There is a lot of debate, and mystery, around whether or how social media activity can benefit your business’ search engine optimization-SEO. Experts like author and radio host Beverly Macy, Social Media expert and Shama.TV host Shama Hyder and MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley all agree that trends are indicating social media activity is becoming more of a factor in your search ranking.
From time to time I will post tips you will hopefully find useful in leveraging social media platforms to potentially benefit you search engine rankings.
Here are a few Twitter tips. First start with your Twitter BIO – be sure it includes your keywords and your location. You should check settings to make sure location is set correctly to optimize local search. In your basic account information remember to set language and time zone too. Setting location gives tweets extra local signal. You can switch location on and off before each tweet. Twitter stores locations.
Knowing when the majority of your followers and potential customers are online will let you schedule your tweets for the best chance of tweets being shared or retweeted. There are now many tools to help with this including SocialBro – my favorite and it is free, Twitonomy- not sure of the cost. if in beta it is still free, Riffler- from the creators of My Top Tweet which is free. With SocialBro comes with analytics, best time to tweet, follow/unfollow tools, and community segmentation.
A tip from Dan Zarrella, an award-winning social media scientist at HubSpot, is to watch the FREQUENCY of your tweets. His research shows that the less frequently you post a link within an hour the more clicks you earn. His recommendation, “So slow down and pace yourself to a maximum of 3 tweets with a link per hour.”
Finally you really need to add a call-to-action whenever possible. And you should definitely NOT be afraid of using phrases like “spread,” “vist,” “please,” “please retweet” and “please share.” By the way it has been demonstrated that “please retweet” is MUCH MORE effective than either “please RT” or simply “RT.”
Happy tweeting everyone.
