Alex Hochberger

If you aren’t in an urban area, are slightly older, and white, you probably think that Twitter is the most over-hyped thing on the Internet. You may know some people that use it, but it seems silly and pointless. You use your phone to call/text people, Facebook is still the leading social media engine where you swap pictures of your kids with old classmates, etc.

But Twitter has had tremendous growth amongst the non-white population. According to Pew Research, “Twitter Update 2011“, while only 9% of White Internet users use Twitter, 25% of Black Internet users and 19% of Hispanic Internet users use TWitter, and half of all Twitter users use Twitter on their phone.

If your product/service needs to reach minority Internet users or young Internet users, you need to have a Twitter strategy.

Bing and Google announced deals with Twitter to access and utilize their data, and Search Insider is discussing the first impacts of this.  What’s most interesting is that this might be the first major change since “FreshBot” was added to Google (and later became the primary crawler).  Old hand SEOs remember the crazy update schedules of the early engines, but Google’s monthly “Google Dance” as their crawler finished and about a week later the PageRank was computed and the new index went up across their data centers.  Google started crawling and updating with “fresh” data (tagged with the data) with a guestimated PageRank for placement, and as they got faster at computing changes across the Internet, these Fresh results were no longer being inserted, they were the results.

Twitter has a disproportionate presence in media circles and other influential areas.  Twitter data, including trends, what people are talking about, etc., provides a view into what is new and what is going on.  While news feeds capture the mainstream coverage, Twitter will know what is news to the Internet.  This powerful medium helps determine if you are dealing with a “Google Bomb” or a bona fide story.  While Google originally assumed if people linked to you, like a citation in Academia, that made you authoritative, but only a select subset of the population had websites.  Blogs were more common than a full site, but Twitter is even more available to anyone.  Link and information trading on Twitter happens faster than someone writing a blog post, let along researching a news story, so Twitter gives a view into what is happening now.

This is an exciting time in search.  Twitter data will make it even more exciting.

When my wife and I were discussing social media, and I mentioned that at Third Solutions we use Skype for IM, and at ASG Group we were using Twitter, she asked me if we had gotten old? When I arrived at MIT in 1997, I ran ICQ for friends from home + Zephyr for talking to classmates, the next year the freshmen showed up with big lists of AIM friends, and by the time I left school, ICQ and Zephyr were basically dead and AIM dominated communication.

Here is it, over 10 years later, and I still use AIM as a constant business communication tool, but it certainly lacks any hype or excitement. Gmail accounts form the basis of OpenID, yet AOL with 20 years of AOL accounts and 10-15 years of AIM accounts couldn’t make themselves the login option of choice for the community web or the Web 2.0 world.

An old AOL hand asks, “Could AIM Have Been Twitter?“  AOL fought third party integration, mostly because Microsoft was at the time masters of embrace and extend, and the only on-ramp was the weird open access AOL published for the Tik client that we ran on Unix, with limited access.  While AOL had the users, they didn’t have the culture of centrality.  Openness may have helped, but the open-IM groups pushed by Yahoo and MSN fizzled, Jabber went nowhere, and even though Google via Google Chat supports Jabber, Facebook chat seems more vigorous.

I think that AOL could have done a lot with their platform.  But the corporate culture, more than the business around technology, prevented them from being cool.  Everything AOL bought saw talent flee to start-ups and generally fall apart.  Other than picking up Time Warner for a steal, they weren’t able to use their early lead in the Internet, perhaps because of their Internet for the Masses reputation, they couldn’t be “cool” to the technologists, so even if the masses used AIM, nobody was building upon AIM.  That, more than AOL’s internal walled garden mentality, is why AIM didn’t become Twitter.

If you are playing with Social Media, you’re aware of TweetDeck, the Twitter-centric system that helps organize that mass chaos that Twitter can devolve into.  If you are just updating your friends of your comings and goings, particularly via SMS, ignore TweetDeck, but if you are monitoring and participating in far ranging online conversation, TweetDeck forms the center of it.

Custom Searches let you monitor stories and discussions, and with the new version, the directory makes it easy to add discussions and other topics.  TweetDeck supported Facebook Status updates, the original system that Twitter appeared to copy and enhance, but now TweetDeck is integrated with Facebook for tracking all sorts of information.  TweetDeck is also adding MySpace support, the popular service that seems buzz free but with many active users.

Mashable also seems to be big fans of this TweetDeck upgrade.

So Twitter is an interesting medium, because the rules are all informal. The speed at which information flows means that active Twitter users either use Tweetdeck and monitor the conversations all day, or log in periodically and miss whatever didn’t just happen. How often you can repost the same Tweet is a fine line between spamming and letting the information vanish.

