Tasha Harrison

Something lovely and heartwarming came into my life today through Twitter, this wonderful video of a busker on the London Underground. Isn’t social media brilliant!

via @richardpeacock

Ever wondered about retweeting? Are you new to Twitter and can’t decipher the strange codes people talk in.

Here is my three point guide to retweeting:

1. An example of a retweet is:
   
   RT @tashaharrison This is a great article http://bit.ly/45t783
2. You can comment on a retweet like this:
   
   RT @tashaharrison This is a great article http://bit.ly/45t783 <– the point he made is worth thinking about
3. You can also reference someone else’s tweet by writing at the end of the tweet:
   
   This article is really interesting and worth thinking about http://bit.ly/45t783 (via @tashaharrison)

Retweeting is a great way of sharing information with the people you follow. It is generally how articles and news are able to travel so quickly to so many people on Twitter.

There’s big changes on Google today. The search engine is going to include results from sites such as Twitter and from blogs. This is important, because it means that the search results we receive will be up to date news, as it happens. The explosion of  Twitter, in particular, has been the main catalyst for this change. It gives people the ability to publish news as it is happening. It is important that Google reflects this new real-time news source (Rupert Murdoch should take notice).

The other big change is the increased personalisation of your search. Google records your web history and bases its search results on the sites that you visit. So if you regularly visit a particular news site, it will place that site higher up the search rankings if it is relevant to your search. This is a big game changer for SEO, since it favours more established sites. It also means that when you view your own site on Google you will generally see it ranking differently than most of your potential customers, meaning that you have no idea how well your site is actually ranking.

Most good SEOs will have seen this trend already and will have been aware that personalisation has been increasing over the last couple of years. It provides us with a new challenge and increases the need for different forms of online marketing, like social media and online PR. It also creates a problem for SEO companies who still guarantee positions on Google, as they will find it hard to prove.

From a users point of view I actually think these changes are rather limiting. Surely the point of search engines is that we can find something new. Before the days of social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, we relied on search engines to bring us new sites and information. Now we will increasingly receive the same sites, having to look further through the results to find something new.

We’re all busy people, always have been. The most overused excuse in business is that people don’t have time. Which is why social networking seems like it’s going to take too much time to be worth it. Many people read about Twitter and LinkedIn and learn how great they are for their business, which they can be, but, having joined up and filled out their profiles, realise they don’t have enough time to really make the most of them. It can be pretty intimidating when you first get on Twitter and follow a few people. You’re not really sure what you’re supposed to do and you quickly realise that it’s not just a load of people talking about making tea, as many people suppose.

The most important thing when joining an online network is to make sure you’ve got enough time to invest in it and to ensure that it is the right network for you and your business. This can be a matter of trial and error, but if you invest the time at the beginning you will find that the benefits far outweigh the time it costs you.

This video reminds me of why I do what I do.  I constantly find it astonishing how powerful the internet is and how important social media has become in such a short space of time.  Enjoy!