Blog

Posted by dani cass on March 25th, 2011

Browsing through Twitter a couple of days ago I noticed the following Tweet:

“Feeling v disillusioned with Twitter! Can anyone persuade me that it will actually help my business?!”

Now anyone that has spent more than two minutes on Twitter will know that it is not always the most intellectual of content; with everything from a page of Tweets from a cat standing on a keyboard to the insanity that is planetjedward! Although these pages may be amusing, you can’t help but to see why this business owner was feeling more than a little disillusioned.

Well, in response to the plea for someone to persuade them that Twitter will actually help their business, here are a few reasons why Twitter may actually be beneficial:

• Social networking sites attract millions of visitors on a daily basis, from all over the world.
• Having a Twitter account for your business allows you to expose your brand to a wider audience and to make your business more accessible to both new and existing customers.
• More people are looking to social networking sites for recommendations when they need to purchase a product. People regularly tweet for help to find services such as printers and hotels, these tweets are usually retweeted by lots of kind people who very quickly find someone that can help. A couple of days ago I saw one lady say that Twitter had pretty much arranged her whole wedding and that she would be tweeting throughout the day with updates for anyone that couldn’t attend the wedding!
• Each individual page on Twitter has its own SEO page rank, much the same as your website has. Pages with higher ranks give more authority to the website links they share.
• Google and Bing both confirmed that they receive a ‘firehose’ of Tweets with active ‘follow’ links, which do effect the search engine placements of regular websites.

And a few tips to build your Twitter following:

• Many businesses make the mistake of just following companies and people they know; although this is a great place to start it is unlikely to bring new business to your company. Following various ‘real’ people and interacting with them on a regular basis allows you to build new relationships. People buy from people, so building up relationships will increases the likelihood that when they require your product they will come to you first.
• Friday is a great time to find awesome people to follow. In the ‘search box’ to the right hand side, enter #ff or #followfriday and this will show a list of people recommending people they interact with that others should follow. These people are more likely to interact allowing you to build strong online relationships.
• Now for one of the less sensible but still important (in some cases) tips! Animal lovers on Twitter often recommend other animal lovers with tags like #meowmonday or #woofwednesday. Is your business animal friendly? Look them up!
• If someone shares something helpful or amusing, be it a tweet or link to a useful article – pass it on! Hover over the tweet and in the bottom right corner you will see retweet, click this to share with your followers.
• If someone follows you, visit their profile. Do they interact with others, post regularly, etc? If so, follow them back. Following your followers back encourages others to follow you.
• One thing to be wary of is that Twitter does have a lot of Spam ‘bots’, these are accounts that usually post automated tweets which will be of no value to you at all. The unfortunate thing is that bots are becoming more intelligent and it is often hard to tell them apart from the real people. One way to check is to Tweet them and thank them for following you & initiate a conversation, the chances are that a real person will respond and a bot won’t, this also allows you to interact with your new follower.
• A lot of people don’t like companies who are there just to sell and often class these people as spammers. By all means link to your website, share regular updates about what your business is doing but don’t make your business the only focus of your page. Talk to people about different subjects, share articles that interest you, tweet photo’s, write and share blogs, etc. Useful and funny tweets are often retweeted increasing your visibility, and people who interact with their Twitter friends are more likely to be added to their follow Friday lists which will also attract new followers.

Twitter can be beneficial to many businesses but social networking is similar to seo in that it is not an overnight thing (unless you are a celebrity or have an existing well known brand). Investing time into your social networking strategy should be an important part of your marketing plan – and the best part about this form of marketing? It’s free so you have absolutely nothing to lose!

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands