It is well known that Twitter is a great way to connect with millions of people worldwide, and there is no doubt that if you can master it, it can be an effective way to promote your brand and your company. Social media and SEO do go hand in hand in many ways although not in the conventional sense we would imagine when talking about SEO. If you choose to use Twitter as an online marketing tool you need to earn your respect and build trust. You will be the voice of your company. This is not easy as anyone who has been involved with a forum will know. Online “relationships” are more difficult to build than in real life and equally as hard to maintain.

The first and possibly the most difficult step is to build up a following for your company. This is going to be the tricky part. A good place to start is to make a list of suppliers, clients and retailers you offer your products and services to, if they are on Twitter follow them and it is likely they will reciprocate. If you use Facebook add a link to your Twitter page, equally add a link in your email signature, many people out of curiosity will click on the link and then it’s down to the profile being engaging enough for them to follow you.

Use your Twitter account as if you are a real person, make your Tweets interesting and if so inclined there is no harm in adding a touch of humour. Ensure your blog is linked up to aggregate your latest post, make the effort to engage with your followers and those who follow you, you never know who might be reading it. Try search.twitter.com to see if someone has mentioned your company name, if so acknowledge that, it will go a long way. Try and tweet once a day and re-tweet anything you find interesting, flattery goes as far online as in real life, knowing someone has read something you have written and found it interesting makes it all worthwhile!

Twitter is very similar to SEO in the sense that it takes time, but it is free and nothing worth having comes easy. Twitter won’t help your rankings improve but it can give you a greater presence, and therefore more traffic and more people visiting your site, these factors combined will go a little way towards helping your SEO.

A now removed Tweet by Digg founder Kevin Rose suggested Google were developing a social network to rival Facebook.

I can’t imagine it being too much of surprise to most people seeing how popular Facebook is and how much data they have access to.

Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable and social networking blogger for CNN, brought up some interesting points regarding Google’s possible entry into the social networking game.

Cashmore believes Google is growing envious of Facebook’s treasure trove of data it has collected (and continues to collect) from its users, especially since the ‘Likes’ feature was implemented into more than 50,000 websites. Meaning many users preferences are recorded allowing targeted and specific advertising.

As well as being envious Google is probably worried that Facebook could pose a threat to their own dominance/profit-margin.

The ‘Likes’ feature could form the foundations of a search engine, with ranking determined by the amount of ‘Likes’. It would only take a subtle change for Facebook to allow its users to search the Internet for relevant content from their profile or news page, more or less meaning people would be using Facebook for everything except shopping (which is bound to come).

Is there a demand for a Facebook rival? A little. Consumers like competition, it breeds choice, better service and cheaper prices and at the moment there is no real alternative to Facebook.

Within the next couple of years we will probably see Google jump into social networking and Facebook step up its SEO relevance. With Bing powering Facebook’s search engine it’s taken a small step but if the ‘Likes’ feature continues and maintains its popularity then we could be implementing ‘Likes’ onto all web sites.

P.S. The Internet changes so fast there’ll probably be some new form of communication this time next year; psychic or the use of robot avatars.

How the rise of Twitter could spell the end of the PageRank Algorithm

I watched an interesting video on Web Pro News, where Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz discussed the possibility that Twitter is ‘cannibalising’ traditional SEO practices such as Link Baiting. He expresses a very convincing argument.

More WebProNews Videos

Fishkin says that you can calculate PageRank from the twitter graph in the same way as you can on the web.

Why are links going to be less important?

Reading more of Fishkin over at SEOmoz I came across a supporting article from him where he elaborates on this subject. Read it here. Basically, he suggests that Blogging is more about building your own authority and is less popular than it once was, so those still blogging are doing it for themselves and not to share knowledge with their peers, and so rarely link out.

I can only surmise from this that:

a.) blogging for yourself becomes introspective to the level that it not only becomes dull and difficult to think of new things to say and,

b.) the popularity of blogging has decreased because linking out has proved to be unsuccessful for SEO purposes so people are less inclined to do it, and therefore have less to say. And,

c.) if linking to fun or interesting sources can be achieved much quicker on Twitter than on your own blog then this is what people will do.

Having said this I do think there is merit in linking out from your blog but only if you go to interesting and informative sources. It’s a way of connecting what you have to say with what your wider community has to say on the subject.

Why follow when you can lead?

Personally, I think that using blogs to talk about your own products, services, industry relevant topics and your own opinions is a better use of time than randomly re-publishing or re-writing other ‘more interesting’ posts written by other people. As well as this, I really think the place for a blog is to talk about your services in a way that cannot be done on a static brochure style website, as the nature of a blog is comfortable, friendly and much more personal.

The purpose of a corporate blog should not be to regurgitate the same tone and language as the static site would have, but to connect with your customers on a more personal and engaging level. Of course it’s still all about sales, it has to be because that’s the nature of the beast, but you can do it in a more creative and engaging way.

Fishkin goes on to say that this trend may well spell the end of backlinks as the main ranking factor. I can’t help think, that although this remains to be seen, it could liven things up, eh?

I read an interesting article on WebProNews yesterday about how many people seem to think that blogging is dead now that Twitter has so many users.

I say ‘Twitter and Blogging compliment one another’. For example, you may be reading this from a link through Creare’s Twitter, because you are a follower of us on Twitter. Or, you may be a regular visitor to this blog, but also follow our activity on Twitter. We regularly update Twitter, and will be adding some interesting and useful web design resources linked through our Twitter, to offer some useful tools to our web design followers. I am thinking this should be rolled out for SEO tools too - what do you think? Please comment so we can cater for our readership!

How Twitter and Blogging go hand in hand for SEO

There is another point I would like to make here, Blogging and Social Media usage are increasingly important for SEO. This is because they are about spreading the word about your products or services. These tools are there at your disposal, so use them.

You cannot say for certain without testing something that it won’t work for you, in the same way that I can’t tell you to go out and create a Twitter profile and that will be a magic SEO plaster to stick over the cracks in your existing campaign and instantly bring you page 1 success. It won’t. But it will enhance your SEO, but even that won’t happen overnight – these things take time.

SEO is all about waiting, and waiting and working at something until you are sick of the sight of whatever phrase it is you’re working on. And then working on it again the next day, and then the next. It isn’t easy, but neither is it particularly difficult. It is, however incredibly time consuming, but the rewards are ten-fold. A decent phrase on page 1 can make someone very rich.

How to use your blog

Blogging should be a tool for communicating your ideas to your customers and potential customers, and your wider online community. It’s about informing them about how to use the products you sell, or services you provide. It should be a tool for educating people about whatever it is you do, whether you offer gifts such as Driving Experiences or sell Swimming Pool Supplies online.

I don’t think blogging should be there purely for marketing. By this I mean the constant barrage of marketing garbage that some blogs seem to reel out as though people are interested. Blogs should be used to help your customers, to make their experience of your products better, to enrich. This is the only way that you will ever get repeat visitors. How many times have you visited a blog to only be disappointed by the content because it’s full of marketese about why the company is the bees knees and best in the world etc etc. Or, as in the case with many SEO blogs, where they just repeat the same old content over and over - with some of them I feel like screaming ‘but I know how to write successful heading tags – I can read that in a gazillion other places online’. But enough of my frustrations…

How to use Twitter

Twitter should be used to listen to your customers as much as to tell them about what you do. If you get a complaint through Twitter, don’t go with the knee-jerk reaction of trying to bury it, because that’s the sure way of making the problem bigger. Try and fix whatever it is you did wrong, and apologise for it, publicly. Simply by doing that you can gain respect and standing within your online community – after-all everyone makes mistakes, and only by owning them can you fix them.

To Conclude…

So, there you are, Twitter and Blogging should both be used, and Facebook, and any social media platforms dedicated to your industry. Use them to gain industry insights, or connect with your customers on a more personal level. But never use them to barrage people with useless information that nobody’s that interested in in the first place. That’s just a waste of time.

With the unveiling of Google’s Social Search on Monday along with the announcement last week that Bing has signed deals with Twitter it would appear that the world of search is moving into real-time. Even Yahoo has moved in on the action by joining forces with real-time search engine OneRiot.

What do these new features actually do though? Well Google’s Social Search allows you to find information from your friends and associates. Social Search aims to find information specific to the users’ interests, by including blog posts written by friends’ and information gathered from social networks. The idea behind it is to make the results even more relevant for the user. The Twitter / Bing deal is about sharing information between the two parties, or more specifically Bing using twitter as a database. Bing offers a real-time search of twitter updates through bing.com/twitter where you can use bing to search Twitter.

The big question is how will this affect SEO in the future?

Well unfortunately I left my crystal ball at home, but I can give an educated guess. I simply say social media is going to play a bigger and bigger role in SEO. This is good because social media is quite transparent at the moment.

We recently released ‘The SEO Song’ on YouTube and have successfully used Twitter, blogs, facebook and other social media networks to promote this example of pure musical genius. The interest in The SEO Song has been quite impressive (with 6000 views reached today), and we simply couldn’t have done this without Social Media.

My advice to anyone starting out in the SEO industry would be to get into Social Media. Today. Use it to it’s full potential, because over time that is where the trust will be, and everyone knows you can’t market anything without trust.