In a December interview with search engines Google and Bing, Danny Sullivan revealed how social signals are used to rank regular search results. In particular, it was made clear that Twitter played a major role in providing these social signals. Sullivan even went on to say that ‘retweets serve as the new link building.’ If this is the case, then what affects the power of the social signal? This is what we know so far:

What the search engines said:

The Author Authority – Google can compute the author authority, while Bing accounts for known public figures such as celebrities and writers.

The Social Authority – How many people you follow and how many people that follow you can make a difference.

The search engines didn’t give too much away, but some of the leading researchers in this area have added their thoughts on the matter. Here’s what some of the industry professionals think to be the main ideas behind Author and Social Authority.

What industry professionals say:

Quantity of your followers – The more the better! However, its highly likely bots and spammers will be filtered out. This video by Matt Cutts also detailed that similar to regular links, the quality of the follower has part to play.

Author Authority of your followers – Similar to the benefits of having authoritative domains linking to you, if you have a high authority tweeter following you who retweets you, it’s going to be  beneficial.

Association Bias – Retweeting your own content is going to be viewable to search engines, so a retweet from an independant party will be more valuable.

Topic Focus – If you have a theme running through your tweets, this will show relevance to any content that you link to in a tweet.

You may be thinking…

“It’s all well and good knowing this stuff, but what can I take away from this to help me use Twitter as a tool to boost search results?”

Good question! Here are a couple of tips to help you on the way, or for more social media info visit our social media services page:

Get retweeted!

-      Retweets with a link to your content is what will affect search results. As mentioned, it’s not just the nofollowed link to your content you get, but the authority of the tweeter that impacts results. Getting a retweet gives search engines a signal that it is of importance to people.

-      People retweet stuff they want their own followers to see. They will only do this if it’s interesting and relevant. As always, the content is very important.

-      Dan Zarella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book, carried out some research on retweets and found that the time and day are a significant variable. Afternoons, evenings and weekends showed the highest amount of retweets, with Fridays also showing a large increase.

-      The language used in tweets was found to be important. These are the Top 5 most retweetable words:

1. you

2. twitter

3. please

4. retweet

5. post

-      Zarella explains that by using the word ‘you,’ it can add personalisation to the tweet and also shows that you are trying to engage with the person.

-      He also found that 57% of all retweets contain a link. As I mentioned above, people use retweets as a way of sharing content, not just communicating.

Create partnerships with high authority followers:

-      Easier said than done! Creating partnerships isn’t easy. However, people are more  likely to retweet your content if you do the same for them. With high authority tweeters, you should try and engage in a conversation with them. Don’t just send them a ‘please RT’ straight off the bat.

Make sure you have bookmarking tools on your pages or blog posts:

-      Make it easy for your readers to share your content. If your use WordPress, there is an abundance of bookmarking plugins that will sort this out for you. ‘Sexy bookmarks’ and ‘Tweetmeme’ are very popular for doing this.

Host competitions on Twitter:

-      Asking your followers to retweet a link or include a hashtag to gain entry into a competition is a popular method at the moment; it’s relatively cheap and very effective at gaining a large volume of followers.

-      A great example of this would be Moonfruit’s Twitter competition. They gave away 10 MacBooks to people that tweeted with the hastag #moonfruit. This became Twitter’s top trending topic above the likes of #iranelection and #michaeljackson.

-      In the long run, it may be likely that search engines may detect this as being manipulative and a bit spammy.

Use a URL shortener:

-      URL shorteners are used to……. shorten the URL!

-      This is important as you have only 140 characters in a tweet, and so you don’t want to use them on a large url. Dan Zarella’s research found that different url shorteners received higher retweet rates. Bit.ly was the most likely to get retweeted possibly due to it being able to make the shortest url’s. Older url shortners like tinyurl.com and twitpic.com had a lower chance of getting retweeted.

-      To get as much power as possible passing to your site, make sure the url shortener uses a 301 redirect from the short URL to yours. Various URL shorteners also let you track clicks. This is always useful to see how many people have visited the page because of the retweet.

Top url shorteners to use:

These are a few of the newest and offer the shortest url’s:

Bit.ly

Ow.ly

Su.pr

That’s the end of my guide, what do you think on the matter? Do you have any other tips that should be included on this list?