Twitter and Business Use

What is Twitter?

According to their own site, Twitter is: a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices. In practice you can post a short message or piece of text "from breaking world news to updates from friend". Your friends or "followers" can see all your updates. Twitter asks one question, "What are you doing?" Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web. For example, "50% off t-shirts at print factory" or "launch event for campaign at Sketch London".

Who uses Twitter?

There appear to be a number of different users of twitter, but broadly can be divided into individuals and business driven users. One of the reasons some businesses don't continue with Twitter is the time it takes to keep tweeting. There is also a question on the number of actual active users on the site as recent research suggests:

• 80% failed to provide a homepage URL

• 76% of users have not entered a bio in their profile

• 69% have not specified a location

• 55% are not following anyone

• 55% have never tweeted

• 53% have no followers"

Readwriteweb - new Sysomos report: "According to a new report from Sysomos, the up-and-coming social media monitoring and analytics service, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots. Some of these are obviously spambots, though a large number of bots are also run by legitimate organizations, including @diggupdates, @imdb, and @dogbook, which posts updates from pets on Facebook to Twitter.." "Sysomos's Alex Cheng and Mark Evans decided to take a closer look at the top 5% of Twitter's most active users, and the results of their study are quite interesting. Most of them (60.6%) live in the United States, 6.9% in the U.K., 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada. 54% are male and 46% are female (on Twitter overall, 46% of all users are male and 53% female)." "Active users with more than 1000 followers tend to have "Internet marketer", "Internet marketing", "business marketing" and "entrepreneur" as keywords in their profiles." The leading keywords for those with less than 1000 followers are "Web designer", "graphic designer", "love", and "Web developer".

Selective SEO

Is Twitter not as effective as we are led to believe then? Possibly for certain sectors it is not as effective and well used.

Important things to consider are:

A selective strategy from search engines

Media generated social content, for example from music, entertainment, interest groups, causes, popular culture may look interesting and current, however people tweeting about business deals may look more like spam sponsored ads. As with blogs (I hope not mine) there is 80% of drivel and 20% of interesting content in twitter. Therefore, selective strategy in terms of display from the search engines (which they are doing) is necessary to maintain value of content. Businesses should aim to make their content interesting and use some of the list categories to align their content with. If your business is already in the social media, music, entertainment, interest groups, causes, popular culture sphere then you have a distinct advantage in using Twitter.

For example, social enterprises can build a community who have special interest in their ethics or cause, a band can start to build a following via their website/blog/facebook/mySpace and Twitter.

Some SEO benefit

Certainly Google and Bing displaying tweets will encourage increased diversity in search engines and as an extra layer of aggregated data I find it pretty cool. This will make it interesting for us SEO people to understand how this can be used to build quality traffic.

Resourcing and cross posting for social media

With a broad brush we can suggest that most current tweeters are American targeted bots run by a load of techies. It is clear that bot generated content is an effective way to deliver content; or at least we should maximise efficiency and cross posting rss news across the social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, blog) For certain popular culture/music/entertainment tweets there is a necessity to get a load of tweets going effectively, and push links through twitter into Google and Bing.

What next then?

Twitter probably can't be ignored for too long as another part of a diversified linking strategy, unless it doesn't catch on in the mainstream outside America. Whethe

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