SEO Toolbox - Twitter Vs Blogging

I read an interesting article on WebProNews yesterday about how many people seem to think that blogging is dead now that Twitter has so many users.

I say ‘Twitter and Blogging compliment one another'. For example, you may be reading this from a link through Creare's Twitter, because you are a follower of us on Twitter. Or, you may be a regular visitor to this blog, but also follow our activity on Twitter. We regularly update Twitter, and will be adding some interesting and useful web design resources linked through our Twitter, to offer some useful tools to our web design followers. I am thinking this should be rolled out for SEO tools too - what do you think? Please comment so we can cater for our readership!
How Twitter and Blogging go hand in hand for SEO

There is another point I would like to make here, Blogging and Social Media usage are increasingly important for SEO. This is because they are about spreading the word about your products or services. These tools are there at your disposal, so use them.

You cannot say for certain without testing something that it won't work for you, in the same way that I can't tell you to go out and create a Twitter profile and that will be a magic SEO plaster to stick over the cracks in your existing campaign and instantly bring you page 1 success. It won't. But it will enhance your SEO, but even that won't happen overnight - these things take time.

SEO is all about waiting, and waiting and working at something until you are sick of the sight of whatever phrase it is you're working on. And then working on it again the next day, and then the next. It isn't easy, but neither is it particularly difficult. It is, however incredibly time consuming, but the rewards are ten-fold. A decent phrase on page 1 can make someone very rich.
How to use your blog

Blogging should be a tool for communicating your ideas to your customers and potential customers, and your wider online community. It's about informing them about how to use the products you sell, or services you provide. It should be a tool for educating people about whatever it is you do, whether you offer gifts such as Driving Experiences or sell Swimming Pool Supplies online.

I don't think blogging should be there purely for marketing. By this I mean the constant barrage of marketing garbage that some blogs seem to reel out as though people are interested. Blogs should be used to help your customers, to make their experience of your products better, to enrich. This is the only way that you will ever get repeat visitors. How many times have you visited a blog to only be disappointed by the content because it's full of marketese about why the company is the bees knees and best in the world etc etc. Or, as in the case with many SEO blogs, where they just repeat the same old content over and over - with some of them I feel like screaming ‘but I know how to write successful heading tags - I can read that in a gazillion other places online'. But enough of my frustrations…
How to use Twitter

Twitter should be used to listen to your customers as much as to tell them about what you do. If you get a complaint through Twitter, don't go with the knee-jerk reaction of trying to bury it, because that's the sure way of making the problem bigger. Try and fix whatever it is you did wrong, and apologise for it, publicly. Simply by doing that you can gain respect and standing within your online community - after-all everyone makes mistakes, and only by owning them can you fix them.