Stumbleupon Advertising is a truly powerful tool for link building. It puts your content at low cost in front of a large audience, and as long as it doesn’t suck, you can easily and quickly get thousands upon thousands of hits to your content.
Since that time, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets has emerged. This seems like an obvious promotion mechanism, but is currently beyond the budget reach of many brands, as some services list their recommended investment as $15k over three months. I myself reached out to them, thinking I could do some social promotions utilizing the tool, but received dead air – likely because of the small budget for promotion I presented. It seemed like such an obvious way to create a viral contagion with the right piece of content and target market. Then, I saw this -
Hokey, but fun test. I scored 1,124 words/minute and thus could bang out War & Peace in 8 hours. You? staples.com/sbd/cre/market…
— Chris Sacca (@sacca) March 17, 2012
I thought it was peculiar that Chris Sacca was tweeting this out, so I asked if he had been seduced by one of our friends in the SEO community. It turns out he had not. Instead, he had seen one of Staples promoted tweets for the page. I tried to find the actual marker that said the Tweet was promoted, but by the time I started writing this post, I couldn’t find it. However, its impact is obvious. Chris Sacca (someone you should be following), has 1.3 million followers, and his tweet also quickly created Paul Kedrosky’s, who also has 200,000 followers. And that’s just the people in my stream.
Given the content of the speed reader – a clear embed, obvious SEO implications – this, to me, marks the first clear use of promoted tweets for the purposes of SEO. There are obviously secondary benefits (branding, product awareness, etc), but given what this was created for and the structure on page, the SEO majority push here is obvious.
Not sure what the ROI will be for Staples, but it’s great to see large brands with this kind of SEO buy-in. And sure enough, here I am linking to the reader, which, naturally, is pretty cool in and of itself. Props to Staples – and the SEOs who got this approved – as their forward thinking in using Promoted Tweets for SEO will surely give them a market advantage others will be a step or two behind in utilizing.