Twitter is for microblogging, not for link-spamming your macroblog.
Twitter is for microblogging, not for link-spamming your macroblog. It is okay to post links to your latest blog post, it is rude to post nothing but such links.
Some bloggers do treat twitter as nothing but a link dumping ground for their macroblog. Most of these do not even bother to spam themselves, but use the twitterfeed bot to do the link spamming for them.
They never tweet anything themselves, not even something boring like they just had lunch, they just use twitter as a spamming ground for links to their latest blog entry. Their dumping of nothing but link spam on twitter demonstrates that they do not grok twitter; if they did, they wouldn’t do that.
Users that eagerly install twitterfeed in the hopes of gaining more readers by spamming links to their blog make several serious mistakes in their short-sighted reasoning. So, dear link spammer, here is what you are doing wrong:
First of all, unless your links are very short, they are not going to show up on twitter at all. It will probably be shortened using TinyURL or some other URL shortener to make the entire tweet fit in 140 characters. There are few search engines that bother to expand these URLs, so the short (pun intended) of it all is that your link spamming is ineffective anyway.
Secondly, I have the impression that most tweeple that make the mistake of following a link spam bot do so when they are still new to twitter. They are only following because they recognised a familiar name. In other words; most of those followers are probably people reading your blog already, not new readers at all.
New readers are the ones that discover you through twitter and then either keep visiting your blog or subscribe to your macroblog’s feed. If you post nothing but link spam, you are not likely to attract any new readers.
You purport to be on twitter, but are really just an absentee bot master.
Thirdly, it are precisely those readers you already have that will be very
disappointed by your lack of twitter presence. They decided to follow you hoping to
get some interesting tweets, trade some tips and discoveries, engage in some
conversations, and all they get is a delayed, weak echo of your RSS feed, with
nothing but titles and obfuscated URLs.
In plain English: you let your readers down. You purport to be on twitter, but
are really just an absentee bot master.
Fourthly - perhaps firstly - you are rewarding the loyalty of those macroblog
readers by insulting them. You are telling them that you are too good to talk
them, that they can talk your bot instead. That is not just unmannered, that is plain rude.
You are effectively telling them that they are too dumb to figure out that your
account is just a bot. Admittedly, all the tweeple that follow your link spam
bot and have not unfollowed it yet do seem to prove that point, but that is
rather cynical. By letting them follow a bot, you are exposing their lack of
judgement to all - and that is no way to reward loyal readers either.
Considering that you must be a lame selfish bastard to start link spamming in the first place, this appeal to courtesy is probably something you laugh off. Perhaps I should rephrase the same argument like this: by so ungratefully proving how stupid your readers are, you’ve also shown us why you are desperate to link spam your blog; it is obviously so bad that smart people don’t read it. Summarising in one short sentence with only one- and two-syllable words: Your link spamming proves that your blog sucks.
It is okay to post links to your own post. Not only is everybody else doing it, it is a perfectly sensible thing to do; after all, if I am interested in your tweets I am not unlikely to be interested in your macrotweets as well.
However, there is an art to tweeting links, any links. You cannot just dump a raw link, you need to indicate what it is about - especially when the link is obfuscated by an URL shortener like TinyURL. A link spam bot is likely to simply use the title of your latest blog post. That may be fine for self-explanatory titles, but is definitely less than ideal for creative titles.
Besides, if you are excited about the brilliance of your latest piece and want to get the word out fast, you do not want to rely on a bot that introduces a delay because it only checks your RSS so often. You want to get the word out now.
You should post manually, to post now, pick the right keywords, add the right hashtags,
and perhaps use a custom URL; why settle for http://tinyurl.com/b8trrc when you can have
http://tinyurl.com/twitisblog?
In fact, if you pick that custom URL wisely, you may be able to leave out a
word or two to make better use of the 140 characters you have.
It was probably some self-proclaimed Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) expert
that convinced you that it is important to get all your links out and therefore
just had to install twitterfeed.
don’t insult your followers by letting a bot do the messaging, thus implying that they are not worthy of your personal attention. Do not bore them with messages for all posts on all your other blogs when they follow for your thoughts on one topic.
It is a good idea to get those links out, simply because your
followers may be interested in your macrotweets. But you owe them the respect of
a manual tweet, and some informative words and well-chosen hashtags to go with
that link.
Here is an real SEO tip: search engines love words. So pick the words that best
and tweet manually, and try to pick a custom URL with just the right words in
it.
That way, you treat your users with respect, help them decided whether the link
is worth their while - and get the best possible search engine results as a
bonus.
Make a clean break with your spammy past. Remove your link spamming bot. Do not bother trying to delete every spam tweet, but simply delete your link spamming account, there’s nothing of any value there anyway. Besides, you have tainted that particular account name forever. You made it a link spam account, and that is how it will be known forever.
don’t worry about losing your followers; those who followed you despite your spamming and complete lack of content are sure to follow you again. Better yet, if you start over as a good twitizen, you will gain more followers quicker than you did during your spamming days.
Delete your account, and then either start afresh and engage your followers so they become interested in your macroblog and perhaps subscribe to its RSS feed directly, or simply stay away from twitter.
Twitter is for microblogging, not for link-spamming your macroblog.
Just wrote the Catching a ReTweet Thief? article about researching retweets that uses tweets about this article as its example.
Added a section on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) debunking the myth that twitterfeed is good for SEO as bad advice; explaining that if you care about Search Engine Optimisation you should definitely tweet your links manually.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.