TwiTip » Darren Rowse

Twitter Rejects Verification Request with Cryptic Message

Darren Rowse — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:01:20 +0000

In June 2009 Twitter launched ‘verified Twitter accounts’. As someone who had had numerous instances of people impersonating my brands (and myself personally) I was really pleased with the new feature and immediately applied to become verified.

Since that time there’s been no word from Twitter. I’ve seen a few accounts ‘verified’ since that time but they are largely fairly sizeable businesses or celebrities. Fair enough I guess – the amount of people applying to be verified must have been pretty large and to verify someone must be a pretty manual process – I put it down to Twitter biting off a bit more than they could chew….

Today I got an email from Twitter with a subject line of – ‘Account verification status update‘. Yay – an update!

I opened the email to see this:

OK – so I’m not verified and there are problems with my request. But what I find odd is that there is no way for me to address the issues. The email says that if I’m a business I can go to a ‘Business Center Page’ for more information – but I have no idea what such a page is or where to find it. I do run a business and my Twitter account is used in conjunction with that business – but I’ve never registered as a business and have never been told about any such ‘Business Center’.

Of course I Googled for more information – only to find others have had the same message in the last few hours.

Not sure what is going on but it leaves me feeling a little confused and disillusioned. In the scheme of things it doesn’t matter too much whether I’m verified or not – however to refer people to some mystical business center when no-one seems to be aware of what it is doesn’t really help anyone.

My Opinion on Ads on Twitter [or Sponsored Tweets]

Darren Rowse — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:01:41 +0000

A number of people have asked me recently what I think about running advertising in Twitter streams.

Should it be done or avoided? What impact might it have on you as a Twitter user if you do run them? Are there times you should and shouldn’t use ads to monetize your Twitter account?

My opinion is pretty simple. I know no everyone will agree but it’s probably somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of opinions on the topic. Some argue that Ads should never be used on Twitter – others argue that you should monetize your account in any way you can.

My Opinion on Ads on Twitter:

I have nothing against it in principle. I see no reason why someone investing time, creativity, energy and brain power into becoming an influence in this medium shouldn’t be able to receive financial reward for doing so.

People on Twitter who genuinely grow their audience big enough to attract advertisers are usually doing something useful. Whether it be entertaining, informing, educating, empowering etc – I see people using other mediums making money for doing this type of thing, why not on Twitter?

I make a living from my blogs (about half my income from them is from advertising) and while Twitter is a unique medium in some ways I don’t have issue with it being monetized if done well. Interestingly it was 5 or so years ago that the big debate was about whether blogs should be monetized – many of the same arguments were going back and forth at that time – just replace ‘Blog’ with ‘Twitter Account’ and you’ll from some of those old articles to see where the debate is heading!

Having said that – I personally believe that three elements probably should come into play when considering whether you run a particular ad on your account. The first is perhaps more about ethics than the other two which are for me just good business sense and about delivering value to my followers:

1. Transparency

If you’re being paid to tweet, disclose it. How you clearly do it in 140 characters can be challenging but it can be done ranging from ‘Sponsored Tweet’ in the tweet to ‘#ad’. I suspect we’ll see some widely accepted practices emerge around this in the coming year.

2. Relevancy

I was asked a while back to run an ad in my twitter stream for running shoes – the payout for a single tweet was over $1000. I refused in the same way I would refuse to run the same ad if someone wanted me to run it on my blog. My blog and twitter stream are on the topic of social media and blogging – not shoes or running. While I do stray off topic from time to time on Twitter (and my followers forgive me for doing so) – receiving money for a tweet that is totally irrelevant to my topic will probably not go down well with my followers.

I’m not sure it’d deliver much value to an advertiser either to promote an irrelevant ad (although I see my fair share of them on TV).

Related to this I’d probably also be wanting to only do sponsored tweets that are legitimate and not scammy products or services. Really it comes down to keeping on topic and being useful to followers.

3. Frequency

I’ve run three disclosed and relevant advertising tweets on my @problogger Twitter account in 2 years (one through ad.ly and another two were sold directly). In that time I’ve tweeted 15,330 times. I don’t think I’m in danger of letting my Tweet stream become overrun by paid tweets. However if twitter advertising does take off I could see the temptation for some Twitter users to let their streams become overrun by sponsored Tweets.

In the same way that I refrain for letting all of the real estate on my blog above the fold get overrun with advertising (pushing the content down under the fold) I would want to let ‘content’ and being useful be the primary thing that I do on my Twitter account.

What other Factors Would You Ad?

These are the three main factors that I’d consider as I look at whether I’ll tweet something for money.

Social Media Summit – Early Bird Discount Ends This Thursday

Darren Rowse — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:10:56 +0000

This is just a short note to highlight the Social Media Success Summit 2009 that I’ll be speaking at (disclaimer: they are also sponsoring TwiTip this month). It starts on May 26th (and happens over the weeks that follows) and features sessions from a variety of successful social media (and Twitter) users including:

Gary Vaynerchuck (Wine Library TV)
Mari Smith (Facebook Expert)
Jason Alba (Linked In Expert)
Ann Handley (chief content officer from MarketingProfs)
Brian Clark (CopyBlogger)
Chris Garrett (Co Author of ProBlogger the Book)
Denise Wakeman (BlogSquad)
Michael A. Stelzner (White Paper Guru)
And me – Darren Rowse

I’m doing a panel discussion on 3rd June with Brian Clark on ‘The Future of Social Media: What’s Going to be Hot and What’s Not). Other content covered includes:

How to Create a Mega-Following and Mega-Sales With Social Media Marketing
Building a Loyal Facebook Following for Increased Profits
How to Grow and Engage an Audience on Twitter
Using the Power and Reach of LinkedIn to Grow Your Business
How to Productively Engage in Social Media Marketing
Five Reasons You Need to Be on Twitter (and Tools to Help You Manage)
Social Media Start Up: 3 Key Tools to Build Your Social Media Marketing Plan
How to Attract Tens of Thousands of People in Mere Days
Using Social Bookmarking for Improved Traffic, Links and Visibility

The Early Bird special ($200/40% off) for this event ends this Thursday. If this is an event that interests you check it out at Social Media Success Summit 2009.

What is Twitter (to You)?

Darren Rowse — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:02:49 +0000

What is Twitter?

I know Twitter has had a lot of press lately and has taken significant steps forward in terms of getting public attention – but I’m still asked the question all the time – ‘What is Twitter?’

The official answer to the ‘What is Twitter‘ question is on their homepage:

But what is Twitter to you?

How do you answer the question when asked? What does Twitter mean to you? How do you define Twitter?

Looking forward to reading your definitions, ideas, experiences and more in comments below.

What is Twitter? Over to you…..

Review of Laura Roeder’s Backstage Pass To Twitter Webinar

Darren Rowse — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:01:14 +0000

There have been a number of teaching resources to help people learn about Twitter lately – one of which is The Backstage Pass to Twitter Success by Laura Roeder. I’ve heard a few people say that they found Laura’s training helpful so I asked one of them – Dave Navarro from The Launch Coach – if he’d be willing to write a review of it. Here’s what he came back with.

I’ll be honest – I’ve been on Twitter longer than Laura Roeder has (well, only three weeks longer, but still, I have to claim what I can). But there’s one big difference between how the last 12 months have played out for the both of us. While I have a healthy enough Twitter following – almost 1.5 followers per person I follow – Laura has a staggering 8 followers per person she follows.

Clearly, Laura knows something I don’t. Maybe a whole lot of somethings. So when she launched her “Backstage Pass to Twitter” webinar a few weeks ago, I had to take a look … and here’s my review.

Part One: Establishing Credibility

Usually when you want to look into someone’s credibility, you Google the heck out of their name and look into what other people are saying about them. But since this is Twitter, I went to TwitterCounter.com instead and graphed her Twitter growth as compared to mine:

TwitterCounter is a nice enough service, but it doesn’t show the whole story. To be fair here, at the beginning of the graph I’m way ahead of Laura, mainly because it was around this time that I started following lots and lots of people in my niches, so I naturally had a good portion of follow backs.

