Twitter vs Digg for links and attention

by Patrick Altoft on March 25, 2009 / 11 responses

Many people are saying that Twitter is corrosive to online marketing and that the sudden upsurge in Twitter use is reducing the number of links being given to quality content.

Certainly Twitter has been game changing but is it really having an effect on link building?

There are two goals that bloggers or website owners have when they carry out social media marketing:

1. Build a larger readership
2. Get more links in order to rank higher on Google

What most bloggers forget is that these two goals require totally different strategies to achieve them.

If I wanted to build the RSS readership on Blogstorm then getting on the front page of Digg or releasing a viral widget isn’t going to help me very much. These strategies are likely to give me a lot of links though.

Likewise if I wanted to release some linkbait which people would read, enjoy and hopefully link to from their blogs then the last thing I should do is promote it via Twitter. Anything decent you send via Twitter is just going to be re-tweeted which is fine if you want traffic but useless if you want links.

Twitter is great for slowly but surely building relationships and growing your readership one by one. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s a link-building tool.

If you want to get a link from a blogger just send them an email. Because they receive the email outside of Twitter they are more likely to blog about it and less likely to post it on Twitter.

Post category: Social Media, Twitter Tweet

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.