How To Align Your Twitter Campaign With Your Keyword Strategy

Posted by Optify Team on May 26th, 2011

Twitter & SEO: What’s the connection?

After writing a new piece of content, marketers typically turn to social networks like Twitter and Facebook to share and propagate their message beyond the reach of just their website’s visitors. From there, great content can gain speed quickly, passing through the social sphere from your followers and fans, to their social networks, across popular social networking sites, email, blogs, discussion boards and so on. Beyond sharing and spreading content to just your immediate network, businesses can also optimize these Twitter campaigns to extend the reach of that content to Twitter users outside of their social network and even more far reaching, through search engines.

You’ve optimized your content for SEO, why optimize keywords within your Twitter campaign, too?

Twitter users are looking for information via Twitter Search, which crawls status updates and bios looking for relevant keywords to match user search queries. Make sure you’re extending your content’s reach across Twitter by optimizing for this real time tweet stream. Even more impactful, today’s search engines incorporate real time Twitter data in search results. In the case of Google, many of their “Realtime results” are a click away under their Google Realtime Search property, but at times, these social results are climbing higher and higher on the SERP. Getting as many social shares on your content as possible influences the search engines, too, but keywords are another indicator for the search engines of your content’s relevancy.

Below we’ve listed five recommendations marketers can leverage to align their Twitter campaigns with their keyword strategy.

5 Tips for Aligning Your Twitter Campaigns & Keyword Strategy

Avoid irrelevant messaging. Your social media marketing messaging should line up with your overall brand messaging. Even if you use an enticing message, if your content doesn’t match, people might click through on your tweet, but leave your site as soon as they realize your product/service isn’t what they were looking for. Just because you’re seeing traffic, a high bounce rate doesn’t denote quality traffic. Many marketers are tempted to use “marketing lingo,” but when you’re promoting content, try to stay away from using irrelevant or misleading language to describe that content.
Approach Twitter campaigns like on-page SEO. Optimize your tweets for a given piece of content with the same keyword phrase you’ve optimized that page for. Tip: If you’ve optimized the page correctly, your work is already done for you. Repurpose title tags and <H1> and <H2> tags. Just as you align your on-page SEO and internal linking with an overall keyword strategy, make sure your social sharing aligns as well. Use keywords that make sense for your brand and that you would actually want Twitterers to use in order to find you.
There’s such a thing as overkill. Don’t overload your tweet with repeated mentions of your keyword phrase. It’s important to include your target keyword, but to provide value and deliver your actual message, too.
Link, link, link. Be sure to leave bread crumbs leading back to your website–after all, a primary goal in syndicating your content across Twitter is to drive traffic back to your site. Make sure the link you provide next to this message leads users directly to that piece of content, rather than making them look around your site to find it. Think about Twitter in terms of user experience. If you saw your own tweet, clicked on it with a certain expectation, would your linked content fulfill that expectation?

140 characters is the cut off, not a requirement. Sure, Twitter gives you 140 characters worth of space to fill up with your marketing message, but you don’t have to use every character. In fact, try not to use up all these characters in your tweet. When users retweet and reply to your tweet, if they want to include their own message or the tweet is just too long when retweeted, they can easily drop part of your message. If your keyword is dropped from the tweet, an important aspect of your message is missing, despite social sharing of your content. Craft your message carefully, include your target keyword and leave room for a healthy number of characters (approx. 25-35) for users to share your tweet.