Is 2009 really coming to an end already? It’s hard to believe that the year has gone by so fast, especially with all that has happened here at Go Smart Solutions! We have been able to grow our member base, even throughout these tough economic times. And while we know this is due to the value and results that our services deliver, we know that it is also due to our loyal customers. We are so very thankful.

We are excited about 2010, as we have no plans of slowing down! We will be launching even more valuable services soon, but here’s a quick look at a few notable milestones from 2009:

• EmailFlyerAds has grown to 21,600 members. Over 17,000 email flyers have been sent totaling 45,307,716 real estate emails!
• ClassifiedFlyerAds now has 23,800 members who sent out 120,000 ads in 2009!
• RentShout was launched in June this year, and since then has grown to 1,300 members who have sent out over 1,500 ads!
• RealShout is our latest reveal, launching earlier this month. This service will use Geo-targeted technology and proven Go Smart marketing systems to deliver leads to real estate brokers, MLS’s, and mortgage brokers.
• TwitBacks was a fun side project that took on a life of its own in 2009. With more than 152,000 members and 166,700 Twitter backgrounds created, TwitBacks was a fun success!

We hope your year has been as great as ours, and wish everyone the very best for 2010!

Read our newsletter for a more in-depth look at 2009.

Photo credit: Optical Illusion

Why Is Twitter Good For Communication?

Today we suffered from an outage on a few of our primary sites because our server company, Rackspace, went down in one of their data centers.  My first step to address the issue was going to myrackspace.com to submit a ticket.  That didn’t work because it was down too.  Next, I tried calling our account contact phone number.  Busy signal!  Thirdly, I tried calling the support 800 number.  Busy too!  So what did I do after that?  I went to Twitter http://search.twitter.com and searched for “rackspace”. Instantly, I was presented with thousands of tweets of others complaining about their servers/sites being down.

Rackspace Is Down - Twitter Updates

I knew at that point it was not something that was specific to our servers.  I then went to @scobleizer‘s profile and his tweets confirmed the outage.  He also tweeted a couple of references to check for status.

While Twitter didn’t solve the problem of our servers being down, it sure did take me out of complete panic mode because I was at least able to see what was going on.

Thanks for saving my sanity today, Twitter!

I must admit when I first starting hearing about real time search, I was a little nervous. The first thing that came to mind was, “This is going to be an easy way for spammers to blast us with their junk”. However, I convinced myself that the big search engines like Google and Bing would have things in place to filter this stuff out. I was right and I was wrong. I was right to fear that real time search would open up some bad stuff. I was wrong to think that the search engines would stop it.

Rae Hoffman, CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media, began playing with the new feature and discovered some alarming results.  Watch this video and you will see that this is a major issue.  The thing that scares me the most is when Rae touched on safety concerns for children online.  Please spread this video so it gets the attention of the search engines and hopefully they either remove the Twitter real time stream or they fix/filter the junk.

See my other posts about similar topics

• Are You Ready For Google Search Changes
• Google Search Sidebar
• Twitter is Important For SEO
• This is for all of those long-tail SEO skeptics
• Have you seen Google’s new search options?

With today’s announcement of the Google-Twitter search deal and the Bing- Twitter search deal, it is more evident than ever that Twitter should be an important part of your SEO strategy.  Why?

Well, if Twitter results are going to appear in Google and Bing search results, don’t you think it’s a good idea you get your important information on Twitter?  Google is going to pull in what people have tweeted on Twitter. For example, if you search for “online advertising” in Google, you may see some tweets in the Google search results that relate to this search, and possibly even some of this http://search.twitter.com/search?q=online+advertising integrated into the Google search results themselves.

It will be interesting to see how Google displays the tweets in their search results. Will they display them within their regular search or will it be a side option? I have concerns about spam issues. The spammers know how to hijack all the Twitter trending topics with their spam links. I hope Google has a good way to filter this stuff out.

So for all those who argued Twitter has no importance for SEO – think again.

Google+Twitter = important for SEO.
Bing+Twitter = important for SEO.

Welcome to “real time” search!

Twitter 101 is a site that contains documentation on how to best use Twitter. It appears to be mostly geared towards businesses, which is evident from the domain name http://business.twitter.com/.

What Twitter says they can do for businesses
“Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.”

It seems pretty obvious that Twitter is putting effort in positioning itself as a business tool and wants to appeal to businesses.  I think this is smart especially if they want to monetize their platform.  I foresee in the near future this business.twitter.com domain hosting other business apps or accounts.

We will have to wait and see what comes of this.  If they can offer some great business tools and come up with some good solutions for managing all the spam that comes through, I think many businesses will be interested.

If you are a business professional on Twitter you need to get a branded Twitter background.  Why?  When you follow people one of the first things most will do is view your profile before they follow you back.  If you have a nice looking, branded Twitter background you will appear more trustworthy and people will more likely follow you back.  Plus if done correctly you can add more information about yourself on your background and show other social networks you belong to.  Following are a couple of resources you can use to easily brand your Twitter profile for free.

TwitBacks.com allows you to create FREE branded Twitter backgrounds  in minutes

For those of you who are familiar with PowerPoint read this blog post on how to Create Twitter Backgrounds using PowerPoint.  It’s easy and a downloadable template is provided.

If you would prefer to use more advanced image programs such as PhotoShop to create Twitter backgrounds, you can read Twitter backgrounds guidelines from http://www.croncast.com/blog/1320/Twitter-background-guidelines-template-size.php.