Everyone says that doing social media is good for your site traffic, SEO, and analytics. Get a Facebook, a Twitter, and a Blog. That is the secret. But, many people mishandle their Twitter accounts leading to less than desirable results.
Some people think you need a huge Twitter account to make a difference. Huge helps if those millions of followers are engaging you. However, you can do a lot of damage with a brand new account. Here is the secret.
Google has a relationship with Twitter. I’m not sure what the relationship is, but uncle Google is watching what goes on in everyone’s Twitter accounts. The site that is linked to your Twitter account is the site that will benefit from your activity on Twitter. But, what type of activity seems to do the trick?
Proper Twitter behavior that gets rewarded by Google.
(1) Find relevant people to follow
Just finding relevant people to follow, hopefully having them follow you back, and saying, “Thanks for following” can make a huge difference to your web stats. Some people over do it, and I don’t know what your results for overdoing things will be like. But, if you follow ten or twenty people per day, thank them for following, and nothing else, you will see a spike in your web traffic. There is a delayed reaction of about three weeks in your Twitter behavior and your Google results, so expect a 20 day delay in your reward. This procedure I recommended is a no-brainer, is easy, and you need no skill or experience to do this.
(2) Getting retweeted and clicked on.
If you have a blog, and your tweets about your blog entries are well written, you will get retweeted and clicked on which will bring a lot more traffic to your site and blog.
(3) Interacting — this is the best one
Interacting on Twitter is actually in my opinion harder, but more rewarding than the other things you can do. Most people interact in a very stupid way on Twitter. Google understands this. Many people will respond to a tweet by saying, “RT” and basically publish the tweet under their own account name which is not a horrible thing to do, but not creative. When I do this, I rewrite several variations of the title and use different tags to see if I can get a good result. Many people right dumb comments to other peoples tweets. This is not appreciated by anyone. But, what if you can write really interesting or funny commentary on other people’s tweets? Do you know what will happen? You will get favorited, retweeted, followed, and more. Google gives you some reward just for commenting on someone else’s post. But, you will get a much bigger optimization reward if the other person answers you back. It is hard to get people to answer back, and it is hard to write commentary good enough to be answered back. So, master this skill, and you might see your site stats go through the roof!
Other types of behavior that might not get rewarded.
(1) If you favorite every tweet that you like, it can get out of hand.
If you have 1000 favorites, then none of them are your favorites. Try to use Twitter’s tools the way they were meant to be used. Favorite only stuff you really want to see again. You don’t want your favorites feed pumped up with junk.
(2) Auto follow and auto unfollow
Having a machine get you followers is a great way to get quantity, and having that machine unfollow people who wouldn’t follow you back is a great way to get rid of people. But, you won’t get much if any rewards from the mere accumulation of followers. Google is more interested in seeing how many clicks, interactions and retweets you get, and not in how many dormant followers you get. However, if you get a million followers using these tools, chances are that you will get a fair amount of clicks as a result which is good!
(3) PPC for interactions and new followers
I used PPC for interactions and got very poor quality interactions. People would click on my links and then visit my pages for an average of six seconds. I want people who will read for at least two minute and visit at least two pages. Organic clicks from Twitter are actually some of the highest quality clicks I get in terms of number of pages they visit. However, the PPC was a disaster. You can’t cheat the game by paying. So, win the game with skill, instead of by throwing your money down the drain.