral growth mechanisms such as inviting friends and following people, you can understand the importance of using new and burgeoning sites like Twitter.com.

About the Author:

No comments: