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As with SEO, it's going to take some time to see the fruits of your labor with social media. Twitter is about having conversations with your customers, potential customers, etc. It's not necessarily about the number of followers you have, but about the level of engagement you have with those followers. It's not only the quality of content/information you're sending as EGOL mentions, but also the type of people you're interacting with.

Looking at your current Twitter stream, you engage with people quite a bit, but the topics are all over the place. You don't have to ONLY talk about men's clothing, but decide exactly who your audience is (men who buy nice clothes online, or maybe women looking to buy something for their man) and figure out what they talk about. Find a similar type of store as your own and look at their followers. Follow their followers (not necessarily all of them, but this is a good place to start) and see what they're talking about. Try not to just tweet about your site, but tweet interesting articles or facts as well. Again, make sure you take the time first to find out what your audience is interested in. If it's men's clothing, even better.

As an example, I have a friend who runs a plus size women's blog and she gained followers by finding the top bloggers in the niche and interacting with them. She also found plus size women's clothing stores and went through their followers and found women she was interested in talking to. After a few months of having conversations with these bloggers and other women she became a part of that community. Her twitter stream is also a personal account so she talks about anything and everything but she focuses on women's fashion and mainly plus size fashion. People who follow her know they're not going to get bombarded with spam and only showing her own blog posts. She's going to tweet great content she finds from across the web related to what many of her followers are also interested in.

If you can take this example and figure out how to get into the community where your prime audience is then you've found a great start.

Hope this helps!

I agree with Ryan for the most part. Here at SEOmoz we get so many comments for each post that if we moderated each comment, it would seriously kill the conversation. However we have a team of people who watch for spam, plus we do have moderation set up for people who have less than 25 Mozpoints and have a link in their comment. At that point one of the team members has to approve the comment, remove a spammy link or delete the comment all together.

In general I'm not a fan of moderating especially if the person moderating checks comments infrequently. Nothing bothers me more than leaving a well thought out comment on someone's blog post in reply to the post itself or another comment and it taking 2 days to finally show up on the site. I wouldn't bother commenting on that blog again.

There's a fine line between moderating and keeping the spam out and if you can find that you're golden.

As for Facebook comments, I haven't personally implemented them on any sites but many people who use them have really loved it. Ryan linked to my post on using them and it seems like a great marketing/virality tool for sure. Facebook gives you easy moderation as well and I think it cuts back on spam quite a bit because it has to be a real user logged into Facebook in order to comment.

Hope this helps!

Excellent! Have a great weekend.

Hi! Is the toolbar still not working? I'm wondering if perhaps this was happening when we were having issues with the website. Normally as Rich stated, uninstalling and reinstalling works, sorry that didn't work! Another thing is, you need to make sure and have 3rd party cookies enabled.

Hi Thomas,

I think this is a question that comes up often. One way to do it is to have both types on your page like we do on our blog. You'll notice the SEOmoz page "like" in the right nav bar, and the post "like" at the bottom of the post. If you're trying to figure out the best thing to do purely for SEO purposes, then I'd say you want them to like the actual URL of the content.

I say that because Google now shows social sharing in the SERPs. So if for example you're logged in and do a search, if you have a connected friend on FB who has shared content on that topic it would show their face in the SERPs.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ryan,

Unfortunately right now when you set up competitors you can only set it to a domain and not to a subfolder. The current URL you're trying to use for a competitor will cause errors because it's a subfolder of wikipedia.org. If you have any additional questions, feel free to email help@seomoz.org to contact the SEOmoz help team directly.

Jen

The ranking tool will show you any page on your domain that is ranking in the top 50 SERPs for that keyword. Hope that helps!

Jen

haha love it! And you're right we say that all the time. Often times when I'm dealing with a tough situation, I'll think "How would Rand respond?" and do that!

Thanks for posting this Jon, I really love this discussion. It's amazing to see people in the community wanting to be TAGFEE as well. When we first started talking about it internally I remember feeling a bit relieved. Each of the words and the overall meaning and feeling are so positive, I feel that it makes my job a bit easier. I always have these tenets top of mind and that means both at work and in life in general.

I've personally had a rough year with health issues and such and keeping TAGFEE in mind has helped to keep me focused and positive. I've also found that these also help me as a parent. I often find myself thinking "What's the TAGFEE way to respond to [this situation]". Now I'm not perfect and sometimes these principles can be hard to live by, but it gives me something to strive for and constantly want to be better.

Seeing the community wanting to implement these in their work/life as well makes me giddy! Thanks again for starting this thread.

Hey Thomas, I just wanted to jump in here on this side topic. I'd hardly say that YOUmoz is a lesser quality blog, in fact many of our top posts each month/year come from YOUmoz. We do our best to keep the posts that show up in YOUmoz, as good of quality as the ones you see on the main blog. Obviously not everyone will agree on this, but I wanted to add my 2 cents. Thanks!

Hola Cesar!

SI, existe una comunidad de marketers en Espana y en america latina pero creo que no hablan mucho en espanol en nuestro sitio porque todo esta en Ingles. Voy a enviar un tweet en espanol a ver si podemos conectar con algunos.

Gracias por la pregunta!

Jen

I don't think there's a difference whether it's a tweet or a retweet, what's more important is the number of times that link is shared and the "influence" of the people sharing the link. I wouldn't worry too much about whether it's specifically a straight up tweet or a retweet though. They both help from what we've seen!

Thanks for the interesting question and answers! I can tell you from experience that thinking and worrying about why someone decides to thumb something down will get you nowhere but with heartache. I've had so many comments and posts thumbed down that I couldn't imagine why people would thumb it down. I have one post that I like to call out, where it was just a fun afternoon post (on Rand's birthday back in 2009) and I got so many thumbs down it was crazy. I was fairly new to the company then and was a bit heartbroken.

Now, we do get "thumb spam" where people decide to thumb down every comment on a post. I can't say why they do it but they do. Usually we catch them and I will email them about it. Sometimes I get a response back that they're sorry but got upset over a comment, but usually I get no response. But they don't do it again either.

When it comes down to it, I'd recommend just not worrying about why others decide to thumb a comment or post down. I think some people do it without rhyme or reason. Maybe they don't like your name, maybe the title of the post turned them off, maybe they're just having a bad day. But the way I see it, if someone thumbs my post or comment down, it means I've struck a nerve. And I'm ok with that.

Sorry I don't have a better answer than "don't worry about it".

Hi Alexander! I just assigned this question to the Hekp team. One of them will be able to help you out soon!

Thanks!

Jen

We completely understand that and expect to have to do some formatting changes. To me if the only thing I have to do is minor formatting that's 100% ready. Agree about the editor though, it's being fixed as I type! It's super, super annoying.

This is exactly why I love my job. #thatisall

Sadly the edit button isn't working at the moment. I'll come back and edit when it's fixed.