The Nielsen Norman Group describes the 5 iterations their announcement of two usability conferences went through, a very detailed process for planning an announcement.  Rather than blasting it every hour and losing followers, they are focused on a tight message that is under 130 characters for easy Retweeting and viral effectiveness.

I feel pretty hypocritical, seeing as how I’m just using Twitterfeed to feed my blog posts, but a real solution is on the to do list, and safe to say for a client I would never simply dump a headline written for the web and Usability/SEO to a twitter feed.

When doing early tests with Pack Your House, which was actually going out via SMS, we would routinely spend 3-5 iterations for each message, because you can’t send people repeated messages without upsetting them or running up their tab.

An interesting thing you’ll notice through the iterations, he dropped extraneous words, not vowels.  He communicated his information without resorting to short hand that his targets might not understand, carefully adding emphasis and scanability to his Tweet rather than confusion.

The Twitter system opens up some tremendous marketing channels for getting messages out, but usability will help determine the success or failure of this channel.

When I started in SEO, everyone wanted a silver bullet.  As the years passed, people still want a silver bullet, but more and more clients and companies realize that SEO is part of the web site design process, not a bolt on service.  Sure you can do bolt-on SEO spamming, but it’s really expensive, time consuming, and only worthwhile for very wealthy companies in hyper competitive areas.

I saw another business blogger talking about Promoting Your Business For Free, and there is a discussion of business tools like blogs and press releases, and using social media to get word out, but not a word about SEO.  What’s a shame is every piece of advice he has on that article is good for someone doing SEO.  Add a little bit of ideas on keyword research, focusing on the topics your potential customers are searching for, and you’d have the basics for writing SEO-friendly copy without getting into the details of keyword density and emphasis.

A press release and a spider-friendly “landing page” aren’t so dissimilar, and it amazes me that to this day there isn’t anyone really offering the combined SEO/PR service (hint, hint, keep an eye on my site, I’m working with a PR firm to put an offering together).  Twitter is a great way to reach like minded individuals, but not necessarily a great way to build sustainable traffic.

The latest demographics show Twitter usage amongst teenagers catching up with older dynamics.  The service still dominates in the 35 – 54 year old segment, which makes sense given that the mid-career professionals with nobody looking over their shoulder at the office all day (literally, more likely to have an office or at least a large cubicle) are making more use of a tool that requires constant connectivity for usage.  However, teenagers are slowly taking more of an interest in Twitter, which seemed odd to those that assume that technology is most often adapted by the young and moves up.  In the case of Twitter, it captured the Blackberry-addict demographic, not the TXTing on a phone demographic that they aimed for.  The comScore Blog Entry shows this with some lovely charts.

Twitter started by assuming that you’d want to update your close circle of friends with your goings on.  When Twitter hit the scene, my friends in urban areas on the coasts jumped on it to update everyone with what they were doing socially.  The teenage demographic doesn’t WANT to publish everything publicly, at least where their parents and/or teachers can find it.  Myspace offered teenagers tremendous room for self expression, while Facebook focused on the college (and later high school and young professional) markets of dating and social connection… high college students keeping in touch with high school friends, etc.

Interestingly, Twitter is now integrated with other parts of the web much better, making it a more useful tool for this demographic.  One of my high school classmates posted on Facebook that we should follow her on Twitter, as she isn’t on Facebook much anymore, but whether this is inevitable or a function of Facebook’s chasing Twitter and de-emphasizing what made it originally popular remains to be seen.  The old core of Facebook, finding old friends and reconnecting, or sharing college experiences with friends across the country, seems to have been supplanted in a barrage of data.  Facebook knocked Myspace off as leader by offering a clean and easy to use interface, but when they started fighting Twitter for buzz the news feed stopped being about sharing photographs and more about comments on statuses and wall posts, making it more and more a poor impersonation of Twitter.  If you want status and comments, Twitter’s world of feeds and mentions is a far cleaner interface than Facebook’s increasingly cluttered system.

Teenagers either have a close social circle that they are in touch with, or looking for ways to break out of the social world that they inhabit during the day.  A service that wants to reach them needs to offer one (or both) of those options.  Twitter offers teenagers the ability to aggregate information flow that interests them, and the increasing integration with other aspects of the web make it more interested.  When I was in high school, BBSes were the online way to communicate, by college, ICQ and later AIM became the online social center.  As Twitter takes that portion of the mindspace, Twitter’s relevance in that group increases.  However, the idea that my instant messages would be published on the website (even with the distinction between direct messages and public ones) seems odd to me, but AIM seemed odd to email/USENET users before us.