But Laura’s growth was strictly organic (she only follows 1 person for every 8 that follow her). So where I started out with twice as many followers as her because I was following people like crazy, she leapfrogged me because people were following her like crazy. So, establishing credibility is done here.

Part Two: Who This Webinar is For

Surprisingly, this webinar covers a lot of ground, weighing in at a mighty 5 hours of content. That’s gives Laura the time to cover a wide range of content, for a wide range of Twitter users. Overall I’d say the content balances out at about 30% entry-level content (what Twitter is, Twitter etiquette, etc.) and 70% mid-level and advanced tactics.

If you’re totally new to Twitter, this webinar will take care of you with no worries. You’ll go through the entire 5 hours of content and get up to speed pretty quickly. With almost 2000 followers right now, I’m a more seasoned user, but there were still some good nuggets I got out of the beginner sections, especially when it comes to choosing what user name to use (something I flubbed on in the beginning – once I changed my name, my followers increased faster) and how to handle your profile link/custom background.

But I really look at this webinar as an advanced course that throws the beginner stuff in there for free. What caught my attention was Section Two (Maximizing Twitter Time). Looking back, I spent a lot of time building up my follower list, and I would have loved to have kept that time with a minimum – and on top of that, I’ve felt like keeping on top of Twitter was getting a bit unmanageable. So even as an advanced user, this webinar held a lot of value for me.

Bottom line: I can’t really think of anyone this webinar wouldn’t have value for.

Part Three: What’s In the Webinar

Here’s a breakdown of the four sections of the webinar (each clocking in a little over an hour)

Section One: Beyond The Basics of the Tweet

Getting started: usernames, photos, backgrounds, link
Settings/notifications in Twitter
Advice on following: Should follow everyone who follows you?
When it’s appropriate to use @ message as opposed to direct messages
Avoiding Twitter profile mistakes

As I said, this is the section that advanced users can skip at first, but it would be a good idea to come back to it later. there are a few “Oh snap” moments in here where you may discover you’re making a simple error in how you handle your profile that can negatively affect your follow rate.

Section Two: Maximizing Twitter Time

Free tools to streamline your time on twitter
How much time you really need to spend on twitter every week to see results
How to update all of your social media sites at once
How to make your twitter account and website to “talk” to each other so that they’re promoting and sending traffic to each other
Laura’s “ten minute twitter drill”

This section is worth the price of the entire webinar, in my opinion. Time is money, and I got a lot out of learning how to leverage Twitter more efficiently so it wasn’t such a time drain. After going through this section I’m spending a lot less time on Twitter and seeing better results for the time I’m putting in.

Section Three: Twit-etiquette and Twitter Culture

The commonly sent message that makes newbies look bad
What topics are OK on twitter and which ones are taboo
How to introduce yourself to new people on twitter
How to increase your follower list without using spammy methods
Laura’s big strategy for getting hundreds more followers than Dave, even though he’s been on Twitter longer than you, Laura (ok, let’s just say this is a sore spot for me, I’m working through it!)
How to form authentic connections with twitter VIPs
The real reasons people unfollow

As an advanced user (and coming from a heavy marketing/customer relations background), I came into this section knowing a lot of it, but for those who haven’t been doing self-promotion for the last 10 years, there’s a lot to learn here – especially when it comes to forming real connections with people farther up the “food chain.”

This is huge, because if you’re looking to build your business by networking and getting exposure on Twitter, this is the section you need to listen to at least twice. Personally, I’d say that 50% of my revenue growth over the last year can be attributed to Twitter, so don’t underestimate what it can bring to your business.

Section Four: Selling & Promotion on Twitter

The twitter monetization method that is guaranteed to backfire in the end
How to avoid certain promotion tactics that will make you lose followers
How to woo potential clients without ever being sales-y or pushy
How to get others to retweet your sales messages and have them spread virally
Laura’s personal strategy for under-the-radar selling on twitter
The common mistake that ensures that your followers will never become buyers (and what to do instead)

Whoo, this is an important section for all twitter users. Selling is always a touchy issue unless it’s done in an exceptionally elegant way, and it’s the little things that make the difference between a pushy message and a message others want to spread for you. Again, with a marketing background, I had figured out a lot of this on my own, but I still learned a lot from this section in terms of subtle tactics that let you promote without being pushy.

