Optimize your Twitter profile for search

Twitter has become the leading social medium platform for searching for up-to-date information and building a more personable marketing presence online.  Increasingly people turn to Twitter over Google to search.  Gyutae Park has written a great article outlining “6 reasons why Twitter is the future for search”.

Before jumping into the many ways each Twitter update can be optimized for search, it’s important to emphasize where and how people search for on Twitter.

The where: if you go to http://search.twitter.com/ you will notice a simply-designed page featuring a prominent search box.  In this search box you can locate almost anything and find the most recent news and information provided by the Twitter audience.

The how: there are many different ways to search for Twitter updates (tweets) on http://search.twitter.com/.
You can simply enter a search query like new homes San Francisco – this query will provide you with search results that show what people are saying about the new homes in San Francisco.
If you wish to find a specific person on Twitter, you can do so by typing in the name of the person or company without any spaces.  For example, newhomefeed.
Say something is trending and you want to find out more about what people are talking about this particular topic.  You can search for this by adding a hash tag in front of your query.  For example, #Haiti.
Let’s say there is a person or company you want to know what people are saying to him, you can search for this by using an “@” in front of your query.  For example, @trulia.  Basically these tweets are like public messages sent to this person/company that everyone can see.

So, how do you ensure each 140 character status update on Twitter is optimized to the point where people will actually find it, read it and share this update with their friends?  Below are a few steps you can take before writing each tweet.

-Keyword research – just like in search engine optimization, keyword research is perhaps the most important aspect for optimizing your tweets for search.  The best thing you can do is find out what people are searching for and what they are interested in.  Once you pinpoint your audience and the top search queries on Twitter, you can write your tweet using two to three of these targeted keywords.  This will ensure you are visible to your audience on Twitter.  You can use Google Keyword Tool or Keyword Discovery Tool to find the right keywords for your tweets.

-Branding – if you are home builder and also offer financial services and products, it is important to set up two different Twitter profiles with unique Twitter logos, URLs, descriptions of your services and products and background images.  This will ensure that you cater to the specific audience and in general targeting will ensure higher click through and conversion rates.

-Relationships – building relationships with people and companies in the same industry is essential.  As soon as you have people communicating with you and pointing links to your Twitter profile, search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) will rank your Twitter profile higher on their search results pages.  This means that organically you will also gain traffic from search queries that match the keywords of your Twitter updates.  This is also another example why keyword research is so vital before writing any tweets.

-Content – writing tweets using keywords is only half the battle.  Content of each tweet needs to be unique and worth sharing and re-tweeting (re-posting your tweet on other Twitter profiles).  If the content of your tweet starts gaining a lot of re-tweets and mentions from Twitter users, you will eventually begin trending on Twitter and gain much more attention and traffic to your website.  Just remember to include a link to your website before posting a tweet worth mentioning.

A contest and a prize you are offering can be a great content worth mentioning and becoming something trendy on Twitter.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.