SEO Werkt!

My policy on who/how many people I follow on Twitter has become much more lax in recent months. These days, I follow back most of the people that follow me. The downside to this is that a lot of these people will immediately unfollow me as soon as I follow them back, I guess in an attempt to ‘pad’ their follower count.

So every few weeks, I like to go through my Twitter network and ‘cleanse’ it. I will unfollow a lot of the people I am following that aren’t following me, and at the same time I will try to follow back people that followed me that I somehow missed. I was doing this today (using Twellow), and I began to notice a trend as I was going through the people I was following, that weren’t following me.

I was following a LOT of people that write for Mashable, that weren’t following me back. I finally found SEVEN people that identified themselves as writers for Mashable, that weren’t following me back. I’m not talking about people that occasionally write for Mashable, these are seven paid writers for Mashable, not counting Cashmore (he isn’t following me either).

I checked the ratio of people they follow to those that follow them. The ‘best’ ratio I found was one writer that was following back roughly 33% of the people that follow him. The worst was less than 10%.

I got to thinking about this, and honestly I’m not sure of the significance. Will I stop promoting Mashable on Twitter because none of their writers will follow me back? Probably not. Now do I think it’s hypocritical for the site to bill itself as ‘The Social Media Guide’ and only follow back a fraction? Yeah, a little. Is that enough to make me change how I share their content with my network? Probably not.

So at the end of the day, who cares? That’s what I’m wondering about. If a company is at all connected to social media, whether it’s via content they aggregate, or create, or distribute, or services they offer, are these companies held to a higher ‘standard’ when it comes to using social media? If an agency brands itself as being ‘experts in making companies social’, and they aren’t using social media to be social themselves, is that a disconnect? Are they expected to be more ‘social’? Should they be? At the end of the day does it really matter?

What do you think?

UPDATE: As I continued to go through the people I am following that aren’t following me back, I noticed that I also had several from Twitter. Which is really ironic.

 Today marks exactly one year from my last post on Deckermarketing. I started blogging in September 2003, and have written many posts on eBusiness, marketing, leadership and life…until May 4, 2009. After that day, I didn’t write another blog post until now. 

This wasn’t by design. Things just "slipped away". One month turned into two months, and that turned into a year. This must happen to others, right? Even John Porcaro – an exec previously at Microsoft who inspired me to blog in 2003 when I was at Dell — has not blogged in nearly a year, and he’s now a social media consultant! 

I thought this one year anniversary of “no posts” is a good opportunity to give a summary of how or why I orphaned my blog for so long.

First, Bazaarvoice has been more than a full time job as we’ve grown from 6 of us in January 2006 to over 550 employees, 9 products, serving 800 brands. In terms of writing (which takes a lot of time) I’ve felt more obligated to blog on Bazaarblog, write articles (such as my ClickZ column), and helping my team produce videos. And then I had other commitments taking time, such as co-founding Capital Factory, launching a web-based chore application, serving on boards, and spending as much time as I can with my family! 

A big factor is my Twitter activity took away from blogging. If I had an idea, I tried to put it in 140 characters and tried to live by a “less is more” mantra. And if the idea deserved more writing, and it was about marketing or social commerce, I ended up putting it on Bazaarblog.

Despite the lapse in content, Deckermarketing blog traffic hasn’t gone down. I still get 100 to 200 visits a day, largely from Google search results. I didn’t expect that.

Now what? I’m still super busy, however I don’t want to let the investment in this blog go to waste. I'm going to start to post again, at least once a month in depth, and more frequently with a simple post of a paragraph or less. But with so many outlets, it's hard to focus on one. What do you think? Is the same thing happening to you?

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