As we’ve been doing our Twitter survey, we noticed that most of what was going on was conversations and mindless babble… When we started, the homepage said “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?“
We guess Twitter also noticed there was a lot of boring babble going and was hoping to make it more useful for people, especially all those people who say they just don’t get the point of Twitter. If it’s just status updates, can’t we just use Facebook? So after the Twitter revolution of it being hailed a useful news source during the Iran election protests and talk of a Nobel Prize for Twitter, they have changed the homepage to say “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”
Is Twitter hoping to become more useful than CNN? Are they hoping that more people will use it to promote their business or personal victories? If companies latch on to Twitter and use it as a broadcasting medium for their new products, will Twitter still be useful? Will they start charging for commercial accounts? Will anyone actually follow an advertiser? Several companies have already shown a major drop in followers after sending out product messages. On the other hand, Twitter can be a useful tool for instant updates. The Australian government used Twitter to send out a Tsunami warning following an earthquake in New Zealand.
I guess Twitter is something different for everyone. How you use it depends largely on who you follow. Some people use it for news updates. Others use it as a messaging tool. Others promote their business with it. For others it just a time waster at work. It does seem to be either an all or nothing phenomenon. Many people just don’t see the point of it. They may try it once or twice and then give up. Those that do use Twitter are fairly constant in their use. Statistics show that it’s actually about 5% of Twitterers who do about 75% of the tweets. Some people obviously either have too much time or their hands or too much self importance. Personally, I think if you have that much time to Tweet every 5 minutes, you’re probably not getting anything else done and probably aren’t that important. How much time do people have anyway. (Yes, I’m talking to you Ashton Kutcher!) Personally, I don’t care who Perez Hilton hates today. Or what Shaq is doing right now. I’m also not that interested in the daily goings on of someone on the other side of the world tweeting they just had a ham sandwich for lunch. But, I do follow people like CNN and some fellow expats that always have interesting news from both sides of the globe. I’ve also unfollowed a couple of people because I just didn’t find their tweets to be interesting. Especially those that post too too much.
Stay Tuned. Next week we’ll post the results of our Twitter Analysis.
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Right now we are working on developing a premium version of the Website Analyzer, our free SEO tool. The tool is scheduled to be launched at the SMX conference in New York City from October 5-7 (the same conference where Microsoft Bing was launched last year).
We are still going to give the detailed and non-techie reports on the free Website Analyzer just like you get today. However, the premium version is going to help you automate and monitor your SEO efforts in a lot more detail. We will be sharing some features and how they work in the near future.
We are really excited to get an opportunity to showcase our tool at SMX and getting feedback from the search community. Look forward to seeing you there!
While working outside in the garden yesterday, I was watching a baby bird learning to fly while its mother chirped and moved from tree to tree trying to get the little one to follow. Occasionally the daddy bird would also join in. It was nice to hear the little tweets as they all talked to each other. It gave me something else to think about as I was pulling weeds. There are days though, when all the crows are chirping incessantly and all I want is some peace and quiet. I’m not interested in what they’re doing, I don’t care what all the fuss is about. I just want to switch off. Their chirping is irritating as I try to sleep or work.
The same thing applies to Twitter. There are days when I like hearing that little chirp. Other days, I just want to turn it off. Some people just tweet too much. Unless you’re CNN, you can’t possibly have that much to say that you’re tweeting every 10 minutes. Asking around the office, I’m not the only one that will un-follow someone for tweeting too much. If you’re following several hundred people there can just be a brain overload. That gentle chirping can turn into feeding time at the parakeet show and a lot of those tweets are like the result of all that food…
Whilst Twitter can be a good marketing tool, it’s important to limit what you say. If you babble to much, people will turn you off and then your message is going no-where.
Outside of my job at Pear Analytics, I’m also a producer, so I know my opinion is slightly biased, but I believe video is an increasingly important tool in getting your message across and driving traffic to your website.
We haven’t posted too much video from Pear yet, but we did go to a major video outlet, current.com and linked back to our site in the comments field. In one day we had over a 200% increase in traffic to our website analyzer tool. It disappeared pretty quickly, but it was a nice little pop in traffic. I’m going to test again in the next few weeks by uploading a video and testing to see how much traffic that drives to the website. I’ll also be helping some of our clients to post their videos to different sites to help with their traffic.
I believe video is important because people like to watch and listen instead of just reading. For example, we did a screecast video of how to use the visitor mapping feature in Clicky Web Analytics. If you can incorporate video into your blog or have demonstration videos on your website, it greatly enhances the user experience. Posting them on other sites like current.com, blip.tv or YouTube can also drive traffic back to your main website. Most other video sharing platforms will host your video and let you embed it onto your own website.
As we post more videos, I’ll update whether we see any more success from this method. We’re actually thinking of doing “whiteboard Fridays” where we do two minute video clips on the SEO tip of the week.
Have your used video on your website or used it as a tool to link back to you? Did you notice it helped?
While doing research on page load times, I came across a lot of articles regurgitating the same study. Getting deeper into it, there were many more discussion forums where people did not agree with the studies. The most recent study on page load times and customer retention was done by a company who sells a service optimizing load times. So of course, they made a simple questionnaire asking people how long they would wait for a page to load and found most people would wait less than 4 seconds. Many people pointed out that it would depend on the kind of page they were trying to load, whether they had broadband or not, the age of the visitor as well as many other factors.
So the question is, is a study done by a company who’s selling a service really impartial? Can it be trusted, or will they skew the results in their favour?
How long will you wait for a website to load? Is 4 seconds too long? Does it depend on the website? Will you wait longer for a specific site or go search for something else?
Sniffing out the next Google algorithm
It’s been my first week of work (already!) and I am still learning the ropes of web analytics. Here are my first words of wisdom:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another fancy way of saying you are trying to beat Google. Yes, that’s what everyone tries to do constantly: Guess what the Google algorithm is.
2. There is no real expert out there, some people just make better guesses and use a lot of jargon.
3. All SEO self declared experts are self educated. To learn SEO all you have to do is stop being lazy and read a lot.
4. Google’s problem: Trying to beat all these people and get people the best content irrespective of those people who do SEO magic and get their site structure right.
5. Granted the people at Google are smarter than us, but they have a lot of people to try and beat with a search tool that crawls over pages. Can’t be easy work, although we make it easy for them by constantly telling them what we are doing.
Would love to hear your take on SEO as well.
We just shifted in this new office space, and we are now co-located with Brandstack and Third Party Code. It looks much better now that we have painted it and got a coffee machine.
We painted it in three different colors, a gorgeous red, a blue (which Robert at Brandstack says is for ‘calmness’), and the conference rooms are green (Robert convinced us the green will help us make money). Quite impressed with how how little paint we spilled in the process! (except for Vid, who spilled red all over the carpet in his area).
Another thing great about this place is having our friends downsatairs on the second floor.
Colors, friends and coffee: great times ahead.
G’day, my name is Sarah Monahan. I started at Pear Analytics yesterday.
Officially I’m a Project Manager, but unofficially I’m the Internet Keyword Detective. I spent most of my day yesterday looking up and making lists of every possible incarnation of “Dedicated Hosting”. There’s a lot!
In case you’re wondering why I started with G’day instead of the usual Texas Howdy, it’s because I’m actually an Aussie. I’ve been here in Texas almost 10 years now and it’s really growing on me.
I’ll post on here occasionally and let you know what words I’m hunting for! You can just pretend I’m in my khaki outfit chasing keywords down, saying “Look, isn’t she a beaut!”
Hey! I am Romy and am interning at Pear Analytics this summer. I am the community manager and today was my first day at work. I will mostly be helping promote our free SEO analysis tool, the Website Analyzer.
A quick background on where I come from: I am currently a grad student in industrial engineering at Texas A&M, did my undergrad in mechanical engineering. I like looking at things from a broader point of view, analyzing them which is why I got into engineering.
The conventional engineering job does not bring out my inherent strengths, which is why I joined the team at Pear Analytics.
My role in Pear Analytics is exciting, broad and will have me involved with different things: SEO, PR and overall management. Right now I am involved in distribution of their product, the Website Analyzer. I will also be putting together some content for an added feature on the site and will be doing some front end analysis for clients’ websites.
Lastly, I love writing so you will be seeing me here quite often!
