An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now.

In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and a few of the republican presidential candidates.

You can also filter the entire PolitickerUSA stream of tweets using a hashtag or word into the filter box. You do not have to click <enter>.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are a few other things you can do with PolitickerUSA.

1. Clicking any word or hashtag in a word cloud will run a search on Twitter for that hashatag or word.

2. Politician Trends allows you to quickly isolate and visualize the latest tweets from a specific politician.

3. A table of all politicians accessible using PolitickerUSA is available linking to their Twitter stream and providing their handle.

Kudos to the PolitickerUSA developer Brian for making the site available. You can read more about how he built the site here.

To establish authority and offer value to a relevant community by way of sharing awesome, complimentary content, to solve problems as they arise, to monitor and moderate topical conversations—that was the Social Media Community Manager Job Description, and in many ways, still is.

These forms of engagement, if meant to be worthwhile, should always be tethered to actionable marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). In that respect, CMs aren’t just managing the community… they’re marketing to it.

This is part one of a two part series that will explore a variety of Twitter tools and tactics B2B Community Managers can leverage to identify target audiences, sync up with industry power users, and make lasting friendships that ultimately pay off in more ways than one.

As we move forward, we’ll use the example of Company X, which is marketing to owners of wineries. Whether Company X sells brochure production services, delectable water biscuits in bulk, elegant Pinot glasses, high-end stainless steel wine tanks, luxury rental cars for wine tours, or spit buckets — doesn’t matter. Our goal is to locate and befriend winery owners. So let’s get to it.

Identifying Target Audiences By Conversation

Short-tail, yet sophisticated keyword searches are a great place to begin tapping into relevant conversations that are happening now. Head over to your unassuming best friend, search.twitter.com and plug away.

Note the subtle but terrifically different results for “wine” vs. “winery.” I could tweet about how much I love drinking wine all day long (and sometimes, I do). Winery connotes a tighter focus— the physical, real world hub.

A quick search reveals even “winery” is a bit too vague. Sprinkle in some telling pronouns or articles, such as “our winery,” “my winery,” even “the winery” (though that last may require some extra vetting). Add quotes to filter at phrase match.

If someone catches your eye, follow the lead…

Even if it takes you away from Twitter, social channels are still social channels after all!

Burrow down that rabbit hole as deep as you “like”… then, head back to your Twitter keyword searches and investigate additional promising leads.

From the family owned vineyard to the high-end winery, if they’re hanging out on Twitter, it’s fair to assume they’re looking to make friends.

Dig into what Twitter Advanced Search has to offer. Interested in marketing only to regional customers? Simply add your criteria and refine your search.

Brush up on the Twitter search operators. Drop your search string into a TweetDeck or other Desktop app column to hear that whirrrr notification every time someone’s tweet matches your criteria.

Great community managers are always ready to pounce when the opportunity arises.

Tools like Topsy.com, The Archivist, and SearchTastic offer similar keyword search functionality, with added perks like sweet data visualizations, relevant URLs, tweets by volume charts, ability to export to Excel, and more extensive records.

SearchTastic’s ability to export to Excel is particularly awesome. Comprehensive, organized keyword report sortable by follower count are your pal.

Branch out. Expand your vocabulary. Think like your target audience members – they might be talking about specific varietals, reserves, vineyards, grapes, climates, regions, print publications, events –  things the insiders know. Here, you may want to turn to traditional search for some inspiration and insight.

As you collate worthy leads, create your own report of names, follower counts, profile links, and other useful information to share among your team or with the client.

Identifying Target Audiences By Category

User-powered directories a la WeFollow and Twellow organize Twitter users based on self-tagged categories pertaining to interests, professions, locations, and other data­­.

In WeFollow, categories are pre-set, so you don’t have to be too inventive with what you plug in. Just begin to type and see what populates.

Experiment with similar keywords:

And don’t neglect the specifics:

Drill into an interesting WeFollow profile to uncover other ways the same user self-identifies.

“Winemaker” wasn’t included in our original drop-down of preset categories, but lo and behold– 183 Twitter members self-tagged themselves as such.

Jackpot!

Once you’ve identified sweet pockets of your audience by way of conversation or category, it’s up to you how you proceed. Will you reach out with a branded avatar on behalf of your company, or sneak in more subtly as your own charming self?

Whatever the method, the first step’s well underway: you’re learning where you want to be and who you want to befriend.

In the next installment, we’ll explore tactics for identifying even more target audience members based on the type of content they consume, how identifying and mining power-users in Twitter can lend terrific insight on where your targets hang and what they love, as well as a closer look at best practices for holistic friending and organic outreach.

Happy hunting!

The main benefit of this new button is that now instead of two clicks, users only require one click and aren’t taken off of your website.

But Where Should I Use The New Follow Button?

The addition of yet another new button has many webmasters scratching their heads trying to figure out where to put the new button – and what it should replace.  It is important to know that there is no absolute correct solution that fits all sites; do what works for you and your site.

If you prefer a custom design then make your own icon and send people right to your account on Twitter. If you have a very small area that you are working with, this button probably isn’t for you.  However, if you do want to utilize this slick new button however, it should most likely replace any twitter icons or links on your site that offer to “connect on Twitter.”

One of the best examples of a site using the button well is the Huffington Post.  They keep their main social media buttons in the top left side of the navigation:

Here is how the button looks post-follow:

It is important to note that the default Twitter Follow button will show the user name.  To strip this out (like HuffingtonPost did) simply remove the “Follow @username” text within the anchor tags of your code.

Another site that is using the button well is Mashable.  They built a subscribe “bucket” of dynamic social buttons in their right hand navigation.  Included in this section is Google +1, Facebook and the new Twitter Follow button:

When using the new follow button the best practice is to keep it grouped with your other social buttons and icons, and make it clear to visitors that they are connecting or subscribing, not sharing content.

Sharing vs. Connecting

The Twitter Follow button was created for a very specific reason, to make it really simple for users to connect to Twitter accounts.  It is important to know that this button does not replace the Tweet button!  The Tweet button performs a very different task for users: sharing.

Techcrunch's Sharing Buttons

It is important to make it easy for users to share your best content, so keep those Tweet buttons (and other share buttons) displayed prominently on your best content.

Don’t Forget About Other Ways to Increase Follows

Integrating the Twitter Follow button prominently on each blog post many not be warranted due to other connection features that Twitter offers.  For example, Twitter lets you recommend accounts to follow after sharing an article, a combination of both sharing and connecting.  If I want to share this article:

@theEscapistMag can recommend accounts to follow – right in the same window, no follow button required!

For more information on implementing the buttons see the official info here:

Follow Button

Tweet Button

This is because the following action takes place on Twitter itself, rather than on your website:  you’re essentially encouraging a user to click on a link. As such, there’s more optimization and testing opportunities.

Call-to-Action

Your call-to-action can take the form of a text link, a linked graphic or both. This gives you the opportunity to create and test any number of calls-to-action until you uncover the formula that delivers the highest number of followers.

Best practices for other calls-to-action can be called upon here:  the use of action verbs, brief but compelling text that provides an incentive to click the button, and so on.

Positioning

Factors to consider here are the closeness to the Tweet button, the positioning of other network join buttons (especially your Facebook call-to-action) and the relative effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of a call-to-action to follow in a place like the sidebar.

Tweet Stream

A stream of your recent tweets may provide an additional incentive for visitors to follow you if, of course, they like what they see.  This technique will obviously work best if you have a very active Twitter account that displays a high level of interaction.

Direct Following With Twitter

It is technically possible to have a button that allows users to follow you without leaving your site.

To accomplish this with any degree of customization entails creating and registering an @Anywhere application, so is really only suitable for those with development skills.

Tweetmeme also provides a follow button, but there are few customization options available. These options are worth exploring if you have the skills to implement them and want to try and decrease fallouts in the following process, but users are fairly well-accustomed to initiating a follow on the Twitter account page itself.

In any case the official Twitter button itself provides a mechanism for following without leaving your website. Any visitors that successfully complete a Tweet from your webpage are subsequently presented with the option of following one or two Twitter accounts.

 

Tweet Button Follow Recommendations (Second Recommendation w/ Custom Description)

This, in itself, is another compelling reason to use the official Tweet button, as this functionality is built in.

That you can suggest two Twitter accounts to follow in the pop-up is particularly useful for content sites, where often both the author of a post or article and the domain itself have Twitter profiles (accounts the visitor is already following do not appear).

