As a digital marketer, you use a variety of tools to drive your marketing initiatives across the Internet. Twitter is probably in the mix too (and, if it isn’t, see this Twitter marketing entry on how to set one up). The fun part of Internet marketing is connecting every piece of your online marketing mix together using the unique features of the different online marketing techniques like SEO, SEM, Email, Social Networks and more. Let’s talk about how you can use SEO to optimize your tweets on Twitter and at the same time, use the tool for maximum marketing impact.
1. Select an optimal handle : Using the same technique that you utilize to choose a url for a website (with the most relevant keyword in it), ensure that you choose a handle that’s relevant to your brand or campaign and easy to remember. Do your keyword research to gauge your brand’s (or the keywords related to your brand) popularity. Your handle or your username is then your customized Twitter URL such as twitter.com/yoursite or twitter.com/yourkeyword. This creates a strong static address for future search indexing and is is also strategically relevant when you se the same for online cross-channel marketing.
2. Fill out your profile : Optimize your Twitter page’s “Bio” line so it includes the most important, keyword-rich words to describe your brand’s attributes or benefits. Take advantage of all 160 characters to describe your brand. The search engines index the contents of your profile so ensure that its completed.
3. Add your URL : In the account settings, add your website’s URL to drive traffic back to your website. Bear in mind that any inbound links to your website from Twitter do not boost your search rankings since Twitter has a “Nofollow” attribute in place.
4. Tweet cleverly : Here’s the good news about the search engines. They will index your entire tweet so make sure you use it to your advantage. Ensure that the beginning of your tweet has the strongest keywords possible. It’s 140 characters so make sure that your message is succinct, clever, enticing and relevant. Now, you cant do this with every tweet as Twitter’s about conversations and if you promote your brand incessantly, you’ll lose some followers and even worse, get negative buzz on Twitter. So, tweet sensibly.
5. Allow for retweet possibilities : This means that you should make sure your tweet’s character limits allow for optimal “retweetability.” Keep your message under 120 characters, if possible, so that your followers can easily add RT @YourName in front of the tweet without having to truncate the end of your message.
6. Use a linking strategy : Use outbound links from Twitter to your website to redirect users back to your content. Twitter does drive traffic and bloggers and other website owners have used this to the fullest extent. To share links, use a URL shortener like TinyURL . There’s also Bit.ly which also provides real time tracking of who’s visited your website through the shortened link. This is a neat tool and bit.ly, a small startup who usurped TinyURL from the No.1 position is is now the defacto URL shortener tool for Twitter.
7. Market your brand online : Now that you’re part of the Twitter social network, work on ways to build the online reputation of your Twitter account. Start with your website; Make sure that you have a call-to-action button on your website asking your customers and visitors to follow you on Twitter. Ensure that you have a list of social networks where folks can connect with you (Facebook, del.ic.io.us, LinkedIn are some other icons that you can add). Ensure that this list is present on all the pages of your website. This presents an option to your website’s visitors to become followers of your Twitter feeds and help drive your Twitter URL up in the search engines.
8. Manage your tweets strategically : For this, use some of the Twitter tools that have proliferated the landscape. Start with TweetDeck. It has a powerful dashboard that allows you to view your tweets as well as capture any tweets that mention your brand. Or you can use Twhirl, which allows you to monitor multiple twitter accounts. There’s also PeopleBrowsr, a web based twitter amnagement tool (which differs from the desktop based TweetDeck and Twhirl) which has multi-stack views, reporting functions and a feature-rich dashboard.
