Here's what a $3000 tweet from Paris Hilton to 6.5 million followers brings you

TNW aka The Next Web did a rather interesting – yet costy – experiment by buying a sponsored tweets by celebrity Paris Hilton for their Amsterdam (Holland) conference. Note that a non-paid tweet by Charlie Sheen a few months ago got them 23,000 page views. But as it seems La Hilton is a lot less adequate when it comes to driving traffic than Sheen. Add to that that a conference is less clickfriendly then the Twitter Counter product that Sheen passed on to his Twitter followers. It’s Twitter after all.

The tweet brought TNW 2,652 visits, with 75% of them being new, and 85% of those visits bouncing. So only 15% of the visitors continued to stay on the site or perhaps purchased a ticket for the conference. Not exactly the traffic you’d expect from 6.5 million followers, and certainly not for $3000.

Is there a conclusion to be made? Not really, since the sponsored ‘product’ was quite different, the outcome was bound to be different. And you have to wonder how many followers of Hilton would go to Holland in the first place and how many followers are actually tech-minded. In short the TNW-team spent their money on the wrong public to start with. Had it been a dutch tech crowd I’m pretty sure the outcome would have been pretty different.

Twitter is rolling out its self-service ad platform next month through a partnership with American Express to get access to over 10,000 small and medium sized businesses. It’s not the first time that American Express is reaching out to social media. Earlier last year American Express launched a deal with Foursquare so that card members across the USA could start discover exclusive specials on the check-in service.

Twitter to open up self-service ad platform - why not use Skimlinks?

However, there it’s more than just that. Twitter needs to broaden its revenue streams, quickly. And this is a way to do so.

The 10,000 businesses that will be able to register to use the platform on a first-come, first-serve basis. Those who sign up receive $100 in advertising credits to put towards bidding on promoted tweets and promoted accounts.

The self service platform allows advertisers to make electronic payments instead of being invoiced by Twitter’s sales team. Which basically was just impossible to handle on the long run, automatization still is king, and it kinda surprises me that Twitter didn’t realize this earlier. Currently Twitter has 3,000 advertisers and it now hopes to attract the smaller business into its pond.

I’m kinda sceptic though if Twitter is the way to go for advertising for most of these small businesses. Twitter is pre-dominantly mobile – and although mobile is becoming mature very quickly most business simply don’t have websites or ordering pages which are optimized for mobile use. It’s exactly the same problem which Google’s Adwords program is facing. Most advertisers just don’t have mobile friendly websites crushing much of the possible return.

I would have expected Twitter to join hands with companies facilitating the mobile usage of websites, creating forms etc which are easy to handle on mobiles (not those ugly designed mobile Google templates).

Monetize outbound links

Twitter to open up self-service ad platform - why not use Skimlinks?

But, is Twitter really checking into the right corner when it comes to monetizing their network? Why not leverage that what its users share the most: links. Unlike the bigger social media platforms, most smaller social hubs have embraced such companies like Skimlinks who monetize links posted by members on forums etc. In other words, they monetize the outbound traffic. Just recently Skimlinks got some extra attention because Pinterest is also using it (some journalists made a big fuzz about it, we still wonder why because Pinterest is a free service).

Anyhow, how does it work? A script ‘translates’ every link on your forum or blog and turns it into an affiliated link. Anno 2012 Skimlinks aggregates more than 17,000 merchants across 27 networks internationally which gives web publishers lots of opportunities to monetize traffic. Of course the merchants already active via Skimlinks might be less pleased to see that their social media traffic via Pinterest and co will now be less free, but also here: a free lunch doesn’t exist. On the other hand advertisors will only pay based on CPA and it will show even more what platforms are monetizing the best.

All in all, it’s quite a frictionless way of getting that massive outbound traffic monetized. So, Twitter, creating extra commercial promoted tweets might just not be the perfect option to get your service monetized.

Not with Facebook

Note though that Facebook has blocked all of  the Skimlinks generated links. For some odd reason Facebook never thought about using the service. When I talked about this to people at Facebook’s Dublin office last year they didn’t even know the service existed, and instead informed me that they would be blocking it. A pity. Or is Facebook working on a similar service?

Who hasn’t seen it happen in his (yes, male Twitter users) Twitter account: a sudden surge of female followers. Good for the male (hetero) ego perhaps, but there is more happening than just that. In fact it’s very possible that every single female profile that started following you is actually a spambot, a sophisticated one, which will use elements from your account description – such as your first name, interests, … – and from your last few tweets to address you personalized tweets. These tweets contain links to all kind of dodgy pages, from fake dating pages to malware.

It’s a kind of spam on Twitter that has gotten worse in the last few months.

Here are a couple of screenshots from my Twitter account. The spambot isn’t the best since it seems to randomly use pictures. As you can see, two of the spambot accounts were added using the same profile picture. Obvious. It wasn’t so obvious for at least 22 followers of this particular Latia Stallings account who – the Twitter tradition in mind – blindly followed back. Especially men did this.

The best thing to do when your account is hit by sudden spambot love is to report it as being spam.

Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?

Many SEO gurus have wondered whether social media links are taken into account by search engines AND if they can increase your search rankings. Well, too bad if you never bothered too much about social media when being an SEO professional, because the Googles and Bings of this world do take them into account and they can increase your search rankings.

That’s a B.I.G. B.O.M.B. drop, for many.

On the whole, search engines such as Google and Bing consider social media links to be very interesting indications as to whether a link should be given some extra (social) value or not (aka ‘link juice’). That they are being considered is theoretically not really logical – I agree – since most, if not all, social media links are ‘not followed’. However, from a semantic side it would make no sense taking that specific ‘rel’ into consideration when evaluating links which are (re)tweeted or shared.

Especially in the case of Twitter, you can expect its firehoze to affect real time (news) search results. It’s still unclear how Google does this since they no longer have a deal with Twitter to tap into their tweet firehoze, but the fact is that they do use Twitter in their search rankings. As far as sharing links on Facebook and retweeting links on Twitter, there will be link juice passed on if there is a lot of sharing and retweeting happening. And that is a massive change for many in the SEO industry who up until now contented themselves with onsite and off site SEO/linkbuilding.

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