This week I’ve been at TFM&A talking about link-building strategies and also at the Some Comms conference in Manchester talking about our Twitition.com site and how we get 1.2m visitors per month to it.
Presentations are below via Slideshare, any questions drop me a note in the comments.
In the last few months our Twitition.com site is continuing to grow and it’s getting quite a bit of recognition in the industry – yesterday we won the innovation category at the Some Comms awards in Manchester and a couple of weeks ago we scooped the top award at the GoldenTwits in London.
Our twitition.com site has been very busy for some time now and always gets more than 10,000 visitors per day. Lots of people are big fans of the site and use it every day.
Last week the site got a pretty big spike and ended up getting 89,847 visits in a 48 hour period after both Lady Gaga (6.5 million followers) and Justin Bieber (5.4 million followers) tweeted out links to the site.
As you can see from the chart below Twitter traffic was pretty huge and if you include direct traffic (people using Twitter via apps) then it adds up to around 75,000 visits.
It’s fair to say that we are now surfing the crest of the first great Twitter wave. Slight tweaks to the interface (the recent introduction of lists) don’t disguise the fact that growth in US user numbers has stalled.
Multi-million dollar deals with Google and Bing, as well as translations (Spanish has just launched), will give the service a shot in the arm but its long-term future is somewhat of a mystery.
Twitter’s development so far has been fueled by users – and developers harnessing its API – not by the company itself. It is these continuing changes in the way it is used that will shape the service’s future and ensure its long-term success. But what are those changes and how will they impact?
Seesmic founder Loic La Meur gazed into his crystal ball this week and gave us some ideas:-
This new dilemma was highlighted to me yesterday as I tried to update my LinkedIn social profile to include my involvement with MajesticSEO. LinkedIn’s privacy statement is robust and reassuring, but they have a new beta section asking me to add details about my company. The ”number of employees” section was a compulsory field. Now I am not especially precious about this data, but I serve many masters. My legally binding contract with MajesticSEO includes a confidentiality clause, naturally. Even if it didn’t, I think that I should make it just a LITTLE difficult for prying eyes to build up inside knowledge about businesses where I am not the controlling interest. What if you work for TESCO. How many employees even KNOW how many people work there? Read more →
Dear Twitter,
RE: Making Money to Support your £1Billion Valuation
I have money. Not a lot of it. And I don’t want to give it all away. But I do have some. I would like to reach out from my pocket and give you a few quid if it makes a difference. However, unlike you, I don’t want to give anything away free, so please find below some things I want to pay you for. Read more →
Running a social media campaign is a great way to get lots of visitors to a website but its very hard to target the campaign to a particular country. If your goal is to generate links, buzz or blog subscribers then worldwide traffic is fine but what happens if you are primarily interested in local visitors?
In the past most people have used Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon as the main networks to seed a viral article or blog post and this week I loaded up Google Trends to see which of these was biggest in the UK. As you can see below the daily traffic figures are nothing to get excited about and traffic to all of them seems to have dropped a lot in the UK during 2009.
Ever since Twitter launched the API loads of people have been delivering cool applications and a side benefit was that the links to those applications were not nofollow links. The API links are under each tweet where it says something like:
3 minutes ago from TweetDeck
Then a couple of SEO bloggers decided to blog about How to Get DoFollow Links on Twitter and sure enough a week later those links were nofollowed meaning that it’s now totally impossible to get a decent link from Twitter even in your profile.
We run a popular Twitter app which has been used over 100,000 times which means there are over 100,000 links – all of which are worthless from an SEO point of view. Of course the app wasn’t ever designed for SEO but it’s still not nice to lose that many links in one day. Read more →
First of all let me get one thing straight – I like Twitterfeed. It’s a perfect way for me to publish my feed to Twitter.
The problem arises when people start to publish other peoples feeds to Twitter. For example the people who think automatically tweeting the Mashable or TechCrunch feeds will somehow make them appear popular or the Twitter bots whose sole purpose is to syndicate the Google News results for a query such as “internet marketing”.
If you are lucky enough to be in Google News all you need to do to get 50+ people tweeting a link is use a popular keyword such as “SEO” or “affiliate marketing” in your title and the tweets come rolling in. All totally useless.
Because Twitter has no way of filtering duplicate messages the search results (and aggregators like Tweetmeme) are polluted with dozens of identical tweets.
Twitter could fix this in an instant by removing Twitterfeed tweets from the search results or creating a duplicate content filter but they don’t seem to be doing anything about it.
Last week we started a Twitition asking Google Earth to update satellite images of Tehran which received 6084 signatures. Within 24 hours Google had done exactly what we asked for.
Many of you have been letting us know through Tweets, emails, blog posts, message boards, and even an online petition that you’re very interested in seeing recent satellite imagery of Tehran. Well, we’ve heard your requests and over the past few days have been working with our satellite imagery partner GeoEye to make this possible. We just received updated satellite imagery of Tehran, taken on Thursday the 18th at approximatly 11:18am local time.
The week before @ryanbarr started a Twitition asking AT&T to offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices. With almost 15,000 signatures it’s the most popular Twitition yet and was credited by several news sources in forcing AT&T to modify their pricing.
From MSNBC:
AT&T said today it is modifying its upgrade policy for the new iPhone after existing customers of the popular device protested the $200 price difference they would have to pay if they wanted the new iPhone 3Gs, due out Friday.
As of Wednesday morning, more than 14,000 people on the microblogging site Twitter had signed a “twitition,” — a Twitter petition — asking AT&T to “offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices.”
The Inquirer stated:
US CARRIER AT&T has bowed to consumers over pricing of the Iphone 3GS thanks to a grass roots Twitter campaign. A similar effort aimed at O2 is gathering followers in the UK.
At the heart of the beef with the network operators is the astronomical initial cost of the 3GS handset and the distinct lack of an affordable upgrade path from its predecessor.
Initially AT&T had in mind to charge all muggles $399 for the new Iphoney, whether they’d bought an earlier version a few days ago or not. But Twitterer @Twititions gathered enough followers to pressure AT&T which has decided $199 is a fairer upgrade price.
The moral of this story is that if you want to get something done, start a Twitition about it.
On another note Twitition now uses Oauth which means you can sign petitions in a couple of clicks without handing over your password.
RT @TheDrum: Provocative Powwownow London Underground campaign evokes feminist response from commuters http://t.co/9wFAqSBA
@patrickaltoft / about 1 days agoRT @competwition: Uber chic unique jewelry & #fashion accessories site, @Boticca, is giving 1lucky devil $300/€240/£200 to 2spend onsite ...
@patrickaltoft / about 1 days agoRT @rishil: If you want learn about Press Releases and how to work them for SEO - read this>>> http://t.co/yt764fv6
@patrickaltoft / about 3 days ago@MarriottGolfUK If you want to run a competition to get followers you should try our http://t.co/urrpvJh1 site to do the giveaway
@patrickaltoft / about 3 days ago
