Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Twitter Your Way to Online Profits

By Dominic D. Johnstone

Twitter.com gives users up to 140 key strokes to send their friends and followers a brief message. That says what? It answers the question, what am I doing right now?

Did you ever imagine that a social networking concept as basic and simplistic as this could become so popular?

We all know that Facebook is very engaging because we can observe our friends lives as they describe them to us. We can view their status updates, see their pictures, and SuperPoke them. However, who could have considered that a social network dedicated exclusively to the common status update would become so widely adopted?

I am specifically talking about Twitter.com. This fairly fresh website is quickly becoming the new phenomenon in Internet and online marketing.

No matter how trivial or mundane the concept appears to be at first, it is very popular. A few years ago, very few people would have thought anyone would care if say for example - I am going for a grande chai latte at Starbucks with Joel. Nowadays, people are very interested in the minutia of one anotherss lives. Well add that to the explosive growth rate of memberships on these viral social networking sites, and it introduces a very powerful marketing tool.

You see Twitter allows you to post many updates a day. In fact as many as you can and want to in as short a time as you feel like. Most people want to avoid being seen as annoying with their posts but many people do add numerous status updates per day.

Furthermore, Twitter.com allows you to post your website address as a hyperlink into the update. The benefit here is twofold. First of all, those who are subscribing to your updates on Twitter.com will see your hyperlink and may click onto your website. Secondly, Twitter is gaining a great reputation in the Internet world, and you may find that Google regards links from highly active user profile pages as being from a positive neighborhood.

Just have a look at the profile page of Chris Knight. Chris Knight is an editor at EZineArticles.com. His page is http://www.twitter.com/ChrisKnight. Many thousands of people subscribe to his updates. He subscribes to thousands more. His profile page is ranked 5 by google which is quite an accomplishment.

The benefit of the second factor is that Google will see the numerous links inbound to your site from higher page rank sites. While your own page rank may not be a critical factor, the inbound links is still fairly important.

In conclusion while Twitter is very new and quite rudimentary in principle, below the surface it is definitely a highly effective online marketing avenue. When you consider the growth experienced by viral sites like YouTube.com and Bankrate.com when they introduced viral growth mechanisms, we can understand the importance of up and coming sites like Twitter. - 15478

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