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I personally feel that everyone -- the media, respected personalities in SEM and SEO, search engines, etc. -- have been greatly overstating the importance of tweeting for businesses. This is usually coming from the same people who always encourage us to build quality, thoughtful and useful content which others will want to link to. But let's cut through the crap -- you cannot put quality, in-depth content into 140 characters or less. You have to use this to link to your quality content, which should really make you consider whether Twitter is the best venue for that (rather than, say, Facebook).

But even so, there's only so much quality content some companies can put out. As an e-commerce company who sells a very specific niche of products (discounted color copies and printing), how much stuff do you think there is we could put up that has anything to do with our company and still has the power to "go viral"?

Probably the one thing that had the most potential was our TV commercial. It was funny and it featured two semi-celebrities (a former Timberwolves player and former Timberwolves president / Jewish Sports Hall-of-Famer). But even so, it hardly "went viral," even among Minnesotans and sports nuts who might stand a chance of recognizing said celebrities.

Basically you have to evaluate, first off, whether there's anything you can use Twitter for that will have even the slightest effect on your company. Then decide what and how, and try to get an idea of how much time that is going to take to do. 95% of the time I tweet anything it's a mention of our current promotional specials -- usually a meaningful, tangible percentage off a job's total price (10, 20, 25, etc.) which catches people's eyes. This definitely has a measurable effect. But when I put up a link to our latest company blog post, hardly anyone cares (and neither would I if I weren't writing it!).

Even if you do have quality content people will want to link to and share, you have to make it easy. Install widgets just below or beside it that will allow people to Share it on Facebook, re-Tweet it on Twitter, etc., within 1 or 2 clicks. In this increasingly ADD-centric society, you have to make stuff easy and fast or it's worthless, especially on the Web.

Bottom line: Just because every nerd, celebrity and politician in the country is going tweet-crazy doesn't mean you can cash in on it. Invest a little time in brainstorming whether it's worth it, before wasting a LOT of time tweeting garbage.

By the way, in case I've peaked your interest, you can view the aforementioned commercial here: http://www.docucopies.com/tv-commercial.asp (note the lack of share-oriented widgets!)

I'm a bit confused, what are considered quality twitter followers? How does google determine that? And I follow people who constantly are posting their ads. I mean they just sent it to me 2 seconds ago. Should I stop following them? Does that lower my quality?

I try and post quality, inspirational stuff. Also, Is there a daily limit as well that we should stay under? I'm new to this whole twitter thing. Any advice?

I'm trying to promote my writing site www.needawriter.us. But my main twitter account is under my personal training services "positiveworkout" Should I keep them separate? I need any and all advice I can get, to compete in this tough market. Please help me. If anyone can give me any advice, I would be greatly appreciative.

Not surprised that the use of hash tags would be considered low quality by google.

Yes, I see spammers and bots will get nice positions with this, too. There must be other serious factors to reveal who is person and who is not on Twitter.

Off course, I see Twitter as important to an effective search marketing campaign!,

Couple of things ~ I don't understand the hashtag being penalized. I've used them to look for relevant information almost every day.

Are we going to see Twitter move to more verified accounts?

whether twitter best way to get a place in google??

In my opinion this may help get twitter real. If people in business use twitter as a business marketing tool to it's potential they may realize the importance of real potential customers as followers instead of anyone and everyone they can get to follow.

Part of this game is just work: It is important to take care about twitter, facebook, etc..., but we just have to work, and be present, google will naturally going to rank better the correct page to specific search, it has to think how rank to do your job better..., and also time helps...

I think you meant relevant.

So, Kim Kardashian has a buttload of followers, but do I really give a hoot what she thinks about a certain topic ... NO!

Not to mention the fact that she gets a whopping $10,000 everytime she tweets about a product.

Chris, as usual great post! Like everyone else, I'm pretty surprised that hashtags would be seen as a redflag, great to know that now! Also nice to know they aren't ranking on following size alone.

In order to evaluate how you as a reputable source I almost feel like they have to assign you a user ranking, something akin to the page rank system but based around twitter values like your following to the follower ration your Retweet ratios inbound links to your tweets, how often your tweets appeared in twitter user searches, thins like that would actually begin to make some sense.

I was thinking the same thing, but had never discussed it or heard anyone else discuss it.

So yeah, more followers the better you rank. I would then guess the better your links in your post rank as far topic go.

Its nice to hear the final word from google however cryptic their message may be.

I can understand the monitoring of hashtags as spam control when indexing a twitter feed, however I wonder about one specific tag, the use of #fb for a Facebook Selective tweet.

Does anybody have any word on whether #fb is derogatory in the Google/Bing algorithms.