This week you’ll learn how easy it is to expose who’s buying Twitter followers, see “how idiots measure success” when it comes to social media, learn how to cut through the noise to get your tweets heard, take a humorous look at how readers find your blog despite all your SEO efforts, and look at how fast technology is changing your life and why normal is begging to be messed with.
Making Footprints is a weekly mashup of people, tools, and resources that can help you enlarge your digital footprint through blogging, social media, branding strategies, and marketing online. Here are the footprints we discovered last week.
Buying Twitter Followers? by Amber Mac
Size matters, right? In the world of social media, one indicator of your popularity, reach, influence, audience, or whatever label you want to put on it, is the number of followers or likes you have. If you’re tempted to secretly buy your way to the top, beware. Amber tells you why it’s easier than ever to spot fake followers.
![Buying Twitter Followers and Facebook Likes, a Social Media #Fail [INFOGRAPHIC] | Big Feet Marketing](http://bigfeetmarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Sean-Clark-611x180.jpg "Buying Twitter Followers and Facebook Likes, a Social Media #Fail [INFOGRAPHIC]")
Buying Twitter Followers and Facebook Likes by Sean Clark
Sean looks at why we are obsessed with looking at the wrong numbers with headings like How Idiots Measure Success and I’ve Got More Friends Than You. He includes a great infographic that shows some surprising stats on who is buying followers. Hint: most are not people you’ve heard of before.
Improve the Signal to Noise Ratio on Twitter by Brian Solis
With 250 million tweets a day, how do your tweets cut through all of the noise to find your target audience? Brian gives us nine common sense ways to help prevent our message from getting lost in the noise of Twitter or any other social media network. His last point is a great reminder – especially in an election year.
28 Brilliant Bloggers Talk About Guest Posts by Allison Boyer
Any time you’re called brilliant it makes you want to brag a little, right? Well, When that Guest Post Isn’t so Original was included by Allison in this excellent guest posting resource guide. If you’re thinking about guest posting then check out this post. Also, don’t forget about 21 Resources for Writing Guest Posts that Kick Some Serious Butt.
Happy Search Engine-ing! by Jenny Simmons
This post from the personal blog of one of my favorite singers shows that no matter how hard you try to optimize your blog for your keywords and phrases, Google often sends people your way from the most unlikeliest search terms. Jenny takes a humorous look at some of the search terms that brought readers to her site.
Video of the Week
This week’s video features a commercial from Amazon.com. It just reminded me how fast technology changes the way we, and our customers, live. I love the ending, “And “normal” just begs to be messed with.”
Want to know what will be featured in next week’s issue of Making Footprints? You can find our current nominees in the footprints we’re buzzing about, or you can follow those we’ve already highlighted in Making Footprints on Twitter.
What did you discover making digital footprints through blogging, social media, branding strategies, or marketing online last week? Share it with us in the comments below, or as a comment to this post on our Facebook page.
