Danny Sullivan was one of the first SEOs. He is so well connected to the world of search that Google actually answers his questions about “the algorithm”! So when Danny makes a statement about Twitter and SEO I pay attention. His latest article about Twitter’s effect on SEO makes fascinating reading. I’ll summarize some of the highlights, but if you do SEO or are a Twitter consultant, be sure to read it for yourself.

• Google pays attention to the number of times a link is retweeted.
• Google computes and uses a ranking system for Twitter user authority to assign weight to links in tweets.
• Danny feels it is correct to think about users having a TwitterRank, just like websites have a PageRank.

I went to the OpenCoffee meetup in Cambridge the other day. They all recognized the importance of Twitter, but don’t understand how to make money from it. We are exactly where we were in 1996 with the World Wide Web when I helped start Andover.net. Great point in the cycle.

So here is my quick 5 point pitch on how clients can benefit from integrating Twitter into business and marketing models. But first keep in mind that you don’t make money “from Twitter”, you make money “with Twitter”. Meaning that Twitter is a lever for improving your other efforts, but you don’t get cash handed to you directly by Twitter users on Twitter. Anyway, here’s my list:

1. Putting keyword targeted tweets on pages in the right way is great for SEO. Google loves tweets. This will increase the page’s search rank, getting a lot more first time visitors.

2. Datamining of tweets lets you find the right people to follow in Twitter for your market. This can be used very effectively to build a big follower list. This list becomes profitable when you tweet messages with URLs you want people to click on. Think of it as free Adwords.

3. Follower lists are also essential if you want to make people do something in the real world, like contribute money, or go to an event. Twitter will be huge in 2012 election.

4. If you have a database of tweets, you can datamine it for sales leads. You can give sales people the Twitter accounts and home page URLs of people who tweet a lot about the products the salesperson is selling. The best part is that the salesperson can see exactly what prospects say about their products and competitors before contacting them.

5. You can also datamine a tweet database for sentiment trends. This is valuable for PR and customer service. It gives you a real-time read on how effective the rest of your communication program is.

One of the first things I work on with new clients is helping them to learn the vocabulary people use on Twitter. Clients who use the Web for marketing are very aware of the search terms that are most effective for ads and SEO, and they expect the same phrases to be used on Twitter. They need to learn that Twitter’s 140-character limit leads to a much more concise way of describing products and services.

Twitter users tend to create tags for commonly expressed ideas, so one of the first things I do after starting to aggregate tweets for the client’s keywords is produce a popular tag report that they can view online. When I add tweets to a database, I extract all the hash tags and save them in a separate table along with the id of the tweet where they were used. This lets me perform a SQL query like this to discover which tags are used most often in tweets with the tracked keywords:
SELECT count( * ) AS cnt, tag
FROM tag_tweets
GROUP BY tag
ORDER BY cnt DESC

As you’d expect, the tags distribute themselves in a long tail. For example, in one database I maintain that now has more than a million tweets there are over 33,000 unique tags recorded. The first hundred tags appear thousands of times. The next hundred appear only a few hundred times, and the vast majority of tags appear less than a dozen times out of 1,000,000 tweets. If you can identify the hundred most popular tags, you have have a much greater insight into how people actually converse on Twitter.

Twitter doesn’t produce data on usage of search.twitter.com, but it is safe to assume that when people search Twitter they look for the same tags they put into tweets. If a client can add the right tags to their tweets, they have a much greater chance of being found by people through Twitter search.

Since I also collect user data along with each tweet, I can extract the screen name of users who tweet most often with these popular tags as a way of creating a following list.

I just finished a tutorial on the proper way to use aggregated tweets for maximum SEO benefits, and I thought I should also write about the way to sell this benefit to clients. While most potential consulting clients recognize the effect Twitter has had on pop culture, they aren’t aware of how they could benefit from integrating Twitter into their website and their marketing program. If they don’t use Twitter themselves, their first objection will be that they don’t want to “waste time playing with Twitter.”

I find that SEO is a great entry point for new clients. If they have any website at all, they are aware of the general idea of Search Engine Optimization, or at least know that ranking high in Google results is an important goal. They may have used an SEO to optimize their pages, and add appropriate keywords. They may even have a blog to give their site a little more Google juice. Pitching Twitter consulting as a way of boosting their Google rank always seems to get their attention.

The first thing I ask a potential client to do is use search.twitter.com to look at tweets for their marketing keywords. Then I explain that by adding a similar stream of tweets to their own pages they will be giving Google lots of these keywords to read. This is much better than having an SEO stuff their pages with keyword spam, since tweets are written by humans and have a keyword density that Google recognizes as authentic. Even better, the stream is always updating, and new keywords appear automatically as they become important to that specific domain. For example, if a client has a sports site, a tweet stream tied to the name of a specific team will suddenly be filled with the name of an important player as soon as he becomes newsworthy. Google will recognize this and direct searches for that player’s name to the client’s page right away. No SEO has to be paid to rewrite the page constantly.

Another benefit of having the client look at tweets through Twitter’s search is that they will see how many curse words there are in a normal tweet stream, and they may also see tweets from their competitors. This gives me a chance to explain that while any programmer could just add the RSS feed for this search to their website, it takes a skilled Twitter consultant to filter out tweets for specific negative words, and to block any tweets from competitors’ accounts.  With the right programming they can have all the SEO benefits of a targeted tweet stream and none of the disadvantages.

One of the toughest challenges in doing Twitter API consulting is convincing clients that they do indeed have to use Twitter. At this point everyone knows about Twitter, and has a general idea of what it does, but I keep finding that clients expect to treat Twitter apps like a normal, brochure-style website. They think someone will build them a custom app or integrate Twitter functionality into their existing site, and then they can ignore it while it does its magic.

It just doesn’t work that way. Back in 2007 when social media marketing was reaching its initial peak, engagement with customers was the theme repeated over and over. That idea seems to have been lost with the mass market adoption of Twitter. Now businesses want to join in, but they don’t understand that Twitter is a retail environment, not wholesale. It isn’t a matter of just posting commercial tweets or following users in an automated manner. You need to treat people on Twitter as individuals. Even if it isn’t practical to actually engage with each user individually, the client needs to at least present the appearance of being a human who is interacting with other humans. This means reading and posting tweets by hand. Automation can play an important role, but unless the client actually uses Twitter they just won’t get it, and they won’t be able to get its benefits.

The big challenge is helping the client understand what Twitter communication is about. This is its own medium, with unique idioms and communication styles. The difficulty is that when a client tries to read tweets for the first time they are put off by the inanity and profanity that is so common. The general reaction is “How can anyone read this garbage?” They are right, there is a lot of garbage in the general Twitter stream.

What a consultant needs to do is make the valuable tweets stand out from the background noise. One of the first things I do when working with a new client is start aggregating tweets based on some appropriate keywords. After a week’s worth of tweets and user data are available in the database, I use various metrics of popularity to identify the key influencers in this particular space. Then I create a simple display page that only shows tweets from these influential users. This filters out the crap, and allows the client to see just how much valuable market intelligence there is on Twitter waiting to be acted on.

The other benefit of this initial set of aggregated tweets is that it allows the client to start learning the true vocabulary of their users on Twitter. Most clients are focused on keywords and phrases that are successful in SEO and Adwords marketing, but Twitter’s 140 character limit forces users to be much more concise and adopt different idioms from what they use to search Google. A common three or four word phrase used for searching may be condensed to a six letter hash tag. That is why I also do textual analysis of the tweet database to see which tags are used most frequently by people who tweet with the client’s keywords.

It generally takes a couple of weeks, but once clients start to grok the power of Twitter as a marketing and customer engagement tool, they can be much more active partners in any consulting project.