It’s a great example of how not to do things using Twitter. That should be self-evident. Habitat have said that the use of these hashtags was not authorised, but did not say who had used them (Source: BBC News). They have since apologised for the mess up, but it seems the damage has already been done.

But it looks like people are jumping on the bandwagon and following suit.

Habitat Fail, others follow suit

See this very recent example of promoting products and services by using the conversations around the release of the Transformers 2 movie. There are many more like these on Twitter right now.

As with everything online, people will find a way to abuse the system for their own gain. Facebook went through the same, when they started letting third parties develop applications. People’s profiles were awash with invitations to “bite people as vampires”. Not today thanks, I’ve just had lunch!

So, we face a barrage of spam on Twitter against popular subjects. This erodes the credibility of Twitter and the people that tweet genuinely.

Let’s hope that Twitter do something to stop this, ASAP.

Searching on twitter is more passive and recreational than using a search engine. People will be interested in conversations rather than actively seeking a piece of information. Thinking carefully about how you write your tweets and using the correct words and tone will help to promote your business.

Optimising your tweets

All the major twitter platforms, including the web interface, have a search facility. This enables users to search for a particular phrase that interests them and see who is tweeting about that topic. They can then follow this person’s tweets.

To start growing your online audience, consider doing the following:

Keyword rich tweets – you have 140 characters, use them wisely. Think about your audience and the keywords they might use to find your product or service. Use your existing research to help you. Search campaigns, other social media, web logs are all good places to start.

Search for your own terms - find out what people using those keywords are saying. Think of it as a little competitor analysis. Do you fit in? If not then try some similar searches.

Make it natural - you should not stuff your tweets full of keywords, it should still read well.

Use hashtags to incorporate keywords – you can use these in your tweets to include keywords which do not fit in naturally. Simple place a # in front of your keyword and remove all the spaces; now you have a hashtag. Your tweet will show up against those searches.

• For example: #seo #search #searchengines
• Be aware that you will need to include plurals and that Twitter cannot differentiate between two words in a hashtag. So #mobilephones will be picked up on searches for “mobilephones” and “mobile” but not “mobile phones”.

Use URL shorteners -  this will free up space and allow for more keywords. If your URLs are already keyword rich, you may want to use the full URL. If not, use a service like bit.yl and then add parameters to the URL rich in keywords. This is a great way to get keywords in without ruining the flow of your tweet.

• For example: http://bit.ly/1a0ULG?topic=seo will work and help increase the keywords. The parameter is the bit from the “?”. Format them “?topic=keyword”

Shorten, shorten, shorten – your text. Strip out unnecessary words, use ampersand (&) instead of “and” etc., use numbers (22) instead of numbers (twenty two). Think like you’re writing a text message.

Find a suitable time - broadcast when your audience is most likely to be search/watching. Try different times and watch the response rate. This might be when people are on their lunch break or on a Friday afternoon. Don’t be tweeting your breaking news story at 2am!

Provide value - as with all marketing, give your audience a reason to follow you. Offer free advice, the latest industry news or your opinion. Do it on a regular basis to gain a following.

Choose a personality – when writing your tweets try to keep your tone consistent. No one wants to follow an irrational tweeter, but do show your personality. This is a great place to show your audience the open, fun side of you. Leave the corporate facelessness for your dull print brochures.

Make a pretty profile - ensure you have completed your profile with a link to your website. Perhaps change the colour scheme from the norm, create an avatar and put up a background. See our twitter page for an example.

Things to be aware of:

We encourage you to take all of this advice when you next tweet, but remember the following:

Don’t over tweet -  unless you have tons of interesting updates that provide value, your followers will become irritated and stop listening. We’d suggest no more than an average of one tweet an hour. Don’t retweet the same stuff!

Don’t be afraid to block - it’s not a race to get as many followers as possible, remember quality, not quantity. You want relevant follows who share an interest. Unfortunately there are spammers who will follow people just to get followed back. Block these people if you feel it is necessary.

Follow them – if someone has followed you and they are relevant to you, follow them. It’s polite and it shows that you are interested in what they have to say, building a better relationship.  It’s not all you, you, you!

The main point to take from this is to be yourself and provide value. Don’t over do it; few people enjoy aggressive marketing, especially in a social space like Twitter.

• Tweet Beep – alerts you via email when your brand or keyword is mentioned with hourly updates.
• Tweet Later – software for automating your tweets
• Tweetmeme - Tweet aggregate service, finds the most popular tweets. Great WordPress plugin as used on this site

Our belief will always be that there should be one “search strategy”. That person leading the strategy should know PPC and SEO inside out. But perhaps that’s a pipe dream at the moment, given the shortage of experience SEO/PPC people in the industry.

So, before we have even managed to get to grips with that, everyone is suggesting that we now focus on search and social, eeek!

So what do we do? What with Facebook Vanity URLs coming out, there has been a flurry of blog articles coming out advising to optimise your Facebook pages and twitter profiles. Great if you are a business to optimise you brand name. Chances are that you are already number 1.

So how can SEO and social media be used to help your business?

You don’t have to be an expert at both to do the basics:

• Set up social profiles – sign up to Facebook and Twitter. Both are free and are easy to set up.
  • Optimise Facebook – get fans, build interest, get your facebook vanity URL, link from your profile page to your website.
  • Optimise Twitter – get your twitter account and get it optimised for your business name .
• Blog - blogging is a great way of building interest around your business. Write articles around the latest industry news and optimise them well for key search terms and link out to other areas of your site.
• Create valuable content – this one is very important. Making interesting and relevant content for your audience will set you apart form the competition.
• Make your content portable – make any content you produce for your site shareable. Videos, whitepapers, gadgets, images, etc. are a great way to get people to link to your site. Getting inbound links is great for improving your rankings.
• Learn about SEO – the basics of social media are easy, it’s about being social online. But learning about how SEO works can help improve your basic knowledge.
• Get engaged – spend time with your customers, get to know them online. They will naturally want to tell others about you online. More links, better rankings.
• Get involved – get involved with other blogs and networks. Submit stories other than your own and be an active participant.
• Let everyone know – get yourself out there doing the following:
  • Submit your stories to Digg ,Reddit and Propeller
  • Get fans and share your stories on Facebook
  • Tweeter about your latest article
  • Get blogged about

There’s no golden rules here. You need to understand SEO and social media to pull it off. But word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool and if you create deep engagement with your customers/users then this will pay off. Once you have that it’s understanding how to harness the power of this through SEO, something you may want to consider using an search agency for.

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant