As a fellow web marketing professional — whether you’re a web copywriter, web designer, web developer, or a business owner interested in learning about the best way to market your business online — I’m sure you follow a plethora of like-minded people on Twitter.

You’ve probably also noticed a pattern in the kind of headlines that enter your feed, some at a more irritating frequency than others.   These headlines purposely target high pressure points, and get incessantly regurgitated as a result.

Here’s how to recognize these repeat offenders and why you’d be better off to spend your clicks elsewhere.

New Development Signals Death of SEO!

These headlines are worse than a crazy guy wearing a sandwich board in Times Square, babbling incoherently about the impending end of days.  Don’t we have better things to do than fall for this fear mongering?

Of course there will be changes to the way search engines operate, but this certainly doesn’t signify the end of search engine optimization, but rather, a constantly changing concept to which we must learn to adapt.  Just like planet Earth has gone through changes in its climate, species, and geography, so, too, will this ever-dynamic Internet universe.  Fear not, my cyber disciples! The end is not near!

23 Things You Should Never Say on Twitter

These headlines are annoying unless they’re done in a hilariously brilliant fashion (as seen on The Oatmeal). The accompanying articles usually express violent opposition to people broadcasting what they’re eating or what other inconsequential tasks they’re completing to their social networks.

But, these articles often disregard one important fact about social media — its popularity can be partially credited to the little perverted voyeur in all of us.  Sometimes we DO care what you’re eating because we want to compare it to what we’re eating, or get inspiration for tonight’s dinner, or we’re storing it in our minds for the next time we meet so we can start a conversation about it IRL (no, not creepy at all, right?).

Deep down we all want to believe that the CEO of our favourite company shares our guilty pleasure for Funyuns.  Plus, it’s good to have a mix of subject matter in your Twitter feed so you can demonstrate that you’re a real person, and not just a robot pumping out blatant sales pitches 140 characters at a time.

Obviously, you shouldn’t do things like bash your employer on Twitter, but do people really need to be reminded of this?  If so, they deserve to be fired.

Aside from wise tips like this — go ahead, be yourself online! After all, that’s how people connect through social media, right?

Finally, a Surefire Way to Calculate Your Social Media ROI!

People who write headlines like this are smart.  They know that the elusive social media ROI is a pressure point for a lot of business owners trying to decide whether they should venture into the social media world.  Unfortunately, so many of these articles fall short, resulting in their sweeping categorization in our minds as wolf-crying disappointments.

How can you quantify the value of building relationships with current and prospective customers?  We know this practice has value, but the exact value depends on how you cultivate these relationships and how well you can turn online networking into real world connections, and social media driven site traffic into sales.

Social media is about participating in conversations, listening and constantly being visible and accessible so you’re top of mind next time a new or old customer is in the market for a professional or business with your qualifications.  In that regard, determining a formula for calculating exactly how much money you will make per tweet is a tall order.

On the other hand, with Twitter’s recently announced official analytics tool, we might actually be a step closer to authentic measurement practices.

Get a Beta Invite for Hyper Hype Mail!

Everyone will eventually be able to use the new product, so why do people freak out about being the first ones to use the beta version, which is likely full of bugs?

Remember when Gmail was invite-only? How many people are using Gmail now?  In fact, what was commonly viewed as a highly successful marketing tactic, and thus copied by many others since, was actually credited to paranoid engineers who thought the system would crash if too many signed up for a Gmail account at once.

Wait until the product is actually good, and let the tech nerds clamour for beta invites.  You can get the play by play on their blogs as they curse the bugs until it’s properly adjusted for optimal use.

How Social Media Is Changing Business (or Life, or Shopping, or the World, or Butt Scratching)

These articles usually begin with some dramatic generalized statement, such as ‘The world as we know it is completely turned inside out, upside down, right side left, etc. etc. thanks to the all powerful phenomenon known as… drum roll — SOCIAL MEDIA!’

Sure, just like the telephone and television and the Internet, new, widely adopted ways of communicating do affect every aspect of our lives because communication IS life.  We do it every day.   But, really, it’s not social media that’s changing the world, rather the way we choose to use it.

Need Help Finding A Good Headline?

Here’s a list of proven social media headline formulas you can customize for your content.  Just make sure they don’t end up looking like the headlines described above, or the accompanying content you’ve worked so hard to create may get left behind.

– Opticon