A line of text can optionally be inserted above the profile block, providing at least a nominal opportunity to create and test a call-to-action.

Read on for other useful tips in this series:

• How To Convert Visitors To Tweeters
• How To Convert Website Visitors Into Twitter Followers
• Plus: How To Use “Direct Following”
• How To Convert Website Visitors To Facebook Likes
• How To Convert Website Visitors Into Facebook Fans
• 7 Approaches To Engagement Conversion On Twitter & Facebook

There are a number of things that can be tested in order to improve the number of Tweets a page receives.

Display Type

The Tweet button is available in three versions, all versions sharing the same color, size and label (“Tweet”). You can choose a button that does not display tweet counts, one that displays the tweet count next to the button horizontally, and one that displays the tweet count above the tweet button.

 

Tweet Button Styles

For sites where pages receive a lot of Tweets, the vertical option puts the highest emphasis on the Tweet count and is probably your best bet (because of the “bandwagon effect,” whereby something demonstrated to be desirable is more likely to be perceived as desirable).

For sites with little traffic, or things like product detail pages where a low Tweet count might potentially discourage tweeting (or give a product or resource the appearance of being “unpopular”) a button without a count might be the way to go.

Positioning

What works best:  a Tweet button at the top of the page?  The bottom of a page?  Multiple locations?

Obviously, for very long pages like in-depth articles, a bottom placement (or top-and-bottom placement) seems logical, as visitor may not return to the top of the page to click on a tweet button that they’ve long ago scrolled past.

For a page where all or most of the content is above the fold, such as a video or product page, multiple buttons may clutter up the page and dissuade the visitor from taking other actions. Another possibility for the technically-proficient is a fixed twitter button or share block, that stays in the same position on the page as a user scrolls.

Twitter Reactions

A stream of tweets being made about a page, or even tweets topically related to the page, may encourage visitors to click on the tweet button themselves in order to join in on the conversation (although for content-based sites the most obvious real estate to house Twitter reactions is usually taken up by comments).

Unlike the relative simplicity of adding a tweet button, a certain amount of heavy lifting is involved to include Twitter reactions:  manual scripting, a custom script or a third-party tool is required.

Read on for other tips in this series:

• How To Convert Visitors To Tweeters
• How To Convert Website Visitors Into Twitter Followers
  • Plus: How To Use “Direct Following”
• How To Convert Website Visitors To Facebook Likes
• How To Convert Website Visitors Into Facebook Fans
• 7 Approaches To Engagement Conversion On Twitter & Facebook

That same visitor may also be persuaded to make a long-term connection with you or your business, forging an incredibly valuable bond with you or your brand.

For these reasons, the structure of almost any contemporary website should advance the goal of converting casual visitors into engaged participants.

For Twitter sharing a resource directly from its source takes the form of tweeting about it, and for Facebook by liking the item. The opportunity for ongoing engagement comes when a user follows a Twitter account or likes a Facebook Page (formerly, and still usefully, known as “becoming a fan”).

These four actions – tweeting, liking, following and becoming a fan – are not the only social engagement conversions a site owner can encourage, but given the reach of Twitter and Facebook, they are arguably the most important.

There’s no shortage of advice on how to encourage the sharing of content and how to attract followers and fans (a phrase search for “how to get more followers” on Google currently returns 580,000 results).

For sharing ,this advice tends to revolve around what sort of content is most likely to be Tweeted or Liked, such as effective headline formulas.

Tips for building followers and fans are typically tactical in nature, like how to leverage contests to attract Facebook fans or use @ replies and retweets strategically.

Manipulating specific content and undertaking socially-focused activities are great ways of increasing engagement, but in this post, I am looking exclusively at structural methods of increasing a visitor’s interaction with your website and brand.

What I call engagement conversion architecture is the optimization of web pages in order to convert passive visitors into active participants, and especially the optimization of web templates. What structure works best for 1,000 blog posts? 10,000 news articles? 100,000 product pages?

The bigger your site, the bigger the stakes, and all the more reason to finesse your site and page architecture in support of visitor engagement opportunities.

Before we get into the explicit tactics in the following pages, let’s review the seven general approaches (and most important things to remember) when integrating social conversions into your website.