Part Four: What I Liked / Didn’t Like

I liked the content, plain and simple. It was useful and relevant, and I really liked how the two “beginner” sections (One and Three) actually had things in it I hadn’t thought of before. I’m not sure if Laura did this on purpose, but she included one bullet point in each of those sections that made me say “Crap, I thought I could skip this section, but now I’ve got to know this.” And by doing that, it forced me to listen and learn new things from topics that I thought I was already well-versed in.

I also liked Laura. She doesn’t come across as a know it all, and she backs up all her recommendations

with good, real-world examples that you can immediately use (I’ve even had her guest post about Twitter on my own blog because I like her style).

I also liked her 6-month guarantee. Not many people have the guts to push a guarantee this long.

What I didn’t like – and this is a very personal thing – was that there weren’t any transcripts with the webinar. I’m big on transcripts, because I speed read and I can go the transcript and take notes in a fraction of the time that watching video takes. In fact, I didn’t watch the videos – I downloaded the MP3s of the sessions and played them at double speed so I could move through them quickly (what can I say, I’m impatient).

I’d recommend to Laura that she throw in some transcripts because they’re coming to be a more “expected” feature of information products these days.

Part Five: Is This Worth It For You?

Price is a big area where people get easily hung up, so I just want to tell you that you need to frame your expectations to this or any other info product according to the wise words of Warren “I’m the second richest person on Earth” Buffet: “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”

Now, Laura’s selling this webinar for $197, which may seem high to a lot of people (and I know this in spades, given all the crazy comments I received from my own $97 ebook featured here on Problogger). But as I said in the comments there, price is irrelevant when you’re thinking about value.

If you’re just going to dabble on Twitter, and you like having lots of people to chat with, then this probably isn’t the product you need to be buying.

But if you’re using Twitter as a business building tool, then the only question for you is how much business you want to bring in via Twitter. For most people who are building a business online, this price is a non-issue because it’s easily recouped with a few product sales or a new client or two. And if you’re a blogger (which, if you’re reading this, you probably are), it’s a question of how much traffic you want to bring to your site via Twitter. Thinking about the $197 is small-time thinking. Focusing on what you can get is the criteria you should use with every buying decision.

Part Six: The Bottom Line

What Laura doesn’t realize is that she’s just given me the ammunition I need to turn the Twitter tide and overtake her in followers (I’m coming for you, Laura, the game is ON). If you want to bring in more business this year using Twitter, then you’ll want to take a closer look at Laura Roeder’s Backstage Pass To Twitter Webinar.

13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners

Darren Rowse — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:07:12 +0000

Just starting out on Twitter? Looking for some Twitter Tips to get you started?

Twitter is bound to have a load of new users today as it is being featured on Oprah – so I thought it might be a good day to share some tips for the beginner Twitter user who is just getting going with the medium.

What’s in it for Your Followers? – How to be Useful on Twitter
10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners – good sound advice and tips on getting going on Twitter
8 Sure-Fire Ways to Tick off the Twitterverse – a few things to avoid on Twitter
5 Ways I Benefit from Twitter – this outlines why I love Twitter in my business of building blogs
Defining Your Twitter Goals – this one is more for those who want to use Twitter for other purposes than just letting their family know when they’ll be home.
How to Set up a Twitter Account – most of your are probably past this one but it could be useful if you’re a ‘Pre-Twitter’ user.
5 Steps to Model Successful Twitter Users – an exploration of a few ways that Twitter is being used
Think Like a Toddler and Find Your Voice on Twitter – using the analogy of growing up as a kid to growing as a Twitter User
Twitter in Plain English – cool video on the basics of Twitter
What Twitter Application is Right for You? – looking at some of the tools people use on Twitter
10 Traits of Highly Effective Twitter Users – some good advice for growing your profile on Twitter
How to Get More Followers on Twitter – a question many ask. If you’re not a celebrity to start with – you might want to read this.
6 Ways to Maximize the Use of Your 140 Characters – basic ‘Tweet Writing Tips.

To keep up to date with more Twitter Tips and Tutorials for both individuals and businesses wanting to get on Twitter – follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our news feed.

Has Twitter SEO Tweak Paid Off Already?

Darren Rowse — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:01:38 +0000

A few days back we wrote about how Twitter had changed title tags of their site to better optimize their pages in the search engines (Google particularly).

Today I was looking at Alexa (which tracks how different websites are going in terms of traffic) and saw this with regards to Twitter Traffic:

It’s a big spike in traffic that saw Twitter rise in Alexa’s rankings from in the 200’s to somewhere around #30 virtually over night.

Things have settled down again in the day or two since but traffic does still seem to be higher.

I’m sure there are a variety of possible explanations for this rise in traffic – but it does seem to coincide with the week that Twitter changed its title tags. Are there any SEO types out there with any insight?

What is Your Advice to Businesses Exploring Twitter?

Darren Rowse — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:35:58 +0000

What advice would you give a business wanting to explore the world of Twitter?

I’m speaking later in the week on the topic (I’ll post a summary of my presentation next week) and would like to feature the tweeted advice of a few readers of this blog.

Here’s how it’ll work.

Login to Twitter or your favorite Twitter Client reply to @twitip with your advice. I’ll take a screenshot of as many people’s advice as I can to include their responses in my presentation.

Please keep your advice to a single tweet. Thanks for your help.

Please note: I won’t be able to use comments in this post, just tweets as I want to show the tweets as screen shots.

Twitter Tweeks Title Tags and Ranks Higher For Your Name – What do you Think?

Darren Rowse — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:42:24 +0000

Techcrunch today are reporting that Twitter has just tweaked the title pages on Twitter users pages to now include users names at the start of the tags instead of the end.

So my tags now read – ‘Darren Rowse (problogger) on Twitter’ instead of ‘Twitter / ProBlogger’.

This might not sound like much but it’s actually a fairly significant tweak when it comes to search engine optimization and has already increased the search engine rankings for Twitter for the names of those using it.

For example – on a search for my name in Google (not that I’d ever search for it…..) my Twitter page now ranks #3 whereas it previously ranked less than 10th (on the second page). Many twitter users that I’ve just done searches for now have their twitter pages rank at #1 for their names.

There are a number of implications for this:

1. It could be useful (or not) for reputation management – online reputation managers often teach about how it is important to ‘control’ the top listings. The more results that you control in the top 10 search results for your name/brand the less likely people are to find negative things about you. Of course this could also be used for ‘evil’ by people wanting to hurt your reputation

2. Twitter is outranking many users homepages/blogs – I’m lucky to have a blog that ranks higher for my name than my Twitter page but as mentioned above there are quite a few Twitter users whose Twitter pages outrank their own home pages. This won’t phase some – but I know a few people who will be a bit ‘miffed’ by this.

In fact I just chatted to one blogger who is now outranked for his own name by Wikipedia (he didn’t even start that page (and doesn’t really ‘control’ what appears on it), LinkedIn, Technorati and now Twitter. His own blog (with his name in the URL even) ranks 5th for his name!

update: there’s a poll at Tweet Social asking people where their Twitter page ranks in Google – it is early days but most seem to be reporting rankings between #1-#3.

3. Good for Twitter’s Growth – as the Techcrunch article explains, this will certainly increase the number of people hitting Twitter as a result of search results. I guess this is potentially good for Twitter users as it means more and more people will be on the network.

Interested to hear your thoughts on this SEO tweak by Twitter?

Get a ReTweet Button for Your Blog

Darren Rowse — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:32:23 +0000

This is just a short post to answer one of the most commonly asked questions here at TwiTip:

Where did you get the ‘ReTweet’ button for your blog?’

The answer is that it is from the team at Tweetmeme (a service that tracks hot stories on Twitter). You can get the code for this button here.

It is currently available in the full sized version that I’m displaying:

As well as a compact version:

It can be installed simply using javascript code in your blogs template or as a WordPress plugin.