Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

I’ve made my bones with Twitter in the past, but truth be told I’ve warmed to it over time and certainly understand it’s value as a marketing and customer relationship management tool.  But when I see videos like this, I can’t help but roll my eyes a bit.

There are some clearly fundamental issues with what’s said here.  Now, I don’t think there’s anything necessarily malicious, but this definitely provides some false hope for how effective you can be with Twitter, and belittles another truly valuable marketing channel.

• Mr. Voss has cultivated a massive following, but doesn’t state how long it’s taken to acquire this following - and a targeted following at that.  Additionally, what type of staff manages his Twitter campaign(s)?  You don’t just start an account, Tweet and get thousands of visitors to your website.
• From an SEO standpoint, his example was pretty sad.  There will always be a limited audience for branded keywords, especially for non-essential items (how often do YOU search for an internet show?) .  However, ranking out well for targeted high volume terms can equal serious revenue.  What type of money making clicks does he expect to get from the keyword search “chrisvoss show” used in the video?  Further, just by looking at the dynamic URLs of his blog, it’s no surprise there’s no organic traffic - his site isn’t SEO’d very well.
• The bit.ly examples aren’t exactly accurate either.  Sure you can generate a lot of clicks through a massive audience…especially when it’s to someone else’s content.  Lost in this example is that if you want to sell something, you need to attract them to YOUR site.  To have something take off through ReTweets and truly go viral to your benefit, you have to make the content.  Oddly enough, when you consistently make good content, if you get your ducks in a row, you can also climb the SERPs and consistently generate highly targeted search traffic.

Again, I don’t think this guy’s terribly off base in that you can really do some great marketing with Twitter, I just think it’s irresponsible to tell people to not worry about search marketing.  People won’t always be on Twitter, some people just don’t use it, and others may not find the majority of your Tweets relevant.  Search can help these audiences find your site…or you could just ignore them and leave that money on the table.  Personally, I like making money.