Jacob Brown Designs Blog

Twitter’s New Homepage Design: Thumbs Up!

Jul 29

jbdseoexpertstwitter Mashable, Social Media, twitter, Twitter Design, Twitter's new homepage 2 Comments

So…yesterday I began hearing and reading about Twitter debuting it’s new homepage design on Mashable. I immediately thought to myself…thank God. I’ve never been a fan that old homepage. There hasn’t been a single person that disagrees with Twitter’s decision to do this. I also agree with the changes that Twitter has made. It seems to want to cater toward the users and even the non registered Twitter prospects.

I was on Twitter last night around 8:30 and I wasn’t quite sure when the new homepage was going to make it’s appearance. I logged off and BOOM…there it was, beautiful shades of blue and features that were new to my eyes. The first thing I noticed was the new search bar right in the middle of the screen. This allows those who aren’t registered users on Twitter to search what is being tweeted. I, in particular, like this new feature. There are times that I don’t feel like logging in, but just want to see if anyone is tweeting about a certain topic. This gives me that option.

Also if you look at the bottom half of the new…I guess you can say, “Twitter Login-Search Engine Homepage”, you will see that they’ve added another neat feature for “POPULAR TOPICS BY THE MINUTE, DAY, AND WEEK“. This allows you to view what the hottest topics are in the Twitter world….THUMBS UP to Twitter on this one.

Social Media Boom vs Baby Boom during economical crisis

Jun 26

jbdseoexpertsSEO, twitter baby boom, economical crisis, SEO, social media boom, social media sites 2 Comments

Baby & Social Media Boom

A month ago today, my second son Connor was born. While speaking to our pediatrician, Dr. Forman of West Bloomfield Pediatrics…whose website I recently redesigned…BTW…he informed my wife and I that there is going to be a baby boom. Now his reason for this was that during these times of economical crisis…people have lost their jobs, and now they are at home with nothing to do…so they make babies.

There were two occasions in history that a baby boom occurred, the Post-World War II baby boom from 1946 to 1964 and the Echo baby boom (Millennial Generation) from 1980 to 1999. The Post-World War II baby boom occurred, obviously because of the returning soldiers to their families. The Echo baby booms, or Generation Y, were the children of the first baby booming generation, but this time around…it’ll be out of boredom.

Now….what does that have anything to do with Social Media? Well, I will show you.

There is a Social Media boom happening right now and will last a while. Everyone is talking about Twitter, Facebook….not so much MySpace anymore, but I won’t leave them out…they could be reading this…LOL

Thousands, if not millions of people are joining social networking sites daily. Why? Well #1, it’s fun…#2 people are realizing the advantages of doing business on these sites…but what I think is happening #3 is that people are home…either laid off or fired…and they are bored. Just like what’s going to happen with the baby boom…a social media boom will happen as well. A lot of people have nothing to do all day at home but Tweet and make babies.

While laid off at home, and supposed to be on the computer looking for another job…people are going to be joining these social media sites and getting caught up in all of the fun and excitement of interacting with others just like them. The smart ones will use these sites to for job hunting. A lot of social media sites offer great opportunities for both the job seekers and employers. Sites like TweetMyJobs.com funnel leads from recruiters and folks in HR out to job hunters. There’s also a new site called TwitterJobSearch.com that lets you search Tweets worldwide for mentions of jobs.

So…how can we as online marketers take advantage of this booming situation?

1. Many of people are beginning to venture into entrepreneurship and starting up small businesses….isn’t that who we target? Our social media presence and interaction will help gain their business.

2. More and more visitors will be on your blogs and websites, either looking for useful information or possibly your services…so be everywhere that you can so you don’t miss out on opportunities.

3. Make sure you are putting links to your website or blog in these social media sites. With these social media sites gaining more and more traffic…this in turn will boost your site with more and more relative inbound links.  So this way…we all win.

Twitter tricks and tips for SEO

Jun 17

jbdseoexpertsSEO, twitter SEO Tips, SEO Tricks, Twitter and SEO, Twitter Tips, Twitter Tricks 6 Comments

Just this a few days ago Scott Cowley from SEO.com mentioned a technique that I used in my most recent blog post, Will Bing.com change the face of search? The tactic that Scott referred to was how I targeted certain individuals who I knew would take interest in that particular post using a direct message with a link on Twitter.

There are several different Twitter techniques that can be successful…if used properly. I’ve compiled a few of them below for all to see.

Twitter Tip #1:

Be a good Twitter citizen. Don’t spam people with dumb links to things they probably don’t care about anyway.

Ok…now that we’ve gotten that one out of the way…now we can learn. LOL

Twitter Tip #2:

Connect with people on Twitter that share the same interests as you. A lot of times you may get requests from Twitter Spammers, or as some call them, Twammers…..BLOCK THEM….hopefully eventually they may disappear.

Twitter Tip #3:

Be courteous enough to retweet (or “RT”) other people’s blogs, websites, press releases. This will help your posts out in the long run as well and you will begin to see other tweets about your information as well.

Twitter Tip #4:

Add a retweet button to your blog. This will allow an easy avenue for those reading your blog posts to tweet your post easier than copying and pasting your url…which is always too long, so they end up having to shorten the url, which is just too much work.

Useful Plugins: Wordpress, Blogger

Twitter Tip #5:

Remember that Twitter is a Social Media site, where you are supposed to be meeting and networking with similar individuals…not just posting links without interaction. This is where your Twitterank drops…and people just stop liking you. The more you are liked…the more will follow.