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| How To: Win Tweets and Influence Search Engines with PayWithaTweet Posted: 14 Jul 2011 04:21 AM PDT Posted by mattgratt This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. PayWithaTweet (hereby known as PWaT) is a service that enables web publishers to give visitors content in exchange for a Tweet or Facebook share. In this post, I will share my experience with PWaT, tweet and CTR data, and how you can use this tool to go viral and influence search engine results. What is PayWithaTweet? The creators of PWaT have made a great video explaining the concept and some of its uses: The Experiment: Tweet for an Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet I created an Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet during one of our Portent 'Hack Days.' I wanted to distribute the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet far and wide – and PayWithATweet was something I always wanted to experiment with. The Set Up After creating my Google Analytics Cheat Sheet, I uploaded it to WordPress and created the PWaT button. When you use PWaT, you get to write the message that is tweeted when visitors download your file. I did some quick keyword research (turns out "Cheat Sheet" is more popular than "Cheatsheet"). I also thought Portent's strong brand in the internet marketing community would entice people to click through, so including Portent in the tweet was important. I then did hashtag research: #Measure is a very popular web analytics hashtag, and I believed the #measure community would find the cheat sheet interesting and useful. So I needed to write a message that included all of these elements in only a few characters. I set the PWaT Tweet Text to "Get the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet from Portent - #measure - http://bit.ly/mLBPht", and created a simple landing page. (My wise and generous boss Ian later added a screencap and made it better.) Then on Friday morning, I tweeted out the link, and asked some of my colleagues to do the same. The Results The Numbers Because Twitter is a real-time medium, I took measurements at various times to watch the tweets spread.
I used bit.ly tracking to compile these metrics. You can see the bit.ly numbers yourself at the link's bit.ly information page - https://bitly.com/mLBPht+. (If you see any differences between the numbers in various graphics and references in this post, it's due to the time the numbers were taken.) As of 5 PM on Saturday, 83 people have downloaded the cheat sheet for a tweet. There are four double tweets, and five of the tweets were from colleagues at Portent I asked to Tweet. This puts the organic Tweet count at 74 Tweets. The bit.ly link received 258 clicks, so 28.7% of the people clicking on the bit.ly decided to download the cheat sheet and Pay With a Tweet. The landing page was probably the weakest part of the experiment. (The Kanye West reference in the first paragraph was an unsuccessful attempt at writing like Groupon.) I imagine had I created a stronger landing page and a stronger message, all of these metrics would be better. I'll come back to lessons learned in the "insights" section. The Search Engine Impact Major search engines index Twitter, and these social shares appear to be a ranking factor in both social search and traditional search. Jen Lopez of SEOmoz has shown tweets have a substantial effect on search in her well known "beginner's guide" case study. I was curious if we would see the same thing, so I looked at the search engine rankings of two terms – "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" and "Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet". In Google (signed out, personalization off, but from both office and home machines), the post ranked almost immediately for "Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet." (It's apparently the only piece of content on the web optimized for that phrase.) However the SERP for "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" was dominated by Ian's last Google Analytics Cheat Sheet and pages linking to it. On the first day (Friday), when the bulk of the tweets were occurring in real time, I didn't seen ay modified conventional results. I did see some Tweets being pulled in through 'social circle' search functionality. However, on Saturday afternoon, I found that the landing page was now ranking in position eight for the term "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet."
Fascinated by the result, I used the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis Tool to analyze the "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" SERP:
By Sunday, the Cheat Sheet had received over 85 tweets. Now the page was appearing in position six for "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet."
And again, according to the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis tool, the page had the lowest domain and page authority in the SERP. The page has, to my knowledge, no inbound external links. Tweets are the page's only signs of quality and relevance.
