Recently reported by Bloomberg Business and other sources, Twitter and Google struck a deal to include users tweets in Google search results. So why is this important for your business and search engine optimization? Here’s my take on it and why now more than ever you NEED to be using Twitter for your business.
While the deal is mutually beneficial to both Twitter and Google, it would seem that business owners that can leverage the benefits of this deal may net the best results. In years past Twitter, from an SEO perspective was great for getting Google to index new URLs and content. That’s about it. I’ve never really seen any other benefits to using Twitter but, I still encourage businesses to use it to be sure their content was indexed as well as increasing brand awareness and authority.
Google’s Benefit
Google stands to drastically increase the amount of content that it can get it’s paws on. Not only that but, although Twitter’s content is limited to only 140 characters, Twitter generates a staggering number of tweets (i.e. content) every day. Try somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 million tweets per day! That’s a lot of new content to be able to present to your users. More importantly for Google, it’s a lot more data. If you haven’t figured it out by now, Google is driven by data and they monetize that data in form of advertising.
A New SEO Powerhouse?
So where is Twitter in all of this. How does this benefit them or more importantly, how can you leverage this new partnership? According to reports, Twitters main goal in this is to increase brand awareness and attract more users. Why do they need more users? More money of course. Twitter also has become an advertiser of sorts. More users means more revenue. So now that tweets will be shown in Google search what can we do to make the most of it? Here’s my take on some do’s and don’ts:
DO: Get on Twitter if you’re not already and if you are start using it!
DO: Post unique content on Twitter.
DO: Post frequently, 3-5 times a day is NOT too much.
DO: Include links in your Tweets like you should have already been doing.
DO: Post images in your Tweets, when it makes sense.
DON’T: Get off track and stop posting to Twitter.
DON’T: Think that there is little to no benefit to Twitter any longer.
DON’T: Forget to optimize your Twitter profile with hashtags and location information.
If my theory is right, and I’m not often wrong, then it is now of paramount importance that you get your social media presence updated and that you put a new plan of action in place for getting the most out of this new deal between Twitter and Google. Keep in mind that if Google will presenting tweets in search results, that means when you tweet and image or link, they will show up in Google Search as well. This means you will now have 3 places to have content posted and indexed by the largest search engine in the world.
Do you know what those 3 places are?
Post your thoughts in the comments below.