Last week, Facebook announced that they would support Twitter for Facebook Pages.  This seems to shock Mashable, but I’m not sure why.  Facebook offers Pages (formerly fan pages) as an enticement to businesses.  You can advertise them, add applications to them, message them, all sorts of functionality for businesses to use Facebook for marketing and pay Facebook to run CPC ads for their Page.

Hellotxt added support for Pages a while back, which would let you cross Publish to your Facebook Page, Twitter, and a few dozen other social media sites. If I’m Facebook, I want to be the core of your Social Media existence, and letting your updates auto-post to Twitter makes sense.  A business doing social media is likely to do Twitter and Facebook, so if you’re Facebook, why have them go to a third party, when you can make yourself the center of their Social Media world.

Facebook offers tremendous tools for online interaction with customers, Twitter offers some buzz.  If I can’t have dedicated people for both, I either need a cross posting tool, or having one update the other.  I see no threat to Facebook from this, and a way of enhancing the service that they want to charge people to advertisement.

A common exercise in demonstrating the human mind is give people a broad assignment, like “write something funny,” which isn’t something that most people can do without preparation.  A set of guidelines (like write a Limerick beginning with, “There once was a boy from Kentucky”) makes writing on the spot much easier.

Similarly, Twitter’s 140 Character Limitation actually makes the site more expressive.  I love the limitation inspired by SMS, which makes it a great “on the go” tool.  However, the internal language of Retweets (RT), Mentions (@), Hashtags (#category), plus URLs somewhat makes a mockery of the system.

I’ve expressed my issue with URL shortening, it “breaks” the web which at its core is linking to valuable resources.  The redirects have always made spidering the web harder, tracking links more difficult, and otherwise interfered with common usage of the Internet.  They create the risk of link rot, and in the case of Twitter, undermine the importance of link anchor text.

If I publish the name of my blog entries on my Twitter feed, they clearly should be clickable, but instead, a shortened URL will appear in the Twitter entry to conserve “characters.”  Given the ability to encode links within hypertext, it seems rather silly to “use characters” for the link, encouraging one to use a third party “shortening” service.

However, if in the middle of a Twitter discussion, I want to express a real idea, the “hypertext” approach would be to publish it to the web and link over, creating a permanent record in an accessible manner.  In our new Web 2.0 world, we use a service like TwitLonger, which essentially lets me upload a stream of text and make it available via Twitter.  I guess it’s the same thing, but now it’s floating out there on someone else’s system, someone who may or may not figure out how to make any revenue off this service.

Limitations can encourage creativity.  When I ran an SEO shop, I gave relatively strict requirements, which let me team mass produce content, while a broader range of action would have people simply staring at the screen.

Short URLs like Tinyurl.com were created for serve a valuable purpose, as URLs get long (think long query string, or SEO friendly long text strings), emailing a link is problematic for those using text mail clients as the text wraps around.

Twitter’s use of “shortened” URLs for the 140 character limit are totally arbitrary.  If you are sending it via SMS, the protocol supports a URL being passed along as data, not text.  Further, one could always shorten the URLs for SMS purposes and not on the web.  And on the website, you could use anchor text, the words that you click on, instead of the URL itself.

Nonetheless, Twitter decided to not support URL as special items, and the shrunken URL became a part of Twitter culture and it is here for any area that posting a link doesn’t show anchor text.

Now WP.me is a horrid idea.  Creating a special WordPress.com URL isn’t a horrible think, for those that are Username.wordpress.com, switching to Username.wp.me seems pretty harmless, and offering a shrunken URL format seems fine.  The “Permalink” of /year/month/day/URL-friendly-title works for Pre-2000 Internet days that the search engines still live in, making it SEO friendly, but less friendly for today’s world of Social Media and quick URL sharing.

However, that doesn’t appear what they are doing.  They appear to be pushing it as a shortening service, so you can still be AlexHochberger.com, but your links will be WP.me/ASDFAD if you choose to use Short URLs.  I suppose this serves a purpose for Twitter posts worried about Link Rot, but it also may trap you on WordPress.com.  If you outgrow their limited Blog feature set, how do you make certain that your WP.me links don’t rot out.  Wordpress.com seems a bit more stable than Bit.ly, but if Bit.ly survives long term, your links are save, WP.me may only work on a single host.

Given Bit.ly’s sharing a VC relationship with Twitter, I think that they are pretty safe, because if they can’t figure out a business model, VCs can usually force a merge up of their two investments.