Social media is becoming a huge force in driving traffic to websites and creating more sales for all types of local businesses. If you aren’t using social media as part of your company SEO strategy, you are not getting the most out of what is possible with digital marketing. However, in this post we will focus mostly on one giant social platform in particular, Twitter.
If you doubt how powerful social media can be in driving traffic and it’s benefits, check out our previous post “Will Social Media Help With Your SEO?“. Now days when you watch TV and you see commercials for big brands (if you aren’t using a DVR and fast forwarding through the commercials like I do) at the end of a lot of these commercials you will see that you can follow them on social media. If it were a waste of time do you think these mega companies would be hiring staff to post to these different social platforms?
Just in case you are still on the fence about using social media, here is a post from Geektime.com that was written by Nadav Olmert and what he says about using social media:
Use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Medium, and Tumblr to start forums specific to your niche. With over 1.5 billion people using social media, there is a large amount of potential traffic that you can direct to your website. People will ask questions and start discussions about areas that are relevant to you. It’s important to support this by providing links back to your website and publishing information that your audience will find interesting.
Being active on social media also means finding other threads that apply to your area and following them. Another good idea would be to go through your old posts and make sure that they are all tagged with hashtags and the right meta tags that will link back to your blog.
Also, target competitors’ fan pages, interests, and likes: You can find out what motivates your competitors’ audience to like their page, you can see what their fans like and dislike about their content, and even how to respond to negative feedback by watching how your competitors respond. Customers who interact with companies through social media convert 25-45% more than others. This shows how much potential there is on social media, and by “stalking” your competitors, you can optimize this potential. Continue Reading “7 key ways to get quality traffic to your website“
Notice the second platform that he mentions is Twitter?! And check out those stats about how many more customers interact with companies through social media and their conversion rates. Even if you look at the low number, 25%, how much more revenue would that mean for your business if you had an influx of 25% more sales?
Twitter For Newbies
On to the importance of Twitter. If you have never used Twitter before or know what it is, basically you create what is known as tweets. These tweets have a character limit of 140 characters. That’s not a lot to work with, but carefully crafted tweets can still get your message across.
In case you have never used Twitter before, here is a good video that explains for newbies –
There is a lot of good information in that video for newbies, and highly suggest you watch the entire video if you are new to the platform.
Twitter has now also changed their character limit as not to include image links and tags to count toward it’s 140 character limit in tweets. For more on this change here is a snippet from LuxuryDaily.com with some helpful info as to how to structure your tweets:
With Twitter’s update allowing users to include more media and text in their posts, it is important that brands find a positive balance between over posting and contextual, relevant experiences. The expansion only counts for images currently, meaning links will still matter towards the character count, signifying there will be a jump in brands leveraging Twitter Cards to bring in traffic.
“Even with the changes, it is still important to ensure your tweets are informative, timely, useful and engaging,” said Carrie McIlveen, US director of marketing at Metia. “Also the use of hashtags and URLs will still be included in the 140-character limit.
“Brands will want to consider using Twitter Cards for URLs to provide additional character usage,” she said. “Also when tweeting, it is still important to not overuse or abuse hashtags in your message.
“You want to continue to consider positioning and relevance when using hashtags.” Continue Reading “What Twitter’s character count expansion means for marketers“
Notice that links are still counted towards your 140 character limit. If you have a long URL for your website it can take up a lot of characters, so consider using a URL shortner such as Goo.gl to help save on character usage. It’s a great “trick”, and don’t know why more people don’t use it. However you want to make sure that the URL shortner that you use is a true 301 redirect as not to loose “link juice” coming from twitter. More on 301 and 302 and other types of redirects in another post to come 🙂
Now you may have heard of a study that was just completed that reports 59% of content shared on twitter will never get clicked. Now you may be thinking, “then why bother?”. Well wait a second, sure 59% is a big number, but 41% is still a good number to be working with.
Danny Goodwin covered this study on SearchEngineJournal.com:
Their study looked at a month’s worth of visits to five popular news sites (BBC, Huffington Post, CNN, New York Times, and Fox News). The researchers discovered that 2.8 million shares on Twitter drove 9.6 million visits to 59,000 pages – and a poor correlation between social shares and views.
Essentially this means that having a large number of Twitter shares doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get tons of traffic. No surprise there – a lot of people share links without ever clicking.
Certain types of content, which the researchers called blockbuster content, generated 90 percent of clicks. This isn’t surprising, either. Certain pieces of content you publish will outperform all your others in terms of traffic – and those posts tend to get a lot of shares.
Another interesting finding is that posts that go viral usually aren’t shared by the publication, but by readers. Continue reading “59% Of Content Shared On Twitter Will Never Be Clicked“
Notice that the study was based on top news sites. In our opinion that really isn’t fair to assume that the same case can be made for ALL types of content and businesses shared on Twitter. With this information however, it is important to make sure that your tweets are informative and relative to get the most traffic to your site from them.
Twitter And SEO
On to our final point. Your twitter profile can be built up with Page authority to help boost your website. How? When you follow other people in your industry, create your own tweets and retweet other peoples content on your profile, as well as gaining more followers. Over time this will build the page authority of your profile.
Now when you create a tweet and give a link back to your site, this link is now more powerful and carries more weight with the search engines. In addition, when your tweet gets retweeted, WALLAH! More backlinks.
Now your SEO company may say, or you may have read that social media backlinks don’t count. Well we say “B.S.” And so do a lot of other SEO’s. Check out a little snippet from an article done by Eric Seal at Business2Community.com:
So yes—it’s likely that Google does rank social signals, but not directly. It’s far more likely that they look at backlinks posted on social, such as those embedded in tweets. Any credible backlinks would be marked by Google and then factored in when calculating a page’s rank. Read The Full Article Here…
Check that out – “such as those emedded in tweets”. Hate to say it, but – Told you so!
Final Thoughts
So there you have it. Twitter can drive direct traffic to your site leading to more sales or calls. Just how much, well the jury is still out on that one. Even if only 25% of your tweets get shared and clicked, we still think it’s a decent number worth going after. And if no one ever clicks on your links, but retweets your tweet – then you are getting more backlinks, and we know that backlinks are still a major ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Until next time 🙂