In our unending quest to achieve good rankings for our clients (and Appletree) I read with interest recently that research, published by Branded3 has shown a positive correlation between the number of times a brand is mentioned on Twitter and its Google rankings.

We’ve used Twitter as part of our marketing deliverables for many years, seeing success for ourselves and lead generation for our clients, but it’s always good to back up these statements with actual facts and figures, so here’s just a few:

The key findings were:

– URLs receive a significant boost in Google rankings when they are shared on Twitter
– The effects of this boost seem to level out at around 50 tweets, and the subsequent benefit of gaining additional tweets is minimal until around 5,000 tweets
– After 5,000 tweets the average ranking of URLs improves considerably
– URLs receiving over 7,500 tweets almost always rank inside the top 5 results
– Average rankings are heavily correlated to the number of tweets about each URL.

So, now you’ve seen the case for using Twitter, how do you go about using it to promote your business and services? In his last blog, Yan explained how Appletree posts 12 tweets every working day, without spending more than a few minutes doing it!

Once you’ve seen how easy it is to schedule blogs, you need to focus on what you want to achieve from them, and what the content should be. It should be integrated with the rest of your marketing, and sending out a consistent message, but its objective should be to establish you as industry experts. How do you do this? You use targeted, relevant news to establish your thought leadership role to your audience. Twitter is ideal for news-sharing, and if it?s interesting people will share your tweets to their audience too (by re-tweeting).

A word of caution though – avoid company news, it cannot be blatant self-promotion. Use industry news that will be of interest to your peers, customers and prospects.

Content-wise, use this checklist to ensure it?s going to be effective:
– Original
– High quality
– Educational
– Entertaining
– Valuable
– Thought-leading
– Non self-promotional.

If you want some help with your social media strategy then contact us.