Making sense of Twitter and Google Pageranks

Why is the Google Pagerank for my Twitter profile the same as Lance Armstrong’s?

So I have a bit of an obsessive personality. One of my latest obsessions is Twitter and another that I’ve for a much longer time is Google Pagerank.

Over the years I’ve found that there are 3 good rules to continuing to see your Pagerank go up:

1. Create good content consistently over time with an eye to using thoughtful keywords
2. Always be on the lookout for new high quality inbound links, and
3. Send Google blogger Matt Cutts a nice bottle of Scotch at Christmas

This is of course a very simple formula and there’s a lot going unsaid in my rules, except for the “Matt Cutts Scotch” rule which is really straightforward.

But here I am with my new Twitter obsession and I’m finding myself at a complete loss as to how Google is determining the ranking score for individual user pages. I’m assuming that the “send Matt Cutts Scotch” rule isn’t applying so I’m looking to the first two and namely the second one, because inbound quality links is a very powerful factor in a page’s Google rank.

So let’s take my Twitter page to begin with at http:www.twitter.com/kgrandia . I have 5 links back to my Twitter account and a Google pagerank of 5 out of 10, I have 1,500 followers and I’m following 1,100 people. I post new “Tweets” on Twitter about 5 or 6 times a day.

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My Twitter and Re-Tweet traffic rules of thumb

I’ve been on Twitter now for about a year and spent enough time watching the referral traffic to my blog posts to start to nail down some general rules of thumb on how much traffic you can expect from the micro-blogging phenom.

In general, I’ve found that I get about 6 (yes, 6) unique visitors within an hour of posting a short, catchy descriptor along with my URL.

That’s 6 unique visitors from a single post on my Twitter feed and I have 1,500 followers right now and have had over 1,000 for about 6 months.

So, I would say a good rule of thumb would be 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors. I have also found that the same rule can apply for re-tweets (when one of my followers, reposts the URL on their own Twitter feed).

So 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors + 6 more for every Re-Tweet. It just so happens that a quick look at my most active followers, shows that most have around the same number of followers as me, so this Re-Tweet factor makes sense. This multiplier effect can actually be pretty significant if you start with 6 and then get 40 Re-Tweets that’s 6 + (6 x 40) = 246 unique visitors. Not bad, when you consider that it takes about 15 seconds to compose the twitter post and hit submit.

An interesting thing that I also noticed over time is that posts that are directly related to Twitter on average get about 10 unique visitors, versus the usual 6.

For example, this post on my Twitter feed - “My top ten tweeters not on Twitter, what do you think? http://reque.st/1687″ - referred 10 unique visitors to my blog. I haven’t written too much on Twitter, so this one is still in the “strong hunch” phase.

These numbers might sound a little depressing, I’m sure you spent a lot of time building a great Twitter profile in the hopes (at least in part) that it might end up driving some nice traffic to your site. 6 for every 1,000 followers doesn’t sound like much, but it actually is a lot.

As I mentioned, drafting a submitting post on your Twitter feed takes about 15 seconds. Those 6 visitors take a micro-second to get. Compare this to the hours it takes to work on the perfect Digg-bait post, only to see it shrivel and die on the general submission page and zero traffic back to your site.

With the way follows are set up on Twitter those 6 visitors are also the types of people who are genuinely interested in your blog post and for me at least many of my followers are fellow bloggers. So if one of those 6 write a post on their own site, that’s a HUGE pay-off for very little time investment.

And finally, remember the rule of 6 is per one thousand followers, so if you have 10,000 followers, plus 100 Re-Tweets that’s a good bit of of highly targeted traffic for doing very little. I would also assume that the 6 per thousand rule would also increase as you become more influential on Twitter and followers in that range.

Now you can imagine the nice bit of traffic Top Twitter users like Robert Scoble are generating for their posts.

But, hey this is just my rule of thumb based on a year of observing traffic referral behavior. I haven’t had the time to do any actually data analysis, so if these numbers seem way off I would stand to be corrected.

What have your observations been? Do you have any Twitter traffic rules-of-thumb?

Oh, and please follow me on Twitter if you’re interested in this type of information, I would love to get to that 10,000 mark someday!

5 things to make your Twitter.com life easier

If you’re like me and use multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Digg, Twitter, blogs etc.) for work and play, then you’re also always looking for easier ways to use and integrate all of them.

Twitter is one of my favorites right now and I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of Twitter apps, userscripts and plugins to try and keep my “Tweet Time” in check. Here’s a few that I found make Twitter easier and more fun to use:

(oh, and take a minute to go to my profile and hit follow if you want my sage advice sent direct to you on your Twitter feed from time to time)

1. Twitter automatic URL shortener: far and away the simplest and best Twitter add-on. It does exactly what the name says, it automatically shortens, even when you paste them in and they go over the 140 character limit. So if the character counter says -45 in bright red after you paste in a URL, just hit submit anyways and it will be shortened automatically. Note that this is a userscript, so if you don’t have “greasemonkey” for Firefox just go here, download Greasmonkey add-on and read the very straightforward instructions. If you don’t have Firefox, then… well, you can download that here.

2. Twitter Berry: I’m a devout Blackberry user and I will never convert, especially since I found the TwitterBerry application. Very simple to use and great way to waste time away on the commuter train home. Best part about Twitterberry is that it works on your data network instead on your SMS text messaging service. To download Twitterberry, just email yourself this URL: http://orangatame.com/ota/twitterberry/ and then click on the link in the email message on your Blackberry which will send you to the download page and the instructions.

3. Friend or Follow: just type in your user name and find out who you are following on Twitter that has not reciprocated and followed you. I use it about once a month to cull the list of people I’m following down to those who are following me in return. Friend or Follow also tells you who’s following you, that you are not in turn following.

4. Twitter Facebook App: going on Twitter and answering the “What are you doing” and then clicking on over to Facebook and answering the same question in my status update bar is kind of redundant. Actually it’s not kind of redundant at all, it’s the exact definition of redundant. Instead, you can just load the Twitter Facebook app so that everytime you Tweet on Twitter it will automatically update the “What are you doing right now” section on your Facebook profile. Very cool and a good example of how mush easier life would be if all these social media platforms opened up their information to allow for such easy cross-pollination.

5. Tweet This Wordpress Plug-in: if you are blogging on Wordpress, I found that that the Tweet This Plug-in is by far the best if you want to include a button on your posts so people can easily tweet your posts.

So those are my very favorite and they’re the only ones that I found truly useful. But that’s just me. There’s hundreds of other Twitter applications on Twitter Fan Wiki Apps page to choose from so have at it and let me know what other gems you come across.

5 Easy Ways to Create a Personal Sweet Looking Twitter Profile

I’ve been getting a few questions lately about my Twitter account and how I gave it a personalized and professional touch. I would like to say that I toiled away for hours coming up with the perfect profile, but honestly it took me about half and hour or so to dramatically improve the look of my Twitter profile by downloading a free template and then making it my own with a bit of work in Photoshop.

Here’s 5 great Twitter templates you can use personalize and professionalize (is that a word?) your Twitter profile.: (for those of you who don’t have Photoshop, I’ve included a couple solutions for you as well)

1. For a clean and professional look, go to Frabrice Epelboin’s blog and check out his Photoshop template for Twitter that he makes a available as a free download. This is the one I tweaked and changed up the colors etc. and use for my Twitter profile.

2. For a bit more of a cool kid look, check out the Twitter profile template free for download at Dra Studios.

3. For those of you that don’t have Photoshop here’s a great collection of 25 Twitter templates where instead of uploading an entire template you can upload a single image, alter the color settings and give your profile a somewhat unique identity. The downside is that you can’t add in your personal information, but for a lot of people who use Twitter for fun instead of a marketing tool this is a really easy way to a add a little somethin-somethin to your profile.

4. Check this one out for a fun, yet kind of professional Twitter profile. You can download this Twitter profile template from this page - there’s also a few others you might like. For this one you’ll also need to use Photoshop.

This guy even made a video about his “TwitterBacks” website.

5. For another non-Photoshop solution for creating a personalized Twitter background, here’s a few more generic, yet way better than nothing Twitter profile options. You’ll notice that some of the ones on this page are simple image files that work well proportionately with the Twitter profile page. To do this yourself, just find an image you like, maybe grandma with her ten cats, and upload it as your profile.

I uploaded a few images to my Twitter profile and found that a good image size if you want to go this route is around 8.5 inches width (1279 pixels) by 4.7 inches height (710 pixels) and a resolution of 120 pixels/inch.

If you don’t have any good grandma/cat images laying around you can always check out Flickr for some cool creative commons images (make sure you add artist attribution to the image) or go to an image site like iStockphoto and search the millions of royalty-free high-end images for sale for around a dollar or so.