You might be aware that Twitter recently updated its terms and conditions, so we thought it was worth highlighting what these changes might mean for brands that use the micro-blogging site.

Advertising

Although no specific announcement has been made regarding advertising, the new terms make it clear that Twitter is seriously considering using adverts to generate revenue. Clearly, this will have an effect on organisations which use Twitter as a PR and marketing channel – the main implication being that they could end up with adverts on their pages that they have absolutely no control over.

We suspect what will happen is that Twitter will roll out advertising at the same time as paid-for ad-free accounts to kill two birds with one stone, since no business would want to allow third party adverts on its page, least of all if it had no say over what those adverts will be.

Content Ownership

Twitter makes it clear that publishers still own the copyright of their tweets, but by publishing them on Twitter they allow the company rights to distribute that content through its websites and API. There’s very little to worry about here, Twitter isn’t about to start doing nasty things with people’s content, since that would immediately scare away all of the business users which are most likely to contribute to its future revenues.

One potential issue in this area is that the content is published to the API which third party developers can then use for any number of things. At the moment there’s nothing bad happening in that space, but it’s worth keeping an open mind about what unscrupulous people might use the content for in future – although it’s safe to assume that Twitter will quickly block access to anybody who’s using the API for illegal/spammy behaviour.

UPDATE: Netimperative reports that Twitter has ruled out introducing advertising this year.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

You may have read that Facebook recently added a new feature which allows you to ‘tag’ other users in updates, which works in the same way as Twitter’s @ reply feature. We think this will have a significant impact on brands which are active on Facebook.

How does the new feature work?

When writing a wall post, users can now easily link directly to the profile of other another Facebook user, fanpage, or group. This can (and will) be used by consumers to specifically direct comments at brands on Facebook.

What does this mean for PR?

If you have a fanpage or group on Facebook, users can now address comments directly to you from their wall. The comments they address at you will be displayed on your wall as well as their own.

This means that Facebook now allows users to engage in public and highly visible conversations with brands, in exactly the same way as Twitter. As with all conversations that take place in a public arena, there are opportunities and risks: negative comments will be seen by large numbers of people, and brands which either fail to respond, or provide an inadequate response, are likely to suffer.

Conversely, actively engaging with consumers who direct comments at your brand can have real benefits. A recent survey by Trendstream found that 30% of people say their opinion of a brand improves as a result of it listening to people’s comments on social networks.

What action should be taken?

Assuming you are already regularly checking your Facebook page, you probably don’t need to carry out any additional monitoring and we expect that in the short term most brands won’t notice much difference.

However, as Facebook users become more familiar with this new feature we expect that it will be used in a similar fashion to the equivalent Twitter feature, and brands will begin to notice an increasing volume of comments directed at them. As this becomes the case, you may need to allocate resources to responding to these comments – ignoring them is not an option!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I read an interesting post at SEOmoz about the different factors which influence how valuable a link is in terms of improving the target page’s search engine rankings, and wanted to share it with my colleagues. But being a busy lot I knew they probably wouldn’t have time to read the whole thing, so below is my heavily summarised bullet-point version – I hope it does justice to the original article (which I recommend you read, if you have the time).

1)     Get lots of links from third party websites.

2)     Make sure those links use anchor text which includes relevant keywords.

3)     Links from sites with high PageRank are better than links from sites with low PageRank.

4)     Stay away from spammy sites (both in terms of inbound and outbound links).

5)     Links from high-authority sites are good – but ‘authority’ is still a bit hard to define.

6)     Get links from a wide range of different websites, diversity of links is good.

7)     Links between sites which have a clear pre-existing relationship don’t have as much value.

8)     Links should be embedded in a website’s main content area – sidebar and footer links are less valuable.

9)     Links from websites with content that is relevant to the client’s website are thought to be more valuable – but don’t get too hung up on this, good links from generic sites are also helpful.

10)  Links that are embedded in editorial copy are better than other kinds of links.

11)  Geography may play a part in SEO.

12)  Links that use the ‘nofollow’ tag are generally worthless, but there is speculation that the search engines do give some value to nofollow links on high authority sites like Wikipedia.

13)  Plain HTML links with good anchor text are good. Image links with good alt text (the stuff that pops up when you hover over a picture ) are good. Non standard links, which are embedded in weird bits of code are not good.

14)  If the page linking to your website also links to spammy sites, this is not good – it is what SEO people refer to as being in a bad neighbourhood.

15)  Search engines sometime penalise websites for spammy behaviour. Links from a website which is being ‘punished’ are not good.

16)  If you have a lot of links that look similar (badges, widgets, syndicated press releases, etc) there is speculation that these links are not as valuable as the kind of varied and diverse links you would find in editorial copy.

17)  It is better to build up lots of links over time than to get one sudden burst of links. Sudden bursts probably don’t hurt, but they should be part of a long-term SEO campaign.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites