That social media are essential in online media campaigns has become a truism. But how do you combine your Twitter strategy with your search engine marketing campaign, and how do you generate enough followers for Twitter to make a difference?
Why should you use Twitter in your online marketing?
There are at least three answers to this question:
1. Given that tweeps (those that use Twitter) often refer to sites, posts and articles in their tweets, Twitter may generate traffic directly to your site. If these tweets are retweeted by other Twitter users, the traffic may become significant.
Note that many bloggers and journalists use Twitter to find stuff to write about. A link found in Twitter may lead them to your site. They may refer to it in their writing, generating a link that can be very valuable search engine optimization wise.
2. Search engines are using social traffic as one of the factors in their search engine algorithm. Links from Twitter to your pages may boost your rankings in the search engines.
To what extent Google make use of Twitter data is unclear, as Google no longer has access to Twitter raw data (which is one of the reasons they are trying so hard to promote Google+ as an alternative), but tweets may find their way into other sites that are indexable by Google (like Delicious, Posterous and Reddit), so this effect may still be important.
3. If you can build a standing as a useful and reliable source of information in Twitter, your are essentially strengthening your personal “brand” or the brand of your service or company.
If tweeps find your tweets being repeatedly retweeted by others, they will interpret that as a sign of your trustworthiness, which makes it much more likely that they will follow the link to your site.
The importance of building a Twitter following
We have seen online marketing “experts” that recommends that you put up a lot of twitter accounts and then send messages or tweets to a large number of people enticing them to go to your site.
This may work for affiliate scams and for the distribution of malware, but this tactic will ruin your reputation and any chance you have of being considered a serious and trustworthy provider of information, services or goods.
There is only one way to Twitter marketing success and that is the hard one.
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