Social Media: Twitter Re-Emerges As SEO Must

As everyone tries to find ways integrate social media, Twitter is one again extremely relevant. The link between SEO power and Twitter is a complicated one that spans many years, and it figures to be a major aspect of internet marketing going forward. It’s no secret anymore that social media has a major impact on a site’s rankings, and it has begun eclipsing many traditional methods of internet marketing in its capacity. In fact, seven of the 10 most important factors in ranking sites concerns social media, so any business that ignores it does so at its own peril.

However, since 2011, Google has treated tweets haphazardly, mostly because Google was no longer allowed access to the social media giant’s firehose data. In other words, Google couldn’t index tweets right away based on their relevance and content. Instead, they had to be crawled like any other site, and that takes a great deal of time. It was also a bit scattershot when it came to highlighting the most important social media entries. Even internet marketing experts were having trouble pinpointing what the strongest correlations were between SEO effectiveness and Twitter, which made many business owners feel like they were spinning their wheels with their social media usage. However, the paradigm is shifting.

What is the current school of thought regarding SEO and Twitter?

Early in 2015, the social media juggernaut reached a deal with Google that has major implications for internet marketing firms and their clients. In the middle of 2015, Google will be granted access to the site’s firehose data stream again, allowing for instant indexing of relevant tweets as they hit the internet. Now, Google doesn’t have to wade through mountains of memes, cat photos, and internet fights that take 300 tweets to resolve. Instead, the search engine king can cut through all of that and get to the meat of the site, and that means highlighting the kind of tweets that are content heavy and relevant to people searching for certain items.

But what does that mean exactly? It’s been known for some time that Google considers a handful of items when determining what tweets to rank. Here are some of the most important concepts to keep in mind if strengthening a site’s social media presence is the goal:

• Develop the company’s profile on Twitter in every way possible. Use engaging photos, accurate contact information, and drop tweets as often as possible.
• Google prefers tweets that make use of interesting photos, but only if they are used in moderation. If every tweet a user puts out contains a photo, Google will not react to it with consistent interest.
• Hashtags are an underrated method for driving engagement and should be included in as many tweets as possible, as long as they make sense.
• Links are fine, but they don’t correlate strongly with user engagement, so only drop them when appropriate.
• The more followers a business has, the greater the likelihood that they will receive priority by Google, so consult with an internet marketing firm on how to drive follower numbers up.

The best advice, though, is to just use the site creatively and often. The goal is to interest users, and that’s best achieved through nice photos, clever entries, and active engagement. An internet marketing firm can provide support with this and make a company’s social media presence as robust as possible