Topics Include: Twitter Adds Advertising Component, Google Using Site Speed in Web Search Ranking, Search Advertising Spending and Effectiveness on the Rise Hodgson Launches NeighborWorks Micro Site

Twitter Adds Advertising Component

Despite having a cofounder named Biz Stone, Twitter’s business model, or at least its revenue plan, has been nonexistent to this point. I guess someone decided that since Twitter is currently hosting 50 million messages per day, maybe it’s time they put something in place.

Until recently, businesses have been able to promote themselves for free on Twitter—just make an official profile for your company, and you can communicate directly with customers and anyone who cares to listen, as long as you're succinct. Now businesses will also have the option of buying Promoted Tweets, messages associated with a particular search term.

People search out subjects on Twitter all the time—coffee, cough syrup, technology companies, etc. Now, if your company buys the rights to that word, your messages get prime placement on the search results page. Organic results are up there too, but the Promoted Tweet gets prime placement.

There is a slight catch. Twitter knows there’s a fine line between selling tweet placement and selling out, so here's the rule for Promoted Tweets: people have to respond to them. Unless your Promoted Tweet (PT) is retweeted, responded to or otherwise interacted with, it will be deemed unworthy of PT status and will be dropped.

If you think Twitter’s new service sounds a lot like what Google does, you’re not alone. It will be interesting to see whether Google–Twitter becomes one of the new online rivalries or if they cooperate instead, bringing to market the best search utility (Google) coupled with social networking and messaging (Twitter).

Google Using Site Speed in Web Search Ranking

Beginning April 9, Google added a new component or signal to their search ranking algorithms — site speed. Google’s announcement of the change stated the following:

Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

Site speed won’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page in determining ranking — in fact, Google noted that less than 1 percent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal and currently, the signal only applies to visitors searching in English on google.com. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, it’s possible that your site has not been impacted. If you have seen changes to your rankings, or if you have any questions on how to speed up site response times, let me know.

Search Advertising Spending and Effectiveness on the Rise

According to the latest quarterly report by local online advertising company WebVisible, the average small business advertiser spent $2,201 on search advertising in Q1 2010, a 2.4 percent increase over the previous quarter and a 91 percent increase over the same period last year. Year-over-year spending was up 111 percent in Q4 2009 and 91 percent in Q3 2009.

Small businesses are also seeing results from their increased search spending—from Q4 2009 to Q1 2010, WebVisible saw a 35 percent increase in the percentage of search clicks that resulted in a phone call for advertisers. Of course, to be able to measure how effective your own online spending is, you’ll need to make sure that you also have in place tracking systems to measure how people are responding to advertising and calls to action. We’ve been working with several companies recently on whole-scale site reevaluations, which include assessments of their online advertising strategies and tracking effectiveness. If you’d like some information on this process for your organization, let Garry know.