What Influences my Tweets

These are the components that influence my tweets:

Demand - People are talking about you and want to be your friend.
Engagement - Try having more conversations and less one-sided broadcasting.
Velocity - Be original, creative and offer good content to the stream and your message will travel.
Activity - Try engaging with more people. Always remember that great content is rewarded.
Reach - The best way to build your audience is by listening and participating. There is no shortcut.




Already, Twitter influences stock and options trading.

"Since brokers have to save instant messages and e-mail, but thus far have no such mandate for tweets, well, you can guess that the far more discreet traffic is on Twitter," says Jon Najarian, of optionmonster.com. It was on Twitter that Najarian first heard last week's news that Matrixx Initiatives' (ticker: MTXX) Zicam nasal spray allegedly damaged people's sense of smell. "Guys started tweeting and the stock dropped from $19 to $13," he says. Matrixx has since pulled Zicam off the market. The stock was recently at about $5.55.

Facebook visits beat Google in between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week

"Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week."

This development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue.

LinkedIn Traffic Power

LinkedIn traffic is more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is due to the professional nature of LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers). Users of this service are business decision makers currently numbering 60 million professionals. For me it is always one of the top 3 referring sites that drives traffic to my blog.

link velocity - Google's need for freshness

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results. With information suddenly so viral and speedy, bursts of links to content are key indicators of freshness and what is at the top of mind for searchers. Take for example, Wikipedia’s content is continually updated by its editors, giving it the appearance of constant freshness. Combined with continual linking, it gives it a live Web relevance and therefore placement. Age of content and websites are then devalued in favor of freshness, and link bursts regain value so long as link bursts appear naturally viral. How does a search engine differentiate between spam bursts and natural viral bursts?

Matt Cutts addresses links from Twitter and Facebook

Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It's just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are. While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. With Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public, so Google can't crawl it, and it can't assign pagerank on the outgoing links. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. Google uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets. However most links with Twitter are nofollow.

Google has released another set of very cool tools for Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most robust offerings by the search giant and it manages to fly under the radar. It has almost become ubiquitous for a large number of companies that are not prospects for other analytics packages like Omniture, Coremetrics, Webtrends etc.

My most popular search interviews in 2009

In keeping with the theme of reflecting upon the year 2009, I thought it would be fun to go back through various favorite interviews in 2009 and find my top five.

Google's Caffeine Update



Vanessa Fox Talks Diagnosing What's Wrong with a Site



Mike McDonald compares the iPhone 3Gs to the Google myTouch




Michael Martin Compares the iPhone to the gPhone




Abby Johnson Looks at Google Voice