Neither domain authority nor page authority is high enough for the page to rank for that phrase. While it's hard to control for personalization, I had signed out and added the "pws=0" string to the URL. I tried it on a variety of browsers - including some I don't use - and I received the same result. With the standard SEO disclaimer (correlation does not equal causation, what works here may not work for you, this is not science nor does it claim to be), it seems that Twitter thru PayWithaTweet can influence Google search results. At the time of this writing, the page is not ranking in Bing for 'Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet' or 'Google Analytics Cheat Sheet'. (In fact, the page isn't indexed at all in Bing.) Insights for Future PayWithaTweet Projects When to Use PayWithaTweet If you have content you can give away to a Twitter or Facebook-using audience, PWaT is a great promotional option. Virtual goods, eBooks, mp3s, or coupon codes are great things to give away. Justin Briggs had more ideas about what to do with PWaT:
Given these changes in search engine rank, it makes sense to do a PWaT promotion around high-traffic seasonal terms. For example, if you sell Mother's Day Flowers, a PWaT promotion for 5% off could help you rank for the highly competitive term "Mothers Days Flowers". Keep in mind people can delete their tweet or share after they download the file. And in the case of a coupon code, there's nothing that would stop someone from sharing a coupon code with their friends, tweeting it themselves, or submitting it to a coupon site. As always, you're playing with fire. Play carefully. Start with a Big Audience My PWaT experiment didn't really take off until Ian tweeted it to his 7,394 followers. You need to start your PWaT with a big Twitter audience. If you don't have a big Twitter audience, you need to get someone that does to Tweet the initial link. This may be a good time to use ad.ly’s sponsored Tweets. Include a Popular Hashtag in Your Tweet I included the #measure hashtag in the PWaT message. The right hashtag gets your message in front of a large number of the right people. Use hashtags.org to find the most active hashstags in your niche. Make a Great Landing Page Landing pages are really important to the success of your PayWithaTweet initiative. In my experiment with PWaT, this is probably the thing I did the worst – I imagine had I improved the landing page, we could've gotten more than 125 tweets. Your landing page has to entice people to download the content and share it with their friends, while not giving the piece away for free. As they say, people don't buy the cow when they can get the milk for free. It's also important to find a way to show social proof – how many other people are grabbing your giveaway for a tweet. Using Twitter's Search Widget set to grab your PWaT tweets and showing them on the landing page is a great way to do this. PayWithaTweet Uses an iFrame – Make Sure Your Publishing Methods Supports Embedding an iFrame The PWaT button appears in an iFrame. There's no other way to implement it (to my knowledge). If you use a CMS that strips out iFrames (like WordPress), be prepared for this. We used the iFrame WordPress Plugin, which worked like a charm. Use the Science of Retweets to Optimize Your Message Social media experts (most notably Dan Zarella) have done a great deal of research on what kinds of messages get retweeted. Use this research in writing your PWaT message for maximum social reach.
Thanks for reading, and I'll answer any questions in the comments. (I'd also like to thank my colleagues at Portent who helped with this project - Michael for editing the cheatsheet, Anna for figuring out how to embed iFrames in WordPress, Ian, Doug, Josh, and Aaron for tweeting, and of course my bosses, Ian, Tracy, and Elizabeth, for letting me do this.) |
| Posted: 13 Jul 2011 11:16 AM PDT Posted by Dr. Pete You’ve tamed your Twitter spam, isolated Grandma on Facebook, and finally become Mayor of the coffee shop you pretend to work at while you’re really playing Angry Birds. Then, along comes Google+, and now you’re circling people like an angry John Madden. As search marketers, there’s value in social media – I can trace real revenue to it, and I’m not the only one. The first 30 minutes are incredibly valuable – it’s the next 7 hours that are the problem. I understand both extremes – I once spent 24 straight hours on Twitter, and I’ve quit social media cold-turkey for 30 days twice. So, here are a few tips for adding Google+ to the mix without losing what little work-day you have left: Mind Your CirclesWhen I first joined Google+, I joked that my circles looked something like this:
The visual simplicity and cute animations make the real power of circles easy to miss, and it’s something Facebook and Twitter don’t do very well (at least without 3rd-party apps). Circles are an essential way to not only manage who you’re following, but to manage your time. When you’re short on time, you don’t have to follow what everyone is saying – focus on a core circle or two. Circles can go a lot deeper than relationships, too (and they can overlap). Consider circling people by:
The list goes on, but the key is to think in terms of how you can best use your time. If you log on at 2am in the US, see what your UK friends are up to. If you’re only on for 5 minutes, check the people who are interested in whatever you’re working on at that moment (for inspiration). If you really need to get a link out, see what the people most interested in that niche are up to. Flow with the Stream
This is more philosophical than tactical, but you have to let it go. The real-time stream is just that – jump in, swim forward, and don’t worry too much about what’s behind you. If it’s important, it’ll get repeated. Social media is so real-time that it can even alienate people to rewind too much. I’ve had people comment on something I said the day before on Twitter, and it completely confused me. With Google+ and Facebook, the conversation structure is easier to manage, but past a point we move on. Right or wrong, that’s the nature of the beast. Engage Your BaseThis tip can tie into your circles, but it applies to any social media platform. When you’re short on time, engage the people most likely to reply or reciprocate. They may be your friends, your fans, or just generous personalities who you happen to get along with. This isn’t about opportunism – it’s about relevance. If you’ve only got 15 minutes (which is probably split into 5-minute chunks), check in on the people whose content and interaction you value. You have to pick and choose – 5 minutes will barely get you through one hilarious cat video and half the comments. Be Highly VisibleUltimately, social media is all about perception. You don’t have to be on it all day – you just want to seem like you’re always nearby (but not too nearby, because then you’re obviously goofing off). Back in graduate school, I had a roommate who was always in his office – he regularly got there at 8am, closed the door, and didn’t come out until 8pm. Meanwhile, I liked a little variety, so I’d work at home, in the lab, and in my office. In between, I roamed the halls and talked to a lot of people. Granted, I also liked to procrastinate, but I valued the social aspect of school. One day, someone commented that I was always around, but they never saw my roommate. Here he was putting in 12 hours days in the office, while I usually spent 4-6 hours/day in the office or lab. Was it fair? No, but it taught me an important lesson – perception is everything. Being visible in social media is easy – engage. In fact, make the first 5 minutes of your 15 minutes all about engagement. Reply to people, [+1] their posts, and generally make yourself seen. Lurkers die lonely. Give First, Then AskSo, you’ve spent the first 5 minutes making your presence known. The next 5 minutes, in my opinion, should be all about giving. Share other people’s posts and links, and [+1] what you like. If you run out of time, that’s fine. Giving back builds up dividends, and you need to do it every day. That way, when it’s your turn to share a link, you’ve already got friends lined up. There are a lot of ways to handle social media, and I don’t think any single style is right, but I do think that virtually everyone should try to give a lot more than they take. This isn’t just altruism – reciprocity is a very powerful thing. Bonus Tip: Try Trunk.lyWe’re desperately afraid to miss anything on social media. Practically speaking, I’ve found that fear overblown – most things can be missed, and the important stuff will keep appearing in your stream. For tracking your links, though, I highly recommend Trunk.ly. It not only captures the links you post on Twitter and Facebook, but your friends' links as well:
Yes, that is a link to a Smurfberry Crunch Ad from 1982 – STOP JUDGING ME! The best thing about Trunk.ly is that it aggregates recent links from your friends. While it doesn’t support Google+ yet, I expect it to soon. If anyone knows of similar tools that do support Google+, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Double Bonus Fun!This probably has no value other than general mischief-making, but I made a Photoshop version of the Google Circle that you can easily edit (or possibly even convert into other shapes). It was created in Adobe CS5 for Windows, but hopefully it’s readable by other versions. You can use it to create such useful diagrams as:
I honestly have no idea how this can be used for good, but I made it and so I thought I’d share. Here's the link to download the Google+ Circle Photoshop file (it's only 100KB). |
Eventually, you have to accept that you can’t keep up with everything. Google+ is just out of its wrapper, and yet 15 minutes would barely let me skim the last hour of activity, let alone the links and comments. For reference, the bar on the right is a condensed version of my unexpanded stream from just the last hour.
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. But it’s been an incredibly long slog … if memory serves, I started on this project sometime around fall 2009. October? So it’s now almost 2 full years later! Learn from my experience and hopefully you’ll save time and money.
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