1. Use proven tactics

Lessons learned from email campaigns, landing page testing, product page optimization and other situations where you have been measuring conversions can all be helpful in crafting messages and creating designs that will maximize social conversions.

• What wording has resonated with your customers?
• What calls-to-action have been the most effective?
• What mistakes have been made that you should avoid replicating?

2.  Limit visitor share options

This discussion is limited to Twitter and Facebook, but there are of course, a multitude of sharing mechanisms available. Sociable displays 99 services on its selector page and AddThis boasts 300+ services.

Don’t display the kitchen sink to your visitors:  the more sharing options you display the less likely a visitor will be to click on any one of them. Include only networks and services that you think your visitors will use, and drop any that see little use.

3.  Don’t hide visitors’ share options

While less frequently encountered these days, it’s still not uncommon to see a global “share” button that, once clicked, displays different sharing options. This represents another hoop the user must jump through before tweeting or liking, and so introduces a potential fallout point.

For both functional reasons and to maximize click-throughs, keep the Tweet and Like buttons as distinct elements, and add an additional share button if more than another couple of services are required.

4. Clearly distinguish sharing and joining functions

It should be apparent on any given page whether clicking on a button will share the item (tweet or like it), or lead the visitor to a Twitter profile or Facebook Page.  This is especially true for Facebook, where identically styled like buttons may reference either the resource the visitor is viewing or the site’s Facebook Page.  When a user is uncertain what action will result from a click, they’re less likely to click at all.

5.  Focus on the best choice for your market

In the online content realm, Huffington Post stacks the Like button above the Tweet button, whereas Mashable puts Twitter on top. All ten Huffington front-page articles I sampled had more Likes than Tweets, and all ten Mashable front-page posts I looked at had more Tweets than Likes. Coincidence? I think not. Give more visual weight to the network that is most commonly used by your visitors.

6.  Test

This really should go without saying when it comes to making conversion improvements, but it bears repeating. Without testing, you will be guessing, and unless you’re very lucky, you’ll be missing out on opportunities to improve the level of visitor participation with your site.

There’s very little publically available data on the testing of Twitter and Facebook elements on a page, but test results that have been published illustrate that dramatic conversion lifts are possible.

7.  Take a holistic approach to testing

Where there are other conversion events that may be impacted by the addition of Twitter or Facebook elements, be sure you measure them as well. Increasing the amount of likes your average product detail page receives by 10% should not be achieved by suffering a 15% decrease in cart additions.

Extending Engagement Conversion Architecture

Many of the optimization techniques used to encourage Twitter and Facebook engagement can be applied to promote engagement on other social networks and bookmarking sites, and can be extended to help build page structures that encourage the addition of user generated content, subscriptions to syndicated content, and even improve the performance of long-standing sharing functions like emailing to a friend.

The challenge in optimizing for engagement in is honing in on the social targets that are right for your site when so many choices exist.

Twitter and Facebook are certainly sensible targets for the vast majority of sites, and optimizing your site for Tweets, Likes, Followers and Fans is an excellent place to start work on turning spectators into participants.

Read on for the 5 Explicit Tactics To Increase Your Twitter & Facebook Engagement:

• How To Convert Visitors To Tweeters
• How To Convert Website Visitors Into Twitter Followers
  • Plus: How To Use “Direct Following”
• How To Convert Website Visitors To Facebook Likes
• How To Convert Website Visitors Into Facebook Fans

There are many places on Twitter that may be the last thing to think about when it comes to starting a Twitter account. However, because Bing and Google now count tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media activity in their search results, search engine optimization is more important than ever.

The SEO’d Twitter Profile

The profile is the starting point to any successful profile. Incorporate as many keywords as possible, because when a Twitter profile shows up in search results, Google will sometimes use the bio portion of the profile for the description. Utilize the best keywords available by creating a list of specialties or services.

As you can see from Mayor Bloomberg’s bio, he lists his main interests and job responsibilities and makes himself easy to find. And even though his most important and obvious title, Mayor of New York City, is what most people know him as, listing his other interests will make his bio show up in other bio search results by users who most likely weren’t searching for him Mayor Bloomberg specifically.

