Three Tools That Make Social Networking Easier

Bit.ly

Your company, like ours offering travel marketing solutions online, probably has a Twitter account. Youve read the How To guides and your posts are the right mixture of fun and informative, but how do you know anyones reading your links? Bit.ly is the answer, not only does it shorten your URL a la TinyURL but it also provides statistics on exactly how many people have clicked on the link that you tweeted. This helps you ascertain which links work and which ones dont. For one of our clients, we found that posts about upcoming fiestas and festivals in their destinations received very few clicks. Whereas any posts that we had written about news stories and current affairs received plenty of clicks. The click throughs are also analysed and we are able to see how many people are posting our links on Facebook or their Twitter accounts, and also what country the majority of the click throughs are coming from.

Analysing our bit.ly data, we found that almost everyone clicked through to our links between 4.52 and 4.57pm. This would definitely show that most people logon to their Twitter accounts during the last ten minutes of the working day. Therefore, by moving our clients posts to this time slot, we were able to receive far more clicks.

Technorati

As a company offering travel marketing solutions online, we write blogs on behalf of many of our clients. But heres a scary statistic: there are more than 57 million blogs online. So how do you work out which ones are worth reading? A search engine specialising in blogs can help, and thats precisely what Technorati is. Make sure that you add your blog to Technorati and not only will people be able to find you, but youll also start to reap the benefits. One thing that irks many SEO agencies about Technorati is that posts arent sorted by the keyword and instead are ranked on the time that theyve been updated. But whilst keyword usage isnt important, the words that you place in your tags are, as the indexing tool is based on how bloggers tag their blogs. So if you update your blog regularly and want more traffic, then make sure you list it onto Technorati.

Trending Topics/Hot Trends

Providing travel marking solutions online for a number of clients, we need to know what works and what people are talking about. For our US clients we use Google HotTrends to see the topics that people are searching for each week, we then try to include these terms in blog posts. For example, todays Hot Topics are pigs and titillation! So writing a blog post on how titillating pigs are would get you extra traffic; well thats the theory anyway! Google HotTrends has a UK subsidiary, but this isnt shown on the home page. To access Google HotTrends UK youll need to click through on one of the American keywords, the UK HotTrends appear on the left hand side of the page in a column. Currently trending are Volvo and Australia, as many of our topics sell tours in Oz, we would tweet about Australia on Twitter knowing that people searching through the trending topics may pick up on this post. One of our clients specialises in courier jobs so a blog post about why Volvo vans are best for delivery work, would also be in order.