Google does take into account your twitter profile and impact. Once again Hubspot have come up trumps with their article on the affect twitter has on search rankings.
Here is their summary of the article in Search Engine Land on whether using ‘social signals’ help rank search results, which it seems it does, in particular your twitter ranking could help influence how a page ranks in web search.
How Twitter Influences Search Engine Rankings
Twitter profiles carry a “score” with Google.
It’s likely the age of your twitter profile and how many followers you have affect how search engines will calculate your profile’s “authority”.
Just like inbound links give a website “credit”, so does social media sharing. A lot of retweets can tell the search engine that this is a good, trusted blog article.
When an influential person (including you) tweets your link, it is a sign to the search engines that it’s good, trusted content.
To find out your twitter grade Hubspot have developed Twitter grader -free to use, which also gives pointers on what you can do to improve it. Their website grader is also very good.
Too Many Events Going On. And if you’re not online at the right time you miss the mention of them on twitter. Fantastic Solution is Lanyrd. It looks at your friends, which events they are going to, and let’s you know.
Lanyrd, The Social Conference Directory
It tracks all conferences, including health. Once you link your twitter account, it gets very clever and not only gives you a calender of events, it tells you who is speaking (with a link to each of their profiles). Usefully I can register to track events in advance. So now I don’t need to worry I’ll miss it. I’m already looking to track BarCamp Sydney and SXSW, and it’s told me that a friend is speaking at an upcoming conference I didn’t even know about. Blimey.
Here is a list of speakers for SXSW:
Awesome. Simple. Highly recommended. To link up go here: http://lanyrd.com
Tweeting from different twitter accounts is a complex business, not least because it can easy to post a tweet from the wrong account. Here’s how I do it:
My main ‘me’ account is @dreamingspires (focussed on health, publishing and social media in the main), and I have a neuroscience twitter account of @bodyinmind which is focussed on… neuroscience. Sometimes health and neuroscience overlap and I want to tweet from both accounts.
It would be regarded as spam if I posted the same tweets from both accounts if you are following both in your twitter stream, but if you are following only @dreamingspires you would expect me to tweet the major neuroscience news as well. What to do?
I put the question out to a medical twitterer @DrVes who manages multiple accounts very well [read tweets bottom up]
In a nutshell different topics can use different accounts, and sometimes you will post from both BUT there is a fine line between occasional duplicate posts and SPAM.
One person who manages this well in the social media sphere: @thewordpressguy (solving the world’s ills of wordpress questions) is also @thelatteguy (organising Sydney twitter coffee mornings) – a good call to separate them as they are different subjects, even though a lot of people who need wordpress advice also are at coffee mornings.
Practicalities to avoid the mistake of answering someone from the wrong account as I have done here
If you do use Tweetdeck be careful of its eversonothelpful new feature of selecting the account you tweet from depending on which column you reply from.
Tracking replies
Tweetdeck won’t register all the replies from different accounts unless I setup several separate columns which my screen isn’t big enough to do – so I use echophon for @bodyinmind to see if there has been any replies, and tweetdeck or seeismic as my mainstay (see previous post on how to use these).
I am going to start using Brizzly more – it is a reader that works with Twitter and facebook and has a nice clear interface
Peoplebrowsr which has a lot of functionality and really does have everything at your fingertips, but it is a fiddly application on a smaller screen.
Whatever you decide to use please note that different accounts are still ’personal’ – in the sense they aren’t just simply information streams – and sometimes it can feel a bit like trying to be part of 2 different busy conversations at the same time. You need to be consistent, even if you only post once or twice a day.
Conclusion
Tweeting from multiple accounts is good when:
you have different subject areas
different audiences
different blogs that you are using the twitter info from
or need an alterego to vent from!
Use one main application like Tweetdeck for all your accounts and an additional one like brizzly or echophon that you can quickly check replies that may not appear on tweetdeck.
How can I disagree with someone when the whole world is watching. Worse – what happens when they disagree with me and the whole world is watching?
What are the rules of a twitter argument?
How much personal stuff do I put out – what goes online stays online?
How can I guarantee that privacy will be respected?
What are my motives, am I doing this for show?
What will people think of me? and Dammit why do I care so much?
Am I using this to escape real life?
Oh God, what is real…
What have I learned? I have added to my physical network and am relating in new ways. I’m also learning to get over myself, the ‘whole world’ isn’t looking at me, but I am part of the ‘whole world’.
New and old friendships
Geography doesn’t count. My network is bigger and more international including meeting people from overseas who I first met online.
Social classes and prejudices breaking down. Many online friends are from different backgrounds that seemingly wouldn’t bump into each other, yet they do online and often what starts online ends up in a physical conversation. Not being able to predict who you will meet or where they are from is changing my preconceived ideas about who I tend to ‘hang out with’ for work and play.
