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Twitter is Social!
By David Brown | April 29, 2008
Over the past few days I’ve heard more and more about Twitter. What is it? What does it do? Why do I need an account? How’s this going to help my business? (I’m paraphrasing from emails) Brian, Carolyn and I have even talked about doing a ‘Twittersode’ on SEO 101! **BTW @doshdosh - we’d love to have you on that episode!
So first off what is Twitter?
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Twitter is great in the way that Disneyland is great… meaning, everyone has their own experience’s in their own way. To me… Twitter is a way to keep up with my friends and colleague’s. At the same time I get the freshest content on the web in ‘real time’. I started a thread over at WebTalkForums titled aptly enough “MySpace Isn’t Social…Twitter is” And… well here’s a reply from the thread:
Heck there are people on twitter who do nothing but update their petty lives every minute!
Hilarious to read through (just finished flipping through a bunch of them) and see people post: Had coffee. Good coffee.
Or: Raining outside, not raining inside.
Or: Opened the window.I mean really?
Do I or you need to keep up with someone who posts “Opened the window”?
I guess the way you experience Twitter is different for everyone. I’ve added all of the bloggers that I normally read, friends I’ve met at SES conferences, Alumni friends, and other folks that genuinely interest me and Followed them. Following someone basically means that when they post something to Twitter you get up to 140 characters in text from them. It really is that simple… short, sweet, and to the point.
For myself (NeOBlog on Twitter) being an SEO consultant it’s good to know what’s going on in the industry. So I follow these folk’s - Brian Mark & Carolyn Shelby (of course) Barry Schwartz, Graywolf, Lee Odden, Danny Sullivan, Vanessa Fox, doshdosh, SearchEngineLand, Tamar, Li Evans, Oilman, Greg Boser, Loren Baker, Shoemoney, Andy Beal, Michael McDonald, Dave Naylor, Rhea, & Rand (I follow more but for the sake of a short post I’ll stop there, you can always add me and look at whom I follow)
The Great thing about following these guys is you’ll get everything… and I mean EVERYTHING as it happens! From one of Lee Odden’s famous Poll’s or a new post on SEOmoz, SERoundtable, SearchEngineLand, or the latest Sphinn story that’s about to pop! *This is the social aspect to me for Twitter… these are folks I read daily, they are saying “take a look at this” and in return I get the info before the Googlebot can crawl the post and put it in the Google index for me to search later!
Of course I’ve added other people to my list of folks to follow like Chuck Norris! Who doesn’t like sitting at their computer toiling away and see a Twit pop up from Chuck Norris that says “I don’t do push-ups, I push the earth down!” LOL 
Now keep in mind that there’s TONS of different ways to set up the way you receive your Twits… I figure I’ll just share how I’m doing it. *side note* as I’m typing up this post Danny Sullivan just Twitted: “dannysullivan: wow, twhirl is like being really sluggish with updates today” Twhirl is another way you can get set up to send and receive your twits.
I on the other hand added twitter@twitter.com as a buddy on my Gtalk account. I get all of my twits on something I already use, always have open, keeps a log in my Gmail, and is in a small enough window on my 19″ flat screen that it isn’t overwhelming like some of the other more annoying chat apps out there. Here’s a screen shot -
(just log into your twitter account and go to Settings > Devices > then give it your gtalk account add twitter@twitter.com to your buddy list… that’s it.)
See nice and easy… it fits the definition of Social, and it’s a fun way to interact w/ the Twitterverse! There are a ton of Applications for Twitter… Facebook has one, Wordpress has one (look to the right => over there) I have the Twitter code plugged into the site - now you the ‘visitor’ can see what all of my friends are saying…. it updates almost immediately, very schweet IMO.
Even if your not an SEO, don’t see the need, or you don’t have the ‘time’ I challenge each of you to go and at the very least… check it out! Find the leaders in your industry, follow them - find out who they listen to and follow them. I think you’ll be surprised at the amount of info you’ve been missing daily…
Two other Twitter articles that you might find interesting (both were twittered to me btw) are here - From Search Engine Land Twitter wrote this column for me & from Forbes Twittering King
See ya round the Twitterverse,
DB
Topics: SEO, Social, Twitter |
