Entries Tagged 'Twitter' ↓

Move over, Alice Munro - there’s a new short story genre in town - and some gent named Sean Hill is leading the brigade.

Sean has Tweeted more than 300 teeny tiny ’stories’ - and also hosts them all on his site, Very-Short-Story.com.

Here are three of my favourite “very short stories” aka Tweets:

We’ve lost him.” said the doctor, “He was disconnected too long.” His family sobbed. The Twitter outage death toll climbed higher.

I’d given up, resigned to be eating by the cannibals. They
spit out the first bite, I was too tough and chewy. The gym had paid off.

It’s refreshing as heck to see good writing on Twitter - instead of the tedious thought-burps, incomplete sentences, hashtag and RT@ jibberish I often see there.

But I admit, I find it a little depressing to see yet another indication of how Tweeting (microblogging) is fast moving in to replace full-out blogging.

Don’t Sacrifice Blogging for the Tweet-Phenom

Who cares, you say? Twitter is faster, more suitable for non-writers, spreads wider and faster than regular blogging, right? And we’re all lazy.. um, I mean, busy.

If you’re a business you really should care about trading in blogging for Tweeting. Here’s why:

Every new blog post you put up on your corporate site will boost your page rankings, moving you up to that golden Page 1 spot in Google’s search results!

Tweets can’t do that. Sure your Twitter profile page can show up on Page 1 if your business name is Googled - that is, if you put your business name in your Twitter profile.

BUT the Tweets you post - no matter how many great, relevant keywords they may contain - do not move you up in the page rankings for those keywords.

Only blogging within your corporate site gives you that added benefit (and it’s a big one) - on top of all the good stuff found in social media: 2-way conversations, instant customer service, online reputation management, etc.

Put that in yur pipe and smoke it, Twitter!

I just passed the 100 mark in the number of people following me on Twitter - the increasingly popular social media channel that combines instant-messaging and ‘micro-blogging’ via the site, Twitter.com. (More than a million people are Twittering.)

100 is, for me, a lot of Followers - especially since 99% of them are strangers, many on the other side of the world. So what is it that draws them to my Tweets (posts on Twitter): My pithy words? Great link sharing?

The answer lies in the name of my Twitter account - writingSEO - which is visible to all and searchable.

So, 100 folks with a like-minded interest in SEO have done a search across Twitter.com and my name came up… logically, they clicked on ‘Follow’ to see if I have SEO pearls of wisdom to share.

An Audience is Born

Suddenly, I have an audience! Enough of a following to start Twittering more frequently and try to keep every post relevant to SEO and, hopefully, with lessons learned from my own business and questions to generate discussion amongst my Twitter peers.

The end game: idea-sharing, collaborating, sales leads (I’ve already had a few inquiries from fellow Twitterers as to my SEO and SM services), intellectual engagement, brand management, improved visibility in the marketplace… It’s all good.

And it all started with an optimized name. I confess, when I bought the domain, writingSEO.com, I didn’t consider its keyword-rich branding carrying my business much beyond the site/blog itself. But now that I have social media accounts, I see the full value of the name I chose.