A blog post from Twitter today stated that there are 50 million tweets worldwide per day. If you think this number is staggering, check out the graph they posted with it, which shows an almost exponential increase in Tweets since Twitter's inception


If Twitter is 50 million tweets a day, that means 600 per second. According to SearchEngineLand the Facebook comparator is 700 status updates per second.

If Facebook is considered a social media 'establishment', then it is fair to say that with 600 tweets per second compared to 700 status updates per second, it wouldn't be unfair for Twitter to consider itself part of the establishment as well.

(Meanwhile, according to the same article in SearchEngineLand, there are only 55 Buzzes (that's Google speak for status update/tweet) per second...which to be honest is a lot more than I would expect from Google Buzz. )

Facebook is benefiting from it's huge following through a good smattering of advertisements down the right sidebar, Google Buzz has the Google search network, why is Twitter still not monetising it's huge audience?

It's not like there is no way to, they could do it in a number of ways;

1. Display advertising, like Google and Facebook
2. New paid services (I doubt making existing service paid would go down well)
3. Selling off of data to businesses

Surely their venture capitalist supporters are getting a bit antsy?

Among the millions of stories going on on Twitter over the last week, one of the most popular was regarding Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines. Kevin Smith (the director of Clerks, etc.) used a combination of Twitter and podcasts (through SModcast)  to rant and spread the news about his bad treatment at the hands of Southwest Airlines flight policy.

This is an obvious nightmare for the unlucky PR and customer service people at Southwest Airlines, and they responded in a variety of ways, including a voucher to him, a carefully crafted post on their corporate blog (wittily named 'Not So Silent Bob') and, of course, Twitter.

The person manning the Twitter account for SWA should get a medal - she must have felt like the whole internet hated her.

What could SouthWest Airlines have done to prevent the Twitter-wrath of Kevin Smith?

Nothing. They have a policy in place which is highly contentious, and it has been in place (apparently) for a long time.

What they did right.

They have a Twitter account, which is fairly cutting edge of them, and the fact that they were monitoring it even better. Lots of  companies don't do this.

After a public apology, they tried to move the conversation off Twitter and into a private sphere, which Kevin Smith took against, but that is the professional way to go, and if Kevin wanted to continue in public, then so be it.

They wrote an apology on their blog so they could explain the matter in more than 140 character chunks.

I think their blog posts and Twitter replies were fair enough. They were unemotional, professional and attempted to state the facts.

What could they have done better?

However, they should have stuck more firmly to their one story. They should have reiterated their rules and directed people to a permanent information source they have which outlines the rules and the reasons behind them.

They could be a bit more responsive to the large amount of people against this policy - this doesn't mean changing their policies, but perhaps just being a bit more considerate in the way they are communicated.  Social media is about listening and responding, whereas SWA was a bit more about using social media to send out their press releases.

So what?

The good thing for individuals - perhaps service will improve as companies have no idea who has a giant online following behind them!

The bad thing for companies - perhaps a person with a giant online following might be the recipient of a slip up of your company, and you will have to deal with the fall out.  Learn from SWA and never think it couldn't happen to you.

PPC (Pay Per Click Marketing) is where you place a short ad on a search engine or network site and pay only when someone clicks on your ad.

The great thing about this payment model is that you only pay for people actually interested in visiting your site (i.e. they will click through) and you can see from the reports a lot of detail about each click. PPC is one of the most accountable of all marketing spends.

With all the information at your fingertips, there are lots of things you can do to optimise (or reduce) your spend and ensure you are getting the most relevant traffic for your money.

Here is a list of things you should check at least monthly, to ensure your PPC money isn't going down the drain.

1. The Search Query Report (not the keyword report). The search query report shows the terms people actually used to visit your site. Using this, you can find keywords which should be made negative in your campaigns. For example, if you own a shoe store and see a lot of people arriving via the term socks (and you don't sell socks), then maybe you need to add that as a negative keyword. Note this kind of thing shouldn't be a problem if you have exact match keywords, but could if you use broad match.

2. Check your bounce rates against your Ads and keywords - whichever ads and keywords are resulting in a high bounce rate or low time on site  need to be reconsidered. Those ads are obviously not targetted to your key market, but they are still costing you money. Try to fix them by making them more targetted, or delete them.

3. Click Through Rate - if you have a very low click through rate, it could be due to one of a few of things, but, if you are ranking well and for the right keywords, a low CTR could be because your ad copy is not enticing. Improve your ad copy, make it more compelling and more professional. Use keywords in your heading and try to identify unique things about your business which means people should click on your ad instead of a competitors.

4. Bidding Wars - The thing with PPC marketing is that it is an auction type process, you bid and you get a placement. The higher you bid, the higher the placement of your ad. For some competitive types, this can be addictive, and they can bid themselves right to the top. The things you need to remember are firstly, top spot isn't always the spot which will get you the most clicks and secondly, you need to question whether that particular term is worth the cost you are spending.

5. Cost per conversion - calculate an approximate cost per conversion for each of your ad groups to see if you are staying within a reasonable budget. For this to work, you need to have Google Analytics on your site, and then you can either use the Google Conversion Optimiser, or create your own. Make sure you judge the costs you are spending for traffic and conversions against what you are ACTUALLY happy to pay for them.

Regular monitoring of your ad words account will mean that you minimise your wasted spend. Don't just set your Adwords and leave it, or you could see your money going right down the drain.

I found the following picture at the SEO Moz blog the other day.



They used the picture to illustrate their decision to exit out of SEO consulting to concentrate on developing SEO tools. They believe that while SEO provides the majority of search traffic, it gets a very small amount of the spend due to the fact that the industry is under developed and lacks sophisticated and integrated support tools and platforms.

I find the picture interesting because it shows such a stark contrast between PPC and SEO. And while I know that the picture does oversimplify things and hide some truths (like the fact that the SEO clicks would include all those search visits which were from inappropriate or existing customers, or perhaps the fact that SEO costs often accrue for months before the clicks start increasing) it probably does provide some grain of truth - that PPC costs are more expensive than SEO costs and that SEO still sends the majority of traffic. I think this would be true for many mature SEO campaigns.

Press Releases are a great source of content to use in your offsite optimisation efforts. If you have a PR person or copywriter writing a press release for distribution, don't waste that content by keeping it offline. Not only can the internet help you reach a much wider audience, it can also point straight back at your website with embedded links, helping increase site traffic and SEO efforts.

The release should be written in a slightly different way for online, so make these adjustments first;

• Have at least one link - it may or may not be allowed to have anchor text depending on the site you are submitting it to, (obviously anchor text is better), but you at least want people to be able to find your site.
• Make sure the headline includes keywords that people in your industry or target market would use and search for (e.g. don't use the word fragrance for perfume).
• Apart from a href tag, try not to use html, because the release might be syndicated to many different sites, and you can't be sure it will end up being displayed properly.
• Similarly to html, don't use foreign characters or accents which might not be transferred to syndicated sites intact
• Don't include your email on the publicly available release because spammers can get a hold of it

Once you have your release ready for readers (edited and checked for errors), you can start distributing it online. Keep track of all the sites you distribute to and see how often they actually get published, whether links stay embedded and how long they stay up. The best sites you can then use again for new releases.

Look at press releases from other companies, and search for a snippet of their press release in Google. Where has it been posted? Post yours there too!