FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that allows you to consolidate updates from your social media activity. Beginning as a microblogging alternative to Twitter, it has evolved into an excellent tool improving your search exposure. It picks up your tweets and retweets, sharing them with the FriendFeed community and major search engines.
Here's an example of a Google search on "wilsonellis FriendFeed:"
Very few people know how Google decides what is worth indexing. Since I am not one of them, I have to test. I have noticed that original tweets show up in search from Twitter most often and retweets appear from FriendFeed. It's like getting a two for one deal when your retweet hits FriendFeed. Similar results are available for your Twitter stream if you are willing to invest five minutes to set it up. Here's how:
Go to FriendFeed.com. If you have an account log in. If not create one and then log in. Using the same username as Twitter provides brand consistency across platforms. Click "Settings" under your name.
A popup will appear. In the screen shot, my description is blank. Don't do as I did. Enter a good description so people will know what you do. When I tested it, the minimal amount of information was entered. I forgot to go back and fill in the blanks. Shame on me! Notice the "t" next to services. This indicates that I am streaming my Twitter feed. To add yours, click on the add/edit link.
In this screen, you can see that I have Twitter listed under "My Services". You can also see a good selection of other platforms that can be linked to FriendFeed. I haven't tested anything other than Twitter yet. Now that I've confirmed that it gives our blog some Google juice, I'll be adding others.
Click on "Twitter" and it'll open up a popup. Insert your user name. I left the @replies unchecked because I didn't want to import them. Some people are using FriendFeed for their conversations. Having the @replies without the complete conversation seemed out of sorts.
Click Import Twitter, give FriendFeed permission to access your account, and you're done. Occasionally there is an error message saying that the user name can't be found. Twitter is probably delivering the Fail Whale saying they are down when that happens.
You're done. All you have to do is to provide great tweets with good keywords and links. The tools will take care of the rest. SEO made easy. More traffic without more work.
One last thing, FriendFeed is a great aggregator, but don't rule it out as a networking platform. When I first tested it, the usability exceeded Twitter by light years. Long before Twitter had lists, FriendFeed allowed you to separate your community members by relationship. The problem was that most people were using Twitter and not migrating to FriendFeed. This changes when Twitter has massive Fail Whale outages and the conversation shifts to FriendFeed.
Even though Twitter is ruling microblogging these days, things may change. In 2009, Facebook bought FriendFeed. They haven't done much with it yet, but they've been rather busy growing their primary platform.
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