A Good Tweet Can Help Your Inbound Marketing Effort

My first thought for a title to today’s blog was “How to be a Good Tweeter and not a Twit!” But, I thought it might be a bit over the top and then I noticed it was missing keywords that are important for inbound marketing success.

Still, it would have been fun! I once worked with a columnist who said if you can’t occasionally make them spit the coffee all over the paper, you aren’t doing it right!

That initial headline came to me earlier this week while I was sitting in on what is now reported to be the world’s largest Webinar “The Science of Social Media,” hosted by our partner HubSpot. There was a lot of interesting statistical information presented about how ideas spread and the nature of content creation when using social media as a marketing tool.

The bottom line: it’s not just enough to be engaged in the conversation. You need to create and publish interesting content to the widest possible audience in a manner that garners attention and motivates the receiver to take action and share it.

Whew! That’s a lot, isn’t it. The concept does break down pretty easily though.

In a nutshell:

• A person has to be exposed to your content. This is why it is important to build up followers, whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, your blog or LinkedIn.
• The content must grab their attention. This can be a function of when you send it as well as the nature of the content.
• The receiver must be motivated by something in the content to take action. Ideally, you want them to share it, which spreads your idea and increases your inbound links – and that’s what we are all after.

Interesting tidbit – the funnel for content action looks a lot like the funnel for Inbound Marketing. I don’t think that is a coincidence.

What all of this means is that while telling folks about where you are going and what the chore of the minute is may engage you in the social conversation, it’s not going to compel your followers to take any action. Your want them to take an action and share your content.

Links to interesting content, on the other hand, are much more effective, according to the data presented by Dan Zarella of HubSpot.

The best demonstration of this was the statistics for Twitter – a surprise since you get 140 or fewer characters – that showed the more followers a Twitter profile has, the less conversational the content. Instead, the content from those profiles is link driven. They are sending out content they think their followers would be interested in and take action on.

While the Twitter statistics painted the clearest picture of this, similar correlations could be found across all social media platforms.

Driving this is likely what a link presents: A link is a potential solution the sender believes will satisfy a want or need of some kind. Maybe its just interest, maybe it’s a solution to a problem or a desired service.

Whichever on it is, it’s becoming more clear that purposeful content such a links to particular information are more likely to be acted on and shared by your followers in their own networks. The more that content spreads, the greater the number of inbound links out there to the content on your site.

Yes, it’s good for prospects. It’s also good for the search engine crawlers that will reference those links when scanning your site. That, in turn, is an important factor to improving your results on search engine return pages.

Voilà! Good content leads to more inbound links which in turn improves your site ranking creates more opportunities for prospects to find you.

A good tweet can indeed be music to your ears!