OlegIlin.com

Not long ago twitter introduced a new feature – ability to classify people you follow by categories. But instead of making pre-defined categories, they let users to create them, calling them “lists”.

I was invited to beta-test this feature before it was released to the general public, and share my feedback. Now I’m sharing my thoughts about twitter lists with you.

Categorization is very important for any established network, especially social network. Yet the correct dichotomy of complex category trees and the optimal definition of tree nodes are not trivial matters at all. So instead of making up artificial categories, twitter essentially created a social poll letting people “vote” for their favorite categories.

Each list (or category) created by individual twitter could count as one vote. So the more people create lists with the same name, the more weight this name will probably carry as the candidate for particular node definition.

Twitter harnesses the collective brain power of its users to build complete modern schema of social flow. All they need now is a relatively simple program to conduct statistic analysis of node’s relations and relevancy. Brilliant!

This is only one of possible applications for twitter lists.

Another application is also pertained to voting, but in different way. Before twitter introduced twitter lists, the only voting mechanism available on twitter was related to RTs (re-tweets). I discussed the actual role of twitter RTs in the previous article.

Yet, many social networks have at least 2 different voting modules. In Facebook, for example, you can “like” somebody’s post, you can write a comment, and you can become a fan of friend’s page or community, essentially voting for it, since all your friends see that you joined that micro-community.

So, with introduction of twitter lists, twitter created a second voting option. Twitter user can place up to 500 people on the list, and create up to 20 different lists. If you follow more than 10000 tweeple, you can easily miss the updates from tweeps that (in your opinion) have the most knowledgeable/interesting/provocative tweets on that topic of interest.

Twitter lists allow to tone-down all that noise and clutter of general twitter communications, and really follow the updates of people that you think are worthy of special attention.

How is this relevant to voting? Well, if tweeple placed someone on the list, they essentially voted for that person. They voted that s/he has something to say, and is valuable for the community.

The more people placed you on the list, the higher is your weight in the community.

I’m pretty sure that search engines will soon add this parameter to their authority calculation algorithms and will pay attention to it when defining the SERP rankings of a particular record (notice, I said record, not web page, since now there are many different formats of indexed information, and “page” can be applied to only a few of them) . Of course, this new parameter should only be used in combination with others.

Here is the third application for twitter lists. (This one could be short-lived since many SEO specialists will soon use it to their advantage, and probably abuse it to death).

For now, you can estimate the value of your own twitter account by looking at the number of lists that you’re in (not financial value, the value of your information.) It should not be estimated as the constant. Information-wise, the account listed on thousands of lists may be less valuable then the account listed on only 10 lists or so. When defining the information value of my different twitter accounts, I use the following formula. You should be listed on the number of lists equal or more than 0.1% of the number of your followers.

Hence, if you have 10000 followers, you should be listed at least on 10 lists. If you’re not, then your account probably doesn’t provide enough value for your followers. You’re not helping your community, and you should quickly do something about it.

Review your tweets. I personally hate useless “bathroom break”-kind of tweets. Yet maybe you’re a part of the community that likes them. Even if this is the case, low listing ratio signals that you might need to deviate from your current tweeting pattern.

Of course the three list applications mentioned above is only a tip of the iceberg. The main point of this article is not only to show you the usefulness of this new twitter feature, but also to demonstrate that for many new features in social networks there are possibly hundreds of possible applications that nobody thought of. Use those applications to promote your brand, establish your authority, and help your social network communities.

P.S. I hope you find this post useful for your SEO and social marketing. If you want more up-to date SEO and Social Media info, signup for Social Media Secrets Newsletter using the signup form at the top right part of this blog, or go to www.web-feed.com .

Yes, I know that Twitter and Facebook are 2 different legal entities. But for the purposes of SEO and social marketing they are like twins, they complete each other.  And ideally they should only be used in combination. You initiate your acquaintance through Twitter, then send your friends to Facebook to nurture this new relationship, share photos, comments, etc.

Both social networks play ever growing role as a sources for social proof and authority. It’s not just a coincidence that Google SERP algorithm now gives even higher weights to the links coming from such sites.

In fact, both Google and Bing (finally worthy search engine from Microsoft!) both now have a non-exclusive agreement with Twitter and Facebook for using their live-time updates in the SERPs.

It does make a lot of sense. People on Twitter and Facebook share the most recent information with each other, something that is as close to “fresh meat” as you can get.
And in the light of these news Twitter RTs now play a very special role. In order to determine tweet’s position in the SERPs, both search engines now take in consideration (for their SERP algorithms) such parameters as number of Rts for the particular tweet and the number of followers of the person who posted the message or RTed.

The more followers the account has, the bigger is weight assigned to tweet, the more RTs the higher is importance.

For those who don’t know what RTs are, they are re-tweets, special commands used on Twitter to share with your followers’ posts published by your friends.

In other words, when somebody thinks that your tweets are worthy reading, and follows you, when you post a tweet in your account, your follower sees it instantly within her/his Twitter account.

So if you tweet something that is re-tweeted by other tweeple, all their followers will see your update. This means your message will be repeated again and again.

Facebook has similar option, but instead of re-sending the message to your followers, you can vote for the message(“like” it), which is essentially the same. All your followers see the message that you voted up. The more “likes” for the message, the bigger the weight assigned to it. Simple.

While RT parameter makes sense, the number of followers is debatable as a valid estimator of tweet’s importance.

Let’s take a closer look. Since both search engines pay a lot of attention to real time posts and events, the more Rts the tweet has, the higher is frequency of its appearance in live time search within the twitter for particular keywords, and hence the more weight will be assigned to this tweet for this keyword. That’s where presumably the “Rt  frequency” or “number of RTs” as a new parameter for SERP’s relevancy derived from.

But if tweeter just started recently, s/he won’t have many followers. However this use may be a real pro in particular industry s/he tweets about, and her/his opinion might be well worth listening too. Plus user can provide a lot of valuable resources and information on the topic. Yet s/he won’t get big weight simply because the account is young.

Sure, the more mature is the account and more followers it has, the more authority it carries (potentially). Yet this leaves an operating space for spammers, and the logic is flawed.

Hopefully search engines will find more suitable parameter for this purpose soon.

Thank you for reading this post. If you like me to share with you some cool SEO and Social Marketing strategies, then please enter your name and email in the form below. Thank you and see you inside.

It’s not a secret that social networks have been used for a while now to get substantial traffic to the targeted sites and also to boost the rankings in the SERPs. SEO experts always try to find a new ways to stay ahead of the crowd, and social networks seemed like a nice way to covertly play a new card in the search engine optimization game.

However, there are indicators that search engines begin to wise up and search for the methods to prevent this new spam. Look at Squidoo, for example. A few months ago all the sites that were heavily linked from Squidoo tanked in SERPs ranking in Google.

Granted, the rankings are back now, but it just get to show you that the easy days for black SEO in social networking are almost over. The same happened with blog and ping that were like a traffic mantra couple years ago.

Social networks are more accurate now in estimating the actual popularity of the posts too. It was easy to create dozens proviles early in the game and get them all vote for the same post. And – voila – you suddenly had your post at the first page of a popular networking site. Now you need not only to play with proxy servers, but actually create your own networks of voters to be successful in this technique…

So, what’s next? Well, it looks like a Wiki might be a new solution for SEO experts. We just need to figure out a way to seemlesly insert the right keywords and links in the popular Wikis.

The problem is that Wiki content can be updated by anybody, so how can you preserve your version of the content on the page?