The first thing to remember when you start a Twitter campaign – or any kind of social media campaign – for your brand is that no-one likes people who talk about themselves. Unless that person is Stephen
Fry. And you’re not.
So don’t constantly Tweet about your website, or about your brand. Sure if you have something to say, then go ahead and say it – but don’t endlessly, pointlessly, Tweet away with things your brand is “doing” just to keep banging your keywords out across the Twitterverse.
Lots and lots of big name brands fall into this trap. They can afford to get away with it, for now, because their name is already a household commodity. If yours isn’t, you can’t. Afford to Tweet like they do, I mean.
Keep your Tweets interesting, valuable and pertinent. Ask questions. Answer them. Put up interesting conundrums. Give advice or respond to follower comments. Set up a Twitter account for interacting directly with disgruntled customers. Do anything, in other words, other than going on and on about your own products and services.
Pay attention to some simple optimization nuts and bolts when you set up your Twitter account in the first place. Make sure your user name is relevant to the industry – it will appear as part of your Twitter page’s URL, so if you use industry appropriate terms that URL can start popping up in searches containing the same words.
Also be sure your account name has a relevance to the industry. The account name is incorporated into the URL for your Twitter page as well, which means you have a second potential avenue there for gathering followers as a result of industry related searches.
A Titter biography becomes the meta description text for the UTRL you inhabit. So optimise it very carefully. Try to put your major keywords in there in a way that makes good grammatical sense with the rest of it. And be sure to mention the industry you are connected with.
Obviously when you Tweet for SEO purposes, you’re Tweeting and trying to include keywords. Try to keep your keyword count per Tweet very low (to one, if you can) and try to put the keyword at the start of the Tweet. The title tag generated for the Tweet includes your account username (so if there’s a keyword in there, that’s great) and the first 30 characters of the Tweet itself. If you can get the keyword into those first 30 characters, you have a double-optimized title tag to work with.
When your Twitter activity is properly optimised, people interested in industry relevant topics will find you. So it’s at this point that the content of your Tweets becomes a deal-maker or a deal-breaker for you. If you’re delivering genuinely useful industry relevant Tweets, you’ll score new followers all the time.
If they’re just the same old Twitter about nothing, with a few keywords scattered throughout, you can expect your follower count to remain very low indeed.