SEO Your Hashtags

Hashtags are an easy way to implement keywords. Marketing campaigns now create customized keywords for events and many people add keywords at the end of their tweet. This is useful when the blog title or content you are sharing doesn’t list any relevant topic keywords.

Including hashtags that are broader and name the industry may make tweets easier to find. Additionally, naming specifics as hashtags in generic titles can also help. A good example would be an article titled, “Search Engine Traffic Metrics for 2011 http://URL.com #google #bing #ask”

Additionally, utilizing the important words that are already in a tweeted blog title or message can save character space.

Try to choose hashtags that are the most important keywords in the tweet and overall content that is being promoted. Hashtags make it easy to search by topic and will increase search result frequency and relevancy to the target audience.

Vanity Links

When it comes to SEO, sometimes simply tweeting the pre-defined blog post and URL may not be enough to get the clicks, traffic, and re-tweets that it deserves. Using custom vanity links from services such as Bit.Ly Pro and Cli.gs that allow for custom endings can help incorporate keywords into shortened URLs, which may hold SEO value.

While there is no concrete proof that these shortened links can lead to being shown in search results, doesn’t http://cli.gs/10-top-seo-blogs look a lot better than http://cli.gs/b453jfwhy?

Twitter Lists

Lists are also another area where it doesn’t hurt to incorporate SEO. When creating lists of Twitter users, use keyword rich list titles, especially since these appear on your profile. Be sure to put dashes between words:

My lists use dashes and are quick to the point. Lists with run-on words, such as “ignitesocialmedia”, are harder to read. Also, avoid slang and shortened words such as “junkies” and “tech”— these words aren’t searched for often.

Bios, hashtags, lists and customized links are all easy ways to incorporate SEO techniques into Twitter. While some have been proven to work, such as keyword-rich bios and keywords in tweets, these other areas could stand to get more attention SEO-wise from Google and Bing and will continue to rise in importance.

I’ve used realtime search tools often, in order to see if people are tweeting and sharing images from news events, such as when the tsunami hit Crescent City. At times, they can provide a faster way to see images before news outlets themselves.

Nachofoto

Nachofoto launched in April 2010 but closed a few months ago to rework the site. Now it’s back and is completely focused on providing fresh images from across the web. It aims to be the primary destination for anyone seeking photos being shared through realtime services, be that via Twitter, blog posts or as part of new web pages.

The site’s home page offers a number of suggested queries that are supposed to reflect news topics that also have many images being shared:

“Aflac Duck” is among the Hot Topics that are trending? Really? Yes. If you drill in by clicking on that link, you get images plus a timeline that shows a recent spike:

Click on the tall bar at the end, and you can drill in more:

Selecting an actual photo brings you to the site with the image –  in the case of CBS, a story about how comedian Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of Aflac’s duck, was fired after making jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Oddly, the picture in the story doesn’t match the picture the Nachofoto showed — but there is a matching photo that is hosted on CBS, so it might have been changed after the initial publication.

Searching For Realtime Images With Nachofoto

How well does Nachofoto work if you’re after a particular image? I haven’t done any large scale testing, but I still like the options that Topsy offers better. More on that further in the story. First, let’s do search at Nachofoto.

While Japan is in the news right now, the image stream is pretty polluted by pictures people are taking of TV images, pictures shared from past earthquakes and more. There are ways to address this, but I thought a search for Bahrain might be more instructive, where protests are happening, resulting in a government crackdown.

With Nachofoto, I can do search for bahrain and get back a timeline view:

What I immediately dislike is that most of the images tend to be from media sources, while I personally often want to use realtime image search to see what citizen journalists are recording. Ideally, I’d like an option to restrict my search to one of the main realtime photo sharing sites or by date range.

Searching At Topsy

I love how Topsy makes realtime image searching easy. From the Topsy photos area, just enter your search, in this case, for bahrain:

The arrows show how you can toggle to see the most recent results first or by other time ranges, such as over the past hour. I’ve found having these time options incredibly useful, when I’m seeking the most recent images.

The images also don’t all seem to be from media outlets. However, it can still be difficult to tell if images are coming directly from those tweeting them. I usually try to hunt back to the originating Twitter account and see if there’s a location being associated with someone’s tweets or other clues, such as if they’ve tweeted additional photos, to better tell.

