MoreMoneyStreams.com

The social services such as Facebook and Twitter continue to grow in relevance in many users’ lives. The search engines understand this, and have started to extract data from the social networks, even if it is difficult to understand how useful that information will be. However, the social services need to generate income to exist, so they are inventing ways of selling advertising. Twitter is the latest to announce that it will be embedding adverts in its search results. Is this another promotional channel to be used?

The use of Twitter is generally passive. A user finds a source that he wants to follow and continues to do so. The reason for a search inside Twitter is probably to find a connection to a comment stream that the user wishes to follow. That type of search has to be beyond the compss of search engine optimisation. It is unlikely to be the type of search that is looking for a buying opportunity, so how would the service decide which advert to show in the results? The most active use of Twitter is to broadcast messages to coupled users, something that is not expected to include advertising. Its main purpose is to disseminate comments no matter how trivial, not for commercial activity. Any adverts shown on Twitter are going to be rarities, a minor irritation in the normal use of the service.

The use of a search engine is active, and for a specific aim. Many new buyers use a search engine such as Google as the starting point for any internet activity. Customers will be drawen to your enterprise’s domain from seeing it on a search engine results page, and search engine optimisation can help to give your website the help it needs to increase awareness of its relevance with the search engines and obtain a good natural search engine positioning and improve its visibility to new buyers. search optimization techniques should help to make changes to the website to make it more noticeable in the results listing, which includes review of the website content. Optimization methods also include the longer term marketing that your enterprise’s domain needs to improve its natural ranking. This will have a greater affect across the various search engines over a long period.

Arguably Twitter advertising is in similar arena to pay-per-click marketing on a conventional search engine, with adverts built around keywords in the search request. The same arguments arise for these types of adverts as with paid marketing on traditional search engine results listings. Competition for popular keywords is rising and becoming more costly. Many companies spend a lot of money on adverts based on keywords that do not have a good natural ranking but could if some search optimization was applied. There is also the proviso that many searching buyers actively ignore paid results, preferring to make a choice from the natural search engine positioning. A good reason to apply search optimization tools to your enterprise’s domain.

Twitter needs to raise money to cover its costs, and bought advertising is one way, but it will not have much impact on the average client. Using search engine optimisation to improve the natural search engine positioning will have a wider impact than an occasional advert on a social network.

Filed under: adsense |