A safe place to begin to explore – initially, if it turns out that person isn’t quite my cup of tea or what I was looking for, I can leave the interaction with them – no harm done. That is much harder to do in ‘real’ life.
Snapshots of lives and intimacies. Personal real time snapshots of lives is new for me and happens at both work and personal levels. Relationships can be maintained and it’s as close as I can get to saying hello over a cuppa – real time chat on twitter, photos on facebook, skype… lots of choice.
Receiving and giving help
What the interweb has given is a network of help to tap into often from people I may not know. The classic ‘how do I…. ‘what is the best….’ posted on twitter brings an often quick and relevant response (read bottom up).
Another recent example from someone whose website Google stopped indexing without warning. The response to help find out why and fix it was instant, which resulted in a personal post about what happened and how to avoid it: When is a blog not a blog.
Every day, as the Web expands and quickens and infiltrates its way across and through our world, the boundaries of our privacy diminish. There’s not much we can do: Technology does what it wants eventually – one way or another. What does it want? I’ll pass on that for now but I can tell you this: technology doesn’t want your privacy. The question for you then is: do you want your privacy?
He gives the holy trinity of privacy as Dignity, Solitude and Healing.
‘…know that privacy is more than data; know that privacy is your sanity-protector; know that privacy is a fight; and know that you define privacy.’
It is true that we define our privacy: Work friends, family members, friends of ex-partners, complete strangers are in our network. How do I define my privacy? I very rarely post anything of a personal/intimate nature that I wouldn’t say to a roomful of people and am also learning to say: this is me and you may or may not agree but that’s OK. As to photos: I wouldn’t post that photo of you looking like a dork, so please return the favour, and if it’s of a personal nature ask first.
Merging of Work and Play
This relates to privacy as well – if you are tweeting/facebooking with your workmates you may not be able to post everything. What happens if your boss wants to connect with you on facebook – you’re damned if you and damned if you dont (and if you’re a boss, please don’t request to be a facebook friend of your team-wait to be asked, it puts people in an impossible situation). You also need to be clear what is your personal account and what is your work account if you are communicating with two different hats on, although the people you are connecting with may be in both groups.
Communication
New communication, new world. The interweb provides written, visual and audio communication depending on what you prefer. It would be interesting to see whether there are certain psychological profiles who tend to take to online communication more than others.
The interweb is also bringing communication to another level of research. This project by Spheres is shaped by dialogue and a net of semantic conversations. I’ve clicked on Mind to look at the dialogue created around it. They say:
‘[...] Whose place is it, for example, to define the meaning of life? -Biologists, philosophers, chemists, historians, writers, journalists, theologians, mystics, metaphysicians, school teachers, parents? -All of them at the same time? Every one of us? We are not interested in the definition of the word, but rather in the dialogue created around it. A single word, like life, contains an infinite extensive trans-cultural and trans-temporal dialogue.’
Arguments and Disagreements
Falling out – open criticism, snide comments, personal attacks – what goes on the web stays on the web. Arguing is hard at the best of times, here it’s locked down forever. Interestingly, what once may have made me cringe with embarrassment due to how public it was, now begins to matter less – although it might stay on the web forever, along with a garganguan gazillion other things (I made that number up), in a sense it becomes part of the interweb debris. If you want to sift amongst that be my guest, but there may be better ways to spend your time. However, a personal rule is that if anyone tries to bait me into a public personal discussion they are going to be heartily out of luck. Nevertheless, if I think something is going to turn into an issue I pick up the phone rather than deal with it online, written words can be misinterpreted and misused.
Criticism
There is a trend for people to be far more willing to criticise someone (eg a presenter) online than I suspect would be the case if they were having to say it in person. There may come a time where the twittersphere, for one, will moderate itself and shout down people who are getting out of line. At least I hope so. Criticism that is personal in nature doesn’t add anything to the conversation and in my opinion reflects badly on the one who is doing it. If you can’t say it in person, don’t say it online.
Family
Frankly, I’m not sure I’m ready to introduce my family to the world or for the world to meet them, but suppose they decide to follow me on twitter/facebook….
What I write here are my own views, not those of any organisation, group, or person. Any comments which I deem to be inappropriate in tone or content will be filed under 'spam' and there is every chance they will not see the light of day.
Google does take into account your twitter profile and impact. Once again Hubspot have come up trumps with their article on the affect twitter has on search rankings.
What the interweb has given is a network of help to tap into often from people I may not know. The classic ‘how do I…. ‘what is the best….’ posted on twitter brings an often quick and relevant response (read bottom up).
