Twitter Search Optimization (TSO)

(Last Updated On: March 21, 2009)

Are you trying to build a Twitter community following?

Twitter is an excellent place to discover content, content providers, and to be discovered. Twitter truly is micro-blogging and the rules are the same.

Good content attracts followers.

When people search for new community members to follow, they often look for common areas of interest.  Photographers will look through the logs of people they trust.  They will search the tweets and the public display of the content providers the photographer follows, just like a blogroll.

Like standard blogs, micro-blog posts are found through searching. Searching depends on key words.

Optimizing your tweets will help people find you.  Tweets with “Yeah, I agree” and “Me too” are not helpful.  Only about 1 percent to 2 percent of the people who follow you actually see your tweets — unless they are very loyal followers. Few followers are that loyal.

With so few of your followers viewing each tweet, it’s important to make every one count.  Rather than “Yeah, I agree” a better response would be: “Yeah, I agree. Nikon has very sharp lenses.”  The more detail the better.

The more common key words you can use the better.  In the example above, Nikon is the obvious key word. But, other key words such as photography, photo, photographer, camera and picture, to name a few,  are also very useful for the photographer.

Another method searchers use to find information of interest is the hashtag.  A hashtag is a tagging method used to by tweeters to signal or tag an area of interest to other tweeters.  A hashtag is easily created by placing a “#” in front of the key word.

Hashtags may represent topics, themes, groups or events. If your tweets are about camera equipment, then  #camera would be valuable. If you want to follow the chatter at the recent South by Southwest conference all you would do is place #sxsw in twitter search.

I added about 15 followers in 20 minutes just by participating with thoughts and comments within a #sxsw presentation for artists.

The more interesting, funny or valuable your tweets are, the more likely your tweets will be RT (retweeted).  Retweets are extremely valuable.  They will introduce your content to a new set of followers.  You could gain followers in large numbers if a major figure in the Twitter community retweets your content.

Givers gain is always a good rule to follow.  If you retweet content, others are more likely to retweet your quality content.  Of course there is nothing wrong with asking for the sale.  You may ask followers to retweet your content, but don’t abuse the request and make sure it’s your best.

The bottom line is great content offers great rewards and quality optimization increases the odds your valuable content will be found.

Rosh