I don’t write a lot about Twitter these days. I did back in the golden days, but many Twitter users don’t readily recall “The Golden Days of Twitter”. Today, I want to offer up some recent observations about Twitter, along with some rather curious numbers.

If you are an old timer with Twitter, you will almost undoubtedly nod and agree with a lot of this. If you are new with Twitter, this should help you understand the service in ways you may have missed. If you are one of those incessant spammers of modern day Twitter, oh yes … then you must be new, or you would have received the memo to explain how the Twitter Follower Frenzy just makes you look bad.

I want to offer a short bit about Twitter following, but then show you more about where Twitter is going for those people who are unwilling to adapt to a better, and smarter purpose for their tweeterizing. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to tell you the right or wrong way to use your Twitter … I will just give you some facts and figures and let you see for yourself.

I suspect that you want to know, “is Twitter good for SEO?” Either that, or your bum is feeling pretty sore, and you are willing to try anything. I am happy to help with the Twitter part, and I am sorry about your rump. Try pistachio, but don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.

I am surprised that more people have not discussed the topic of Twitter and SEO to provide their opinion-based answers. I think that a lot of people are afraid to touch on this, for fear of giving an unpopular answer, or being wrong. Well, leave it to me to tell you this: “Yes, Twitter helps SEO!”

Twitter can help with SEO efforts, directly, as well as indirectly when Twitter users share the information in places such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, and elsewhere. If somebody tells you otherwise, you are listening to the wrong SEO advice.

Do you use Twitter? If you have used Twitter as long as I have, you have surely seen a lot of change. I opened my first Twitter account in April 2008, just over two and a half years ago. I used Twitter to announce my racing starts and results, and to let people know when my auto racing webcast was live. I was too busy on race tracks to use it for much else.

In the beginning, I was pretty unaware of the great value of Twitter, as most of us were, but then I decided to take a little closer look when I created my @murnahan account. Twitter’s usefulness really struck me after I learned about a fire that happened on the roof of my kids’ school, about 100 yards from my home, in a Twitter update. No, I didn’t learn about that fire by hearing the fire trucks or standing in my driveway and seeing flashing lights. I discovered it on Twitter. This was when I decided that Twitter was really worth a closer look.

The majority of the world’s population do not need sex drugs. Likewise, the majority of the world’s population do not need SEO and social media marketing. If you try to convince a spammer of this, their ears turn off. They just don’t get it, because they know that one in “X” squillion people who receive their message will respond.

It is easy to compare the propagation of false and misleading information about SEO and social media marketing to the false and misleading spam of sex drugs and Nigerian banking scams. It is also easy to compare the changes of social media’s growing spam to the way email turned spammy. A huge problem I see is that social media propagates the spam of social media. When SEO and social media is flooded with deception, it devalues the industry and creates much skepticism of these useful services.

What do you seek from social media? Do you know? Are you wasting time?
In a recent conversation with a friend, I asked him why he spends so many hours per day using Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other social networks. I asked him if he had achieved any considerable objectives, and whether they were personal or business objectives.
I was really asking him these things to help him consider his objectives, and to gather his opinions. After all, gaining others’ perspectives is a huge benefit of social media. My friend works for a living and counts on new business to keep a [...]