Using Google Realtime Search

Over at Google, the company’s Google Realtime Search service allows you search through recently shared material and narrow down to those containing images:

You just have to make sure you click on the “Updates with images” option as I’ve pointed to in the screenshot above.

Unfortunately, the display of images isn’t as nice or as compact with Topsy, and using the “Timeline” feature in the top right corner isn’t as easy, to me, as Topsy’s hour / day / week / month buttons.

Searching By Location With Google

Google, however, has a great trick that neither Nachofoto or Topsy can do — it can find pictures based on location. Imagine you want pictures about Bahrain from people actually in Bahrain. This is where search by location can help:

Over on the left, I’ve entered “Bahrain” as a location. That causes Google to only show tweets that come from Bahrain and also which have images.

Searching By Location With Twitter

There are two downsides to searching by location for images at Google. First, some people might be sharing images from Bahrain but not reporting a location with those images. If you filter by location, you won’t see any of those non-location tagged images. There’s no easy solution to that.

The second issue is that some might be sharing images from Bahrain but not using that word (or that word in English). Google Realtime Search doesn’t allow you to do a “blank” search for anything by location. Twitter Search, however, does. Using its advanced search page, you can enter a location:

Then you get back tweets that come only from Bahrain:

Sadly, there’s no option to narrow these tweets down to those containing images. Instead, you have to search for words that are associated with images. For example, consider this:

In the search above, I’ve told Twitter to search for tweets that are within 15 miles of Bahrain (it probably uses a radius out of the center of the country for this) and which have the word “twitpic” in them — which is part of the URL used by the popular Twitpic sharing service.

Notice especially the third tweet. It says nothing about “Bahrain” in it — but by using location plus “twitpic,” I was able to turn it up.

Easier Picture Previewing On Twitter

Unfortunately, Twitter Search doesn’t make it easy to see the images, compared to the way that searching on Twitter itself does. To better understand the difference between searching using Twitter Search versus Twitter.com, see my previous post: The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide.

One solution is to do a search on Twitter Search, such as I did above, and then copy and paste the search terms into Twitter, like this:

In the example above, I pasted this:

near:bahrain within:15mi twitpic

Into the search box at Twitter.com. When the results appeared, I could then easily click on them and make the picture appear on the right.

Ideally, Twitter would make Twitter Search work the same way. Until then — or if it never happens — you can copy-and-paste or learn some of the advanced search commands for Twitter Search and use them directly at Twitter.com.

Other Real-Time Image Search Engines

Beyond the services above, there are a few other real-time image search engines you might want to check out.

Twitcaps: Search across multiple sharing services using keywords, over the past day. You can filter by language or by a particular service. Narrowing by location is offered by hard to use. You can’t do a “blank” search by location.

PicFog: Promises to let you search by keyword and narrow by location across various sharing services, but its inability to find anything for a search on “bahrain” made me sadly doubt it’s that helpful in general.

Roooby: Another search engine that lets you search across several photo sharing sites. There’s no way to narrow by location.

Photo Sharing Sites

You can, of course, try searching at some of the popular photo sharing sites used by those on Twitter. Below are some of the more popular ones and the searching options they offer.

I’ve listed them in the order I see them suggested in both the Twitter iPhone and iPad apps, which is one indication of how popular they are (those at the top are likely used more). I also included Instagram at the end, as I know it’s another popular sharing tool.

TwitPic: Search by keyword, sort results by most recent, popular or “mixed.”

yFrog: Search by keyword, results sorted by date, by default. You can also sort by most popular and narrow to popularity over the past hour, day or month.

Plixi: Search by keyword, results sorted by date, by default. There’s an option to see “Most Viewed” pictures, and this seems to be most viewed over the past week.

Mobypicture: Search by keyword, plus through advanced search, the ability to do a “blank” search by country or location, with sorting by date, relevance or views. A pretty impressive range of options.

Twitgoo: Search by keyword, get results sorted apparently by most recent first.

Posterous: If it offers search, this isn’t available for non-logged in users.

img.ly: It appears to offer no search feature.

Instagram: It appears to offer no search feature. You can’t even browse pictures from the home page. Oddly makes me feel bad for even trying to view it on the web. Maybe that big iTunes App Store button gives me that “get off my lawn” feeling.

Where’s Flickr? While it’s a great photo sharing site, I haven’t personally found or seen that it has gained much traction as a place where people try to share images within seconds after taking them.

All the best with your real-time image searching!

This is clearly the first step and sounds very obvious – but many people will be disappointed to discover that simply opening an account and tweeting their own content doesn’t miraculously fire their pages up the rankings! Your Twitter account cannot exist in isolation if it’s going to achieve anything – so you need to connect with relevant friends and industry peers.

That means doing more than posting links to your own website. You need to enter conversations, respond to questions and queries, talk to customers who mention your brand, and interact.

It’s a social platform, it only works if you use it socially. On top of that, if you want other people to retweet your content, you’ll have more success if you’re being followed by relevant people – so make the effort in building those relationships.

Use Twitter Tools To Help With Promotion

I don’t mean the automated follow/unfollow tools – but look for the type of tools and ideas which can help to leverage your profile.

Examples of tools which have worked very well are those such as Twtpoll or Paywithatweet, where you are naturally generating retweets and @ mentions by adding value to your followers.

Connect With Contacts From Other Social Media Sites

There are so many social media websites available that it’s almost impossible to keep up-to-date with the different sets of connections we all have. Obviously, these each have different types of target audiences and you’re unlikely to want to become Facebook friends with everyone you talk to on Twitter – but what about LinkedIn, Foursquare, FriendFeed, Quora etc?

In my experience, most people are happy to share the same/very similar contacts across different social sites, it’s just not always that easy in practice. There are two ways which I’ve found are effective at managing this:

1. Sometimes it’s just a simple job of importing LinkedIn contacts via Twitter, and then looking to export your other social media contacts into Gmail and importing from there.
2. If you want to dig a bit deeper, I find that tools such as Flowtown are a great way of grouping shared connections across social sites and then you can make sure you are connected with all of those key influencers in the same place.

By doing this, you are connecting with people who you already know from other sites, so they are likely to be valuable followers on Twitter who can help to connect with when building your profile.

Run Twitter Competitions

One potentially valuable way of leveraging Twitter to help your SEO efforts is to run retweet competitions. This is where people retweet a comment – usually including a link to your website, in the hopes of winning a prize you’re offering.

It can be an effective way to build a high number of links and increase followers, so many companies, including national newspapers, are leaping on the bandwagon. But this may not work for long. Google moves fast and it will be developing techniques to assess the value of tweets rather than something as simple as just the number.

So, make use of Twitter competitions for now, but don’t rely on this as a long-term strategy, because it probably isn’t.

Create Quality Content, Conversations Follow

This is the simplest rule for most SEO strategies, but it’s also one of the hardest to pull off. If you want people to retweet your content and enhance your importance in Google’s eyes, then create valuable articles and tools that will make them want to link to it and share it with their own followers.

While shortcuts like competitions will provide a quick boost, the best way to use Twitter for SEO is to fill your site with quality content, whether it’s blog posts, widgets, fantastic discount vouchers or whatever attraction you can create. Of course, that works in the wider web too. SEO shortcuts aren’t the answer, quality content is.

Posting quality content will also encourage people to follow you. Building high numbers of followers will enhance your authority in Google’s eyes, meaning, any links you post will carry more weight.

Also, have a look at the top stories featured on the homepage of Tweetmeme to get an idea of the type of content which generally performs well on Twitter in terms of getting shared – and ask yourself if your content is something that you would retweet if it was someone else’s work?

Use Your Targeted Keywords

Just as you optimise your own website with the keywords you want to rank for, make sure your Twitter account is also optimised this way to add context around your tweets.

Add keywords and phrases to your Twitter bio and use them (naturally, mind!) in your tweets. Without that, Google may not know how relevant your tweets and retweets are.

Make Your Tweets Retweetable

This is a very simple Twitter rule that gets completely missed by so many corporate accounts. Aim to leave enough space for people to retweet your comments and links, and to leave comments of their own.

There are only 140 characters to play with, so it’s not that easy – but it is essential.

Otherwise, you risk people cutting off the link in order to make their comments, or even deciding not to make the effort to edit it down and not retweeting at all. That’s not much use to you and your website’s SEO in the long run.

Gary Price of ResourceShelf tipped me to this gem. Hey, perhaps it’s designed to help balