Tag: twitter usage

Twitter in Numbers: Marginal, Not Magical

100 Twitter Profiles Examined
100 Twitter Profiles Examined

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.

Holy Bird Poop! Look at These Twitter Followers!

Once in a while, but less frequently than before, I check to see who is following me on Twitter. There are always a few new faces to greet me, and I like to know who they are, the best I can.

I used to try and follow most people who followed me on Twitter, so they could feel free to reach out to me directly with a private direct message if they should choose. It has never been because I was concerned they would stop following me if I did not return the “favor”, as if it is some amazing favor to follow somebody. Maybe they think it’ll make them famous … or at least feel famous.

This is just a bit of opinion, but it seems to me that following somebody’s Twitter feed should be because you are interested in what they share, or because you are interested in establishing some sort of communication with them. Am I right, or did I miss something?

Let me show you what I found yesterday when I looked through the list of people who, in theory, wanted to know what I have to say on Twitter. This table includes numbers I gathered from the most recent 100 people who followed my Twitter feed. I chose to follow a few of them, but I want you to take a quick glance through the list. Below the list, I will share some averages, and logical assumptions that a reasonable person could make.


followers following ratio more or less tweets
1097 1931 1.76 : 1 834 814
1015 1989 1.96 : 1 974 889
2977 2359 0.79 : 1 -618 815
66 311 4.71 : 1 245 917
202 1928 9.54 : 1 1726 30
579 2001 3.46 : 1 1422 1037
233 868 3.73 : 1 635 952
2099 2300 1.10 : 1 201 793
617 1170 1.90 : 1 553 91
6323 6459 1.02 : 1 136 1557
113 308 2.73 : 1 195 614
365 1002 2.75 : 1 637 456
12471 12861 1.03 : 1 390 18712
6265 6103 0.97 : 1 -162 4229
524 2001 3.82 : 1 1477 86
403 678 1.68 : 1 275 295
2362 2416 1.02 : 1 54 6160
9481 10427 1.10 : 1 946 9115
1938 1999 1.03 : 1 61 3486
1178 1956 1.66 : 1 778 1341
8439 8238 0.98 : 1 -201 144
1662 1956 1.18 : 1 294 325
1888 1902 1.01 : 1 14 714
112 138 1.23 : 1 26 504
2094 2305 1.10 : 1 211 451
729 1248 1.71 : 1 519 2588
5166 5597 1.08 : 1 431 7871
287 1685 5.87 : 1 1398 94
484 910 1.88 : 1 426 1069
334 745 2.23 : 1 411 7025
1123 1961 1.75 : 1 838 1448
285 351 1.23 : 1 66 4350
73 482 6.60 : 1 409 27
205 246 1.20 : 1 41 473
10859 11887 1.09 : 1 1028 1076
157 575 3.66 : 1 418 155
90 1229 13.66 : 1 1139 6
646 1252 1.94 : 1 606 1313
194 284 1.46 : 1 90 173
4169 3298 0.79 : 1 -871 4047
9107 9299 1.02 : 1 192 764
13779 10807 0.78 : 1 -2972 1650
990 1943 1.96 : 1 953 3135
174 393 2.26 : 1 219 115
175 376 2.15 : 1 201 58
35 242 6.91 : 1 207 22
431 905 2.10 : 1 474 10
1015 1113 1.10 : 1 98 1540
1691 1693 1.00 : 1 2 1237
1373 1979 1.44 : 1 606 527
272 571 2.10 : 1 299 457
438 1085 2.48 : 1 647 425
661 219 0.33 : 1 -442 154
1877 2055 1.09 : 1 178 3044
2204 2394 1.09 : 1 190 3359
2249 2393 1.06 : 1 144 350
168 796 4.74 : 1 628 6
60 922 15.37 : 1 862 54
301 717 2.38 : 1 416 124
401 2000 4.99 : 1 1599 76
48 405 8.44 : 1 357 10
3312 3635 1.10 : 1 323 2171
23141 20522 0.89 : 1 -2619 3126
329 720 2.19 : 1 391 13
12 41 3.42 : 1 29 27
2716 2964 1.09 : 1 248 1314
1066 2001 1.88 : 1 935 1405
242 601 2.48 : 1 359 53
272 373 1.37 : 1 101 10
806 1873 2.32 : 1 1067 447
1005 1628 1.62 : 1 623 67
1316 1442 1.10 : 1 126 48
134 653 4.87 : 1 519 152
293 1389 4.74 : 1 1096 76
149 2001 13.43 : 1 1852 11
138 638 4.62 : 1 500 17
4387 4788 1.09 : 1 401 55
4329 3688 0.85 : 1 -641 180
89 491 5.52 : 1 402 5
1121 1866 1.66 : 1 745 662
132 1030 7.80 : 1 898 20
135 226 1.67 : 1 91 66
2317 2551 1.10 : 1 234 618
380 1143 3.01 : 1 763 55
70082 73497 1.05 : 1 3415 1815
24118 21839 0.91 : 1 -2279 700
972 1384 1.42 : 1 412 522
140 146 1.04 : 1 6 472
877 1034 1.18 : 1 157 312
5337 5239 0.98 : 1 -98 410
65 257 3.95 : 1 192 108
3472 3779 1.09 : 1 307 1190
459 1025 2.23 : 1 566 73
572 1129 1.97 : 1 557 35
301 1097 3.64 : 1 796 489
548 2001 3.65 : 1 1453 2
116 1267 10.92 : 1 1151 1
194 1518 7.82 : 1 1324 121
130 177 1.36 : 1 47 15
61 400 6.56 : 1 339 1
avg. followers avg. following avg. ratio avg. difference avg. tweets
2820.18 3217.16 2.84 : 1 396.98 1202.23
total followers total following total tweets
282,018 321,716 120,223

What Do These Twitter Follower Numbers Indicate?

What I hope you will notice is that the average of these 100 users is following 2.84 other users to every one who follows them. That came out to the average person following 396.98 more people than are following them. A common strategy Twitter has tried to address is that of following a lot of people in hopes they will return the follow. Twitter has set limits as an effort to avoid this, but it is still alive and going strong. What so many people don’t understand is how worthless it truly is in practice.

Now, we could assume the 284 percent (2.84:1 ratio) means people are just doing a lot of “listening” to others, but I found reasons to doubt that. I have tested simply re-following everybody who follows me on Twitter, and you probably guessed it … my follower count goes up like mad! When I stop re-following everybody, it levels off.

This whole topic is much like I wrote about two years ago in an article titled “Follow, Unfollow, Re-Follow … What?!” In that article, I even offered a logical alternative, but apparently that memo missed a few desks.

Perhaps an even more important read for people doing this would be a popular piece I wrote titled “Social Media and The Absurdity of Implied Reciprocity“. Yes, I said “absurdity”, and based on public reception of that article, I think I built a pretty darn good case against this tactic.

What is Twitter Really Getting You?

I’m going to show you some real numbers that reflect user attention and engagement. Of course, there is much more to Twitter than just sharing website links, but since it is a valuable part of Twitter for many people, I’ll use website traffic to make the point.

Let’s look at some sobering numbers based on over 1,000 tweets, and their affect on website visits. Below is a table showing the ten most recent articles published here on my blog, along with the number of times they were tweeted at the time I wrote this. The total of tweets is 1016. The average number of tweets is 101.6, with the lowest at 48 and the highest at 228. Those are sufficient numbers for the point I want to illustrate.

Note: I’ll bet real money that if you click on the most popular ones, you will discover that they continued to receive hundreds more tweets over time.

In a perfect world, that will happen because they were just downright great information, but it also happens too often because enough people clicked and saw a startling number of retweets, and so they tweet it without reading beyond the first three lines.

Yes, in far too many cases, people will just assume it is good, because enough others thought it was good … neglecting that mind of their own altogether. Fortunately for you, you’re still reading, and you are judging for yourself.

Most Recent Articles on SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog Tweets
Persecution of Excellence: What Einstein Knew About Marketing 86
Search Engine Optimization is Not a Technology Job! 119
Why I’m Unsubscribing and Reading Fewer Blogs 80
“Everybody” is Not Your Target Market! 166
SEO and Social Media Fear of Being “The D Word” 48
Social Media Marketing is More Than Social Networking 228
Can You Value Each Blog Post at $10,000? 70
Paradigm Shifting, Initial Perceptions, and Marketing Communication 58
Strategic Marketing Failure: Are You Giving it Up Too Easy? 59
Is Social Media Like Space Exploration? 102
Average Number of Tweets 101.6
Total Number of Tweets 1016

I measure everything. Measuring and analyzing data is an important part of my job. So I’ll tell you what I found from those 1016 tweets, and their multi-million user exposure. The readership totals reflected great signs that readers were paying attention. They spent an average time on page of more than five minutes. That includes the 10 second clicks, and it is good time on page. The average pages visited by readers referred through a link from Twitter was 1.8, so a decent number of them clicked around.

Here’s the punchline! Out of this sample of 1016 tweets by many different users, the highest number of website visits attributed to any individual tweet was 21. The average number of visits per tweet came to 2.74. Maybe that doesn’t seem very surprising, but let’s add some contrast. Two years ago, I witnessed no less than 500 visits from a single tweet within the first hour of tweeting a link to my blog. My guess is that the past level of engagement and traffic generation from Twitter had a big role in its eventual degradation. Times have changed, and much of that change can be attributed to the following frenzy I described.

I Still Like Twitter … But …

I like Twitter a lot, and I don’t intend to stop using it any day soon. Twitter presently accounts for approximately 10 percent of traffic to my blog. I’ll take that 10 percent, but one thing I’m certainly not going to do is worry about whether a squillion people follow me.

The way I see the math, even if each and every one of those 100 users I listed above were to read an article and then tweet the link to my blog, on a sunny day I could expect 374 website visits from that (their 100 visits, plus an average 2.74 visits per tweet times 100). Based on their usage model, I think that would be a pretty steep climb.

The overall average engagement of Twitter users is very low. There is a relatively minuscule few who truly make good use of the service, and those are the ones I enjoy my Twitter time with.

What do you observe about Twitter?

P.S.

I hand-picked some articles I have written about Twitter. I hope you will enjoy these.

If you still insist on more, I wrote a book about Twitter.

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Is Twitter Good for SEO?: Is Ice Cream Good for Hemorrhoids?

Twitter SEO and Sore Bums
Twitter SEO and Sore Bums

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.

I read an article on the widely respected SEOmoz.org blog today that addressed the SEO value of Twitter. It reminded me how much I sometimes forget the importance of bringing things down to a very simple level. I guess I just forget that not everybody has done this “Internet thing” to earn food for the past decade and a half. I try to keep things pretty simple, but I know I can wing one over readers’ heads some days. I try to provide useful marketing and SEO tips, but if I ever forget to make them simple, I apologize. This one should be nice and easy.

I thought that the value of Twitter for SEO was pretty obvious to most users, a long time ago. Sometimes, when I see what other people are saying, I recognize that details like this can slip by some people. Here is a quote from the recent article on SEOmoz titled “The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist“:

“So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn’t have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed [learn more about nofollow]. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it’s time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.”

The article had some good points, but it really did take me back to grammar school. Quoting the article, “Now that we know” … what? Holy hemorrhoid! I guess I assumed that we knew this kind of thing years ago. Links from my old Yahoo chat groups in 1998 helped my SEO, but is that revolutionary, too? It was kind of funny to me how much it resembled something I said in early 2009 when I wrote the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends“. Here is a statement I made in the book, and I stand by it today:

“Many search engine optimizers (SEO) will overlook the value of Twitter for improving search engine penetration. If they miss this part, they are making a big mistake. A reason many SEO will dismiss this value is that Twitter uses the “nofollow” attribute in outbound links. Make no mistake; Twitter can greatly enhance your visibility in search engine results.”

Heck, maybe the Internet is coming up to speed, or maybe I am just one of those people who are as strange as a pickled duck fart and foresee things in some uncanny way. I don’t know … maybe it is a combination.

Do More Tweets Help SEO?

This should be obvious, but the impact of more people tweeting your website content may be even higher than you imagined. Whenever somebody tweets your linked content, it creates links to your website. The quality and quantity of inks to a website are the most important factors that search engines use to gauge the importance of a website. Also, the links Twitter produces are not necessarily only on Twitter. There are a lot of services which aggregate Twitter’ed content, as well as many widgets and other syndication through RSS in which it may appear on other websites.

It will be far more important for other people to tweet your content than just tweeting your link a squillion times. Don’t bother with that, because it is not going to make you a ton of new friends. A few times is fine, but let’s not go out of the way to garner death threats, and insults about your mother.

Do More Twitter Followers Help SEO?

I am the last person who would wish to promote a “Twitter follower-frenzy”, so I almost hate to say this. Many indicators will suggest that more followers on Twitter can improve the SEO value of a tweet. Yes, a high follower count does correlate to higher SEO value, but I believe it correlates even better with the number of Twitter lists a person is on and other measurements.

I know that a lot of people want to become popular on Twitter, but before you implement some off the cuff plan, be sure to read the article titled “How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful“. If you do the things that many moronic marketers suggest, people will wish a bad case of herpes on you and throw you on a flaming bed of nails before they will care to listen to you … or buy your stuff.

The important factor is being useful and giving people what they want. Here you go … try thinking a little bit more like this video.

There is not much that I dislike more than a bunch of bad marketers out there with nothing useful to say. I think that millions of Twitter users would agree with me on this. Don’t take this as any suggestion that you go and try to gather as many Twitter followers as you can. Instead, I recommend, as I always have, that you be useful. As with anything SEO-related, being useful and providing compelling information is what matters the most. If you can do that, many of the other factors seem to magically fall into place. I am pretty sure it can also help hemorrhoids, even better than ice cream.

Twitter Changed, But it is Still Useful for SEO

Although I still really like Twitter, it changed a lot over time. Twitter had a huge growth spurt, and as the new users poured in, much of the real value of the service dwindled. It is still good for SEO, but what so many people do not grasp is that if you expect people to tweet and retweet what you have to share, it had better be pretty damn awesome to be heard over the excess noise.

How much did Twitter change? I could write another book about this, but I would rather stick needles in my eyes. I will just offer this: I wrote about Twitter retweets on February 29th, 2009. It was titled “Twitter: The Tweet About Retweet” and it received many hundreds of retweets. Tweetmeme says 420, but that data is old, and it was actually many more. In another case, I wrote a really short and basic article (approximately 250 words) about Twitter username selection on April 8th of 2009. It also received a ton of retweets and 158 reader comments. Back in the earlier days, I would measure between 500-1,500 clicks on darn near any link I tweeted, within minutes. Now, a hundredth of that would buzz my radar.

Maybe I just became less “brilliant” with the things people love to share, but I am pretty sure that is not the case. Many Twitter users just don’t see it when they are trying to follow a squillion other people, with hopes of being followed back.

Today, when I tweet something from my blog, I do not count on Twitter to pass it along. In fact, Twitter directly accounts for under three percent of my website traffic. Moreover, I have measured that the website traffic coming directly from Twitter has a low probability of participating and adding their comments to a topic. I think this is because of Twitter-enhanced attention disorders which were there before Twitter. Twitter just made it even more “old fashioned” to actually read things and pay attention. My study on this is forthcoming, but let’s just start the study with whether you will take the time to finish reading and add your comment.

Since the time of these popular Twitter-related articles, I have written hundreds of very compelling and useful blog articles which far exceeded the relatively minor value of those. I can effectively measure the value of Twitter from a conversational standpoint as much lower than it was. The SEO value of Twitter and the Twitter “retweet” is still there, but if you want to break through the noise, it better be something stunning.

As I said in the article titled “Is Squidoo Good for SEO? Likely More Than You Think!“, I must add a basic disclaimer as follows:

“I do not rely on any single SEO tool too heavily, and I do not recommend that you do that, either. There is not a short list of SEO tools and tricks that will make you famously successful with search engines.”

If you came here about the ice cream, I am sorry about your bum. Perhaps you could try eating it really fast to take your mind off the ‘roids. If you came here about Twitter and SEO, please add your comments on my blog. Just type it in and let’s have a good old fashioned ice cream social.

Photo credit to weelakeo via Flickr

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Twitter Boom; Twitter Bust; Twitter Revival?

Shall We Revive Twitter?
Shall We Revive Twitter?

Are Twitter’s networking and conversation possibilities still compelling, or is Twitter mostly for link sharing and SEO now? The experience of Twitter is different for each individual, but maybe there is also a collective answer.

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.

Witnessing the Twitter Boom

There was a time, about a year and a half ago, when you were “nobody” if you didn’t use Twitter. It was a sudden craze that dragged celebrities in by the hundreds, and all that publicity coaxed people to check it out. Many of the huge boom of Twitter users were pretty skeptical of Twitter, but they just had to know what it was all about. It was a really amazing tool back then, for those who learned how to use it to meet people and build a network.

The Twitter boom was in full swing, but the majority of new users did not return more than a few times, and Twitter experienced massive losses of users. The number of new users was still skyrocketing, but the number of people actually using the service looked bleak. The loss rate was high.

Twitter is still pretty close to the same service, overall, and the tools surrounding Twitter were made better since that time. What has changed is in how it has been used, which is unique for each of us, but has a collective affect on Twitter as well. Like any tool, it can be used in productive ways, or in unproductive ways. A hammer can build a home, or it can destroy one. Unfortunately, many users have been influenced by the “dark side” and have been less than productive for themselves and the community as a whole.

There are many people who will choose to use Twitter to “build a house” rather than destroy one, but there are enough hammers swinging that it can be pretty challenging to recognize the difference. The confusion and frustration showed many Twitter users the door, and they left.

Twitter made it really easy to meet people, but this had a downside, too. I have met a lot of great people using Twitter. I have also met thousands of people who have no more use for me than to add another number to their Twitter follower count in hopes that I will click their link and buy something from them.

Are the Good Days of Twitter Gone?

Twitter became the easiest network of all for gaining a following of people. I called it the Twitter Follower Frenzy in an article from June 2009, and it just kept growing from there. I found that for a lot of users, it felt like an obligation to refollow anybody who loved them enough to follow their Twitter feed. Heck, I never sought followers, but somehow I ended up following over 20,000 people, mostly just because they had followed me and I wanted to seem politely accessible.

The Follower Frenzy led to a huge pitfall. Call me an ass for pointing this out, but it is really true, and I can tell you why. Twitter gained a lot of it’s popularity among marketers because it was fun, interactive, informative, and because it was a really easy way to bring thousands of people to a website. Once people seemed to “figure out” that anybody and everybody can be a “marketing expert”, Twitter was the low hanging fruit. Twitter would become the place where anybody could be a success by pushing out advertisements, or so they hoped.

How extreme was the lure of Twitter? Back in early 2009, when I would send a Twitter update I could watch anywhere from 500-2,000 visits to my blog from a single “tweet”. Less than 300 unique visitors attributable to a given tweet meant that Twitter was down.

It was apparent that anything worth a tweet was going to be quite visible. Twitter was really useful for bringing attention to websites, thus it became highly abused. It can still be useful for sharing information, but nothing like early 2009. It was really very astonishing.

I had a lot of fun with Twitter back then. Here is a video I produced reflecting the fun I had: Twitter Kids

Is Twitter Really Damaged, or is it Just Me?

It was easy for me, at first, to question whether I had just become less useful or interesting. I ruled this out, because all of my other networks and my blog were still doing fine. Perhaps I have become less interactive with Twitter, but that was actually more of a reaction than the cause. I slowed my use of Twitter as a conversation and networking tool when it started looking more like just another link sharing network.

I questioned whether it was just me who noticed a lot less interaction on Twitter, but I can definitively answer that this was not the case. There was a collective damage by many users, and there was actually a defining moment when Twitter started going down hill for me, and for a lot of others. Ironically, it was right about the time I launched the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends” which so many of my Twitter friends urged me to write.

I still find usefulness to Twitter for it’s search functions and for communicating with a few friends. I like Twitter, I really do, but where I have noted troubles with Twitter is in the number of people who took their follower count too seriously and it became a shouting contest where millions of people tried to get their 15 minutes of fame or to sell their goods and services. It started to look like a huge business opportunity to millions of people.

Collective Benefit of Reviving Twitter

The question of whether Twitter is worth “reviving” is a matter that is up to each of us to answer. We each use Twitter in our own ways, and we each see different results. A revival of Twitter is something that we each do on an individual basis, and it largely affects only our own experience with the service.

At the same time, I still hold some belief that if enough people took the initiative, there would also be a collective benefit. It took a collective effort to cause the damage and subsequent loss of interest in many people. Similarly, doesn’t it seem possible that there could be a collective repair and restoration of people’s interest if we reversed some of the damage?

I think there can still be a lot of great conversations and relationships built, but it will take effort. It will likely require close attention to follower/following connections, and making lists to manage all the information.

The days of massive website traffic and huge allure to inexperienced and shotgun-blast marketers has dwindled. The allure to spammers is still there, but it seems less pervasive because they realized it is no longer the goldmine they hoped for. The useless garbage is easier than ever to filter out if you make the effort.

Perhaps now if people will concern themselves less with unrealistic popularity and inflated numbers, and more with purposeful popularity within a core group of interesting people, Twitter can still be a great networking tool. That is, if we can bring back some of the interest of those great people who just became bored, irritated, and deaf from the static.

Well, what are your thoughts? Don’t be shy!

P.S.

I hand-picked a small group of articles I have written about Twitter over time. I hope you will enjoy these:

Photo credit to SlapAyoda via Flickr

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How SEO and Social Media Are Like Sex Drugs and Nigerian Scams

Achieve Stronger More Enjoyable Campaigns
Achieve Stronger More Enjoyable Campaigns

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.

I suppose I should define what it is that I am comparing to sexual aids and Nigerian bank scams. In case you have not seen the same kind of spam I see every day, I will just give you a quick note on each of these “sex drugs” and “Nigerian scams” of modern day.

SEO is search engine optimization, and it deals with creating higher ranking in search engine results, increasing website conversion, data analysis, and much more. Most of the world’s educated population do not have any idea what SEO means, or what it involves. This fact opens the floodgates for abuse and fraud by “SEO experts” who will stop at nothing to get your money and provide disastrous results in return. There are a lot of crooks out there actively selling SEO with a pitch consisting largely of “You need meta tags on your website to improve your listings in search engines.” Of course, that is a lie, and I can prove it, but I guess lies are easier than the truth for some people.

Social Media Marketing means marketing. Most of us realize that Twitter is not just for spouting off about what you had for lunch, and that Facebook is not just for talking about your kids, your spouse, or how drunk that dude got at the party last night. They are also not just for making more “friends” to pitch your goods to. Against popular adoption of the term, social media marketing does not mean spewing your latest specials and acting like a used car dealer. It means respectful, targeted, creative marketing and other customer communications that can withstand the scrutiny of others and provide sustainable value to a brand.

SEO and Social Media Are Like Futuristic Sex Drugs

The sex drug market took off like a rocket and ridiculous numbers of (low-life, sleazy, bottom-feeding, law-breaking, unethical) people wanted a piece of that market. It was presented as a fast way to get rich, and for a relatively tiny few, it came true. People like sex, and they like money, so this seemed like a perfect plan to get rich. You have probably been a victim of this dreadful pandemic.

If nobody has ever hit you up with their sex drug specials, you are an exception, and I will kiss your ring and address you as my Supreme Leader!

Perhaps the biggest craze to ever hit the Internet is the lure of easy money, and there are squillions of people who will insist that easy money is out there for the taking if you just sign up for their “plan” and give them a credit card number. Many will even tell you that they can make anybody rich with little effort and in just a few hours per day. SEO and social media are the obvious vehicles of choice for carrying out these get rich quick plans, and so they have become extremely popular. The glimmer of hope to have more tomorrow than they have today is just enough to create a spark in people that sets off an explosion.

I have to question the course of seo and social media marketing over time. Of course, it is my job, so it matters to me. It should really matter to a lot of the “innocent” people out there, too. I realize that most people have not been around the Internet or as utterly consumed by it for as long as I have, so the question may seem a bit innocuous to some. A lot of things seem pretty harmless until they get as annoying as a swarm of mosquitoes or actually reach out and cause you direct harm.

I have a lot of questions about the direction of this Internet space we all love. A concern that regularly comes to mind is how it seems that social media is moving the way of email. I remember when email was simple, and required relatively minor adjustments for email spam. Of course, that did not last long. As the use of email spread wide and fast, a lot of sleazy people found ways to make it far less productive, and eventually very costly to consumers. Once the sex drugs reached the market, email hit a really rough spot that it has still never been able to fully overcome. Now it is estimated that over 97 percent of email is spam. The overall percentage of unwanted business social media communication is likely even higher, as the world has been introduced to the “everybody is a marketer” craze and more people are dying to get their hands on all of that easy money available on the Internet.

The truth sucks for a lot of people, but I like to share it anyway. There are millions of people trying to market millions of products, while only a small percentile will take the care to be successful at it, or develop the required marketing talent. There is often no way to prove this to somebody other than to just give them time and watch them give up and fail. Tragically, this demographic are often lured back in when along comes another “plan”, another great “deal” that will make them successful … but this time it is different, and it is a “sure bet”.

I certainly love to dream big, and I never want to squash anybody’s dream. Instead, I just wish for them to have more dedication and better planning for their dreams than to assume it is as simple as what many people will claim.

The allure of easy money is strong, and because of this, it is easy to prey on people’s emotions by offering them an easier solution. That strong demand for a perfect answer to making more money has driven the need for SEO and social media marketing. In reality, SEO and social media are useful marketing tools, but unfortunately the candy brought in a lot of cockroaches.

The majority of the unwanted and spammy social media communication that I witness are attempts to either sell SEO and social media marketing services, or to recruit others to do the same spammy things with an expectation of earning a profit. With an eye on the future, does this really seem like a good plan for success? Sure, we can say that it will die out as more people figure out that it is largely fraudulent, but then, I seem to still find a lot of sex drug offerings in my email every day (thousands per day).

Is Social Media Going The Way of Email?

Social media has revealed and honed some brilliant creative marketers, and the gap between good and mediocre is constantly widening. Pareto’s principle of 80/20 will always apply to marketing, just as it does in any industry. The tragedy is that there is a constant spread of misinformation that SEO and social media marketing creates easy profit and that anybody can do it just as well as the next. I believe that as long as there are still people falling prey to these lies, the integrity of the industry will largely be shrouded in mystery and doubt.

What are your thoughts? Are you fooled by the “easy money” hype of today’s social media?

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