Twitter is quickly becoming one of the most important social media tools, and as it grows, it can be used more and more for social media marketing and SEO. And London seems to be Twitters capital city, having one of the highest populations of Twitter users in the world. As part of our online marketing work for our travel clients, I have started to used Twitter on behalf of our clients, and I’m finding that it’s an incredibly useful method of driving traffic to websites. And I’m starting to realise that it can be a powerful tool in my SEO strategy too. The more people that see your tweets and find them interesting, the higher number of people will independently link to a page you’re promoting in that tweet – an excellent way to get better rankings for our clients.

The biggest challenge to Twitter users is to get their tweets to spread (ie be retweeted). I’ve been playing around with my tweets lately, to see which tweets are the most successful. The first thing I’ve noticed is the style of my tweets. If my tweets are direct and straight to the point, they tend to be retweeted. But sometimes, it’s also good to make tweets a little more mysterious as it generates curiosity (for example, ‘I can’t believe this! ). The number of clicks on mysterious URLs is also high. Of course, the page you ultimately click through to also needs to be interesting if you want it to spread.

To get retweeted, your tweets also need to be short. The character limit for tweets is 140, and when you retweet someone, you also need to include the code ‘RT @Twittername’. So it’s always safer to make sure your tweets don’t exceed about 100 characters, so that they are retweetable. Shorter tweets are also punchier, so they’re more likely to spread.

I’ve also noticed that tweets which include URLs tend to be retweeted more often. And even better are tweets that include URLs linking to images. The psychology behind this is pretty simple: people are more likely to click through to an image because they know they won’t need to spend much time on it, and because it immediately tells them what it’s about. It’s also useful the include [img] at the start of your tweet, so that people immediately know that the URL will take them to an image.

And, of course, the content of the tweet and the URL must be interesting. I’ve noticed that news-related tweets tend to be more popular, and receive higher numbers of retweets and click through rates. Humour is also likely to be successful in tweet spreading. In fact, comedians use twitter to test how funny their jokes are. Those that spread and get retweeted are obviously the most humorous.

Essentially, if you want to use twitter as part of your SEO strategy, you want to spread your tweets as widely as possible. This will give you greater exposure on Google, and if your tweets are interesting, people will independently start linking to you too.