Anyway – I’ve been talking quite a lot about Twitter recently and general social media.

I’ve said this before of course, but social media truly is great for both driving direct traffic to your website and for general search engine optimisation. Of course, different services meet different needs.

Take a look at some of the following social media related articles I’ve written recently.

Specifically, microblogging is fantastic for driving traffic to a website. The build up of following around a specific niche almost guarantees a visit from your followers, because they followed you, so they are very likely to be interested in what you have to say.

What have your experiences been using Twitter to drive traffic?

A complete success or slow progress so far? What problems have you faced when using Twitter or building up an online community following?

"Hi! I'm Google Buzz" - Screenshot of the Google Buzz welcoming screen

Like my pun? I know, I know. It is ingenius.

What is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is a new social networking venture from the almighty search engine. It is designed to integrate well with their webmail service Gmail. Google have dipped their toes in the social networking marketplace before with services like Orkut and Google Friend Connect. Orkut is a big hit in Brazil and India, but is not as large as many of the other social networking websites such as Twitter or Facebook. Google Friend Connect, on the other hand is a system designed for web developers to quickly and easily integrate Google-powered social elements into their websites via iframe’s, Javascript and AJAX.

From the point of large scale social networking, Google Buzz could really be a hit. It has a huge initial base of users, as all of Gmail’s existing consumer user base is automatically given Buzz as of a few days ago. Roll out of Google Buzz to consumers began on the 9th of February 2010 and has now finished being deployed for all standard public Gmail users.

Google Buzz for Google Apps?

You may be wondering if Google Apps users (Business, Schools, Enterprises or Personal) have the opportunity to use Google Buzz? Sadly not, it seems Google Buzz is not available for Google Apps users yet, but Google have promised this will be available within a few months times. The delay is apparently due to the additional complexities involved with restricted Buzz to an individual business or enterprise environment.

What about the Privacy Concerns?

There have been quite a few people heavily concerned about the privacy aspects of Google’s new social networking system. This focuses primarily across Google’s decision to make information about people users regularly contact public by default. This is done to ensure when you activate Google Buzz, you are immediately following your friends and family and they are following you. However, the people you are following is shared public. Twitter has been doing this since the start, allowing anyone to see who is following who. However, Google stores a lot more information about its users by default.

A lot of people are having doubts initially and there has been plenty of bad initial press related to the privacy of service. This is almost always the case and to be expected with all new social networking systems put online. However there are a few genuine horror stories, such as a story in which Google Buzz auto-followed a woman’s abusive ex. Is this a bad move by Google? What do you think?

How are you feeling? View the day’s global mood swings with this fun, social media, Twitter-powered tool. Click here to choose a feeling and begin.

‘How are you feeling?’ is a quick social overview of the feelings that are appearing in the microblogging community. It pulls down hourly updates of today’s microblogs (or ‘Tweets’) based on specific emotional keywords, and presents these microblogs in an appealing and ever so slightly artistic manner.

Clicking an individual microblog will take you directly to the specific Tweet and allow you to see the otherwise hidden author of that Tweet. Take a look at some of the screenshots below and then try out ‘How are you feeling?’ for yourself.

‘How are you feeling?’ is a social media tool/toy/experiment and dynamic web application, created by myself ever so quickly one lunchtime, using PHP running under the Apache web-server. I hope you enjoy playing with it.

This deal will mean tweets will appear from Twitter alongside normal Google and Bing search results. Without a doubt, this will make Twitter an even larger SEO tool than it already is. Constantly the microblogging service is bombarded with spam bots attempting to promote their services, which is certainly an issue when those the tweets those bots submit provide very little in the way of useful information or news.

With blogging slowly being seen as an activity which can be done professionally, this deal could potentially open the doorway to professional microbloggers, a promotional medium which has so far been the realm of mainly automated agents (or bots) and celebrity/government public relations agencies.

Regarding this deal, Microsoft have already make a move to set up a separate, standalone search page on Bing for microblogging results from Twitter. This is likely to be a preceding step towards integrating the tweets into the main Bing search results. Google will be doing the later from the start, when its microblogging service is rolled out “in the coming months”according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google in a recent blog post.

For both companies, this deal will mean the search engines will have direct syncronised access to the tweets almost as soon as they are posted on to Twitter’s microblogging site.