Twitter for example is very popular at the moment. But how can I make it work for me? Firstly, you need to decide how to use twitter for the most effective results for your business. There is always the danger with social networking to let it take up too much time! As mentioned above; your social networking/marketing should make up 10% of your online marketing time. If you are on twitter all day – there is something wrong.

Listening out on the Twitter airwaves

The first way to use Twitter is to engage and open communication potential and existing customers. This has proved to be an effective strategy for many brands as they can be notified instantly if anyone mentions their brand or company name and react accordingly. Read this example:

A guy is sitting in an internet café using the free wifi service. The wifi malfunctions and he sends out a tweet on Twitter telling his friends that the wifi is down in the café and he is annoyed that he will have to move on to finish his work. The pr company (for the large chain of coffee shops) pick up the tweet as they have a search running for their client’s name. They contact the coffee shop immediately and ask them to locate the person packing away his laptop. The guy is given a free cup of coffee and the wifi connection is fixed. 5 minutes later he tweets a new message: singing the praises of the coffeeshop.

A negative pr situation is instantly turned on its head.

Note: This doesn’t mean scouring twitter manually day and night in the hope of intercepting a tweet about you. Use the search functions on www.tweetdeck.com for example to be alerted when you are mentioned. You can also use this search function to be alerted of any tweet or conversation that mentions a word or phrase you are interested in.

Tweeting for tweeting sake

Don’t tweet for the sake of it – if you subject your followers to masses of inane updates about the state of your health and what your dog ate for breakfast you will soon loose that following (unless you are a blonde celebrity!).

However, broadcasting your offers and new products to encourage clicks back through to your website should also be part of your strategy but it is worth remembering that you need to make your tweets and updates interesting to your audience so that they will follow your links – address the issues that affect them.

If you only bombard them with self promotional tweets they will not feel that you are adding value and will cease to click through to your site or worse; unfollow you. If they really like what you are saying they may ‘Retweet’ your message to their followers, and so your message is spread further afield.

Tweet etiquette:

• Do follow back any followers that you have a genuine interest in.
• Do Retweet useful info from your fellow tweeple.
• Understand and use the @replies sparingly or you will be inundating your audience with half conversations – very dull.
• Cut out the running commentary – 25 tweets an hour will push other people’s messages off followers’ homepages.
• Don’t over use #hashtags, in fact don’t use them at all unless you are genuinely contributing to the conversation.
• Do Check your links before you tweet them.
• Do complete your bio information as fully as possible
• Do use a picture of yourself or an image that represents your brand well.
• No swearing or verbally attacking fellow twitterers
• Watch your follower/follow ratio. If you are following thousands more than follow you – you are probably a spammer.

What are your experiences of twitter? Do you have anything to add? Please do leave a comment…

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Studies of indented listings using heap maps show that where the primary listing is popular the indented listing is more popular, it gets more fixation points and more clicks than the primary listing does. You don’t have to have a number 1 primary listing in order to get an indented listing, you can get this listing at positions 8 & 9, at positions 4 & 5 or positions 23 and 24, it doesn’t make a difference where your primary listing appears. You want the highest possible listing, of course you do but my point is that you don’t have to be number one to achieve an indented listing.

An added bonus is that double listings can also help to increase your ranking positions and push you up the search engines results pages.

How do you get a double listing?
The primary listing is the page on your site that is deemed most relevant to the search phrase and the second listing is the page that is deemed second most important – the key is to find out which is the second best page for that phrase. Double listing’s only show when both pages are ranked on the same SERPs page so – SEO TIP – change your preferences on Google to show 100 results in the SERPs (the default is 10 per page), use the ‘find’ function to locate your website and see if you have a double listing showing. If you do then the second URL is the one you need to work on to strengthen the optimisation for the search phrase you are using.

Use the comments box below to ask any questions about this strategy so we can clarify them.

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In general, a properly structured Adwords campaign can produce a conversion rate similar to the organic search traffic of a web site. A new campaign will typically make a loss during the initial set up stage (usually 2 – 4 weeks) while we evaluate the profitability of different keywords and advert groups. However, once the campaign is established we use conversion tracking to provide the best ROI possible.

Conversion tracking allows us to see, at the keyword and advert group level, the areas of the campaign which are profitable. We establish this by comparing the average cost per conversion to the value of each conversion to your business. We then concentrate the budget of the campaign on the best performing areas to maximise ROI.

A great benefit of running a PPC campaign is that it provides valuable data which can be used for SEO. The information gathered from a PPC campaign shows which keywords people are actually searching with, keywords that convert well and also keywords which convert poorly. This data can give a head start to an SEO campaign; the optimisation can be focused on keywords that are known to convert. Also, wasting time and resources on keywords which fail to deliver results can be avoided.

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