1. New or useful apps :
   • backtweets: if you are used to  looking for backlinks of your website or those of your competitors, you won’t be surprised with this feature for the twittersphere. If you are not, you may be interested in looking for twitter profiles that link to a specific URL for one main reason: apart from the fact that each profile has a PageRank, you may want to know how a specific URL spreads into Twitter. This is a good indication on how good your buzz strategy is.
   • Twist: just like Google trends, this application gives a clear indication of the trends of specific keywords and expressions on Twitter. This application also has a feature that aims to compare keywords.
   • Tweetreach: this is my favourite! This application shows how many people are exposed to a twitt. Not only giving the information on the number of retweets (RT) or backlinks, it also provides the number of impressions. For instance, I twitted a link to an article on how the internet had shortages recently after reading a very interesting post from Christopher Mingryan. The graph below shows how many people have actually seen the twitt and the contribution of each Twitterer in exposing the twitt:
     

     ---

     
   • Friend or Follow: this website is really simple but will save you time! This enables you to know who you follow but does not follow you back! Export it as CSV!
2. case studies:
   • Many case studies available online show the various strategies that have so  far been successful. The presentation below sums it up very well according to my point of view:

   ---

   • Last of all, the squarespace case is very important and shows that monitoring its network on social media is also hugely important. Squarespace has been successful in reaching thousands of people promoting its brand only by offering 1 Iphone GS per day for 30 days… To be part of this lottery, one only had to send a post with “#squarespace” in it. A Twitter search shows that “#squarespace” is currently beeing twitter 15 times every 8 minutes:
     

     ---

     

   Voila! Hope this post helps all those who want to start the Twitter journey or go further with their knowledge on this. As a reminder, you may also want to follow me on my Twitter profile where I’m way more active than in my blog! Happy belated independance day to my US readers.

   Quick edit [6th July 2009]: I also advise that you take a look at the moonfruit case and the Dell Offers Followers Specials but do not try to get as many followers as possible through spamming because it’ll probably do more bad than good to you in the long run.

• Google: Apart from showing the disappointing financial results for Q1, Google changed its algorithm as usual but for once, it made the changes public. First, site links are now widespread on the search engine result pages. The main impact will be that each website has more space and more links in the Search Engine Result Page  (SERP). This would surely lead to a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for websites whose content matches better what internet users look for. Secondly, SERP are now more local and geolocalised. Indeed, Google may use your latest local queries typed in the Google toolbar and responds to queries such as “japanese restaurant” with a map from Google Maps.  This is indeed very interesting because Google goes one step further into personalised results. It also shows that optimising your website into Local Business ads is  a must now more than ever. Finally, on top of offering the geocalised suggest feature and local news feature, which recently expanded to the UK, India and Canada, Google changed its URLs in the SERP. It means that more parameters will be available. Here is the example presented in the Google blog:

Old URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
New URL: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The difference in parameters is the following:

——- old

http://www.google.com/search

hl=en
q=flowers
btnG=Google+Search

——- new

http://www.google.com/url

sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The impact if the “cd” parameter is huge, as now, one can track the ranking of his website for each keyword bringing traffic to the website. See how you can do it here (in French) or here (in English).

• Mobile Search: Google released its latest Gmail version. This is a pretty good one as it is faster and uses the Gears technology (yep, you can access your mails even when you have no signal). Google Maps is getting closer and closer from Maps Quest. It seems that Google will already be number one for all vertical search features by the time the internet is available on each and every mobile device.
  

  Google Maps gets closer from Mapquest

• SMO and Twitter: It seems that Twitter makes most of the news for the SMO world. To follow the latest news, follow my bookmarks on the topic: Delicious/twitter

Voila! To stay updated on the latest news, you may want to follow me on twitter, or follow my rss, my delicious or all my feeds on friendfeed.

Have a fruitful week!

An update to my former post about twitter thanks to one of the comments I received, I wanted to point out how to boost your traffic for newly created brands or businesses. Because you cannot count on the notoriety of you brand, you need to make it happen:

• by using seo-friendly keywords in relation to your business (use google keyword suggestion + google trends tool)
• by using the search feature + twitter apps such as twilert.com (sends you on a regular basis a summary of discussions on a particular keyword) and follow people who speak about the same things as you.
• by using twitterfeed with more than one profile to send updates from your site/ blog on a regular basis and categorise them into various feeds (just like RSS). Please note that you should not use it too much in order not spam the whole network …
• by using feeds aggregators and check for stuff which are currently massively retweeted, digged, delicioused, etc. This is very important because the more stuff you find – stuff in relation with your business that buzzes around – the more people will twitt it again and again. The main purpose behind it would be to make your twitter profile famous as retweets always include your profile name. It looks like this:



There is also a very interesting post on how to use feed aggregators right here. The biggest ones being friendfeed, tweetmeme and popurls.

I also gathered a few tips:

• Keep the group active with a content in relation with your target audience:
  - it is important that you use at least one important keyword in your post
  - use the search feature, look for hot topics on twitter and twitt them
  - use the hashtags (“#”) to categorise the content. For instance, each and every post about seo should have #seo in it so other users can find your content.

• Promote the twitter group:
  - use the search feature, look for users who are interested in the same topic you’re working on in your website / blog, follow the profile and start a discussion / inform that you have content on your site in relation with what he/she likes
  - promote your twitter account everywhere you can, in your mail signature, your website, blog, etc.
• Create a branded template (layout)
  - it’ll help you be considered as a trustworthy player in the twitter world.

I’ll keep you posted for more news!

social-network-ideas

This is also how I heard about Ning, an incredible website where one can create its own social network and put it into its website. Take a look at it it’s absolutely awesome!