Chris Baggott's Guide to Blogging

I've read on a few occasions lately how Goolgle needs to be worried about Twitter as an alternative search engine. Never one to underestimate anything, I do like to search for some specific things on Twitter, but primarily it's benefit is more about monitoring....not really searching. And I'm a Freak and so is almost everyone else that's enamored with Twitter and the like.

I was going to title this post "Has Twitter Jumped the Shark?" after the inaguration fiasco (when senators from Missouri have adopted, it's probably over). I'm not ready to go quite that far. It is just discourgaing as a marketer that I hear so much talk about the new opportunities when we don't have a great handle on existing tools that have so much more capacity for growth.

Search is still the best marketing opportuntiy online. Blogging for search is the answer

Anyone see Twitter on this list? Didn't think so. eMarketer forecasts:

“.... the growth of total search queries is astounding. By some estimates, US Internet users will enter 21 billion more queries in 2010 than this year."

Am I saying that Twitter or other of the 'social' tools are unimportant? Of course not. I'm only talking about proportion. If you have an hour to focus on marketing, 58 minutes should be spent on SEO.

What I love about Blogging for search is that you accomplish two important goals. You Humanize your marketing...which is the 'social' part of social media anyway, and you leverage your blogs into an amazing customer acquisition strategy.

Comments for Search: the fastest growing marketing tool in Social Media

Friday, March 6, 2009 by Chad Richards:: This eMarketer report, however, is specifically about search engines. Twitter is not technically a search engine. Now I have not seen numbers yet on the number of search conducted on Twitter, but we do know that on YouTube (again, not technically a search engine) more searches are conducted than on Yahoo - making YouTube the second largest "search engine" if you will. According to a recent ComScore report, Americans conducted 2.8 billion searches on YouTube in November 2008 - 200 million more than those conducted on Yahoo. It will be interesting to see the Twitter numbers when they're available.
Thursday, March 26, 2009 by Douglas Lochmiller:: When it comes to connecting with your existing customers, Twitter works great. But when it comes to acquiring new customers, it is so over hyped it is almost laughable. I can attract new customers after spending 10 minutes "tweaking" my SEO. I can spent many hours "tweeting" on Twitter only to get followers that were also trying to market themselves. If my brand was a common household name, Twitter would be a great way to stay connected with customers. But, when you are trying to get your unknown company in front of potential customers, a couple of minutes working on SEO will get you far more than several hours on Twitter. I don't know about you, but to me time is money. Call Twitter whatever you want (search engine, social network, microblog, helicopter, jet boat) I have yet to receive a monetary return from my "tweeting". I too have also spent time adding to the amount of searches conducted on YouTube. But, a lot of my searches were trying to find the latest video of a skateboarding dog, not to find a company that will provide me with premium Japanese incense. Search engine optimization got my site on the first page of an organic search on Google (not PPC) - the monetary returns have been huge. Now I spend my time trying to keep my site on the same first page.
Thursday, March 26, 2009 by Mark Witzling:: One of the challenges of social media is also that what yo put out there gets read by everyone, intended or otherwise. Obama offended Special Olympics with his self-deprecating bowling humor on Leno. It can be worse for bloggers online. For example, best not to offend your customers in Missouri (I'm one). In Missouri we say "Show Me". Just because we "get it" in Mo. doesn't me twitter has jumped the shark. And, no problem, we also have a good sense of humor back here amongst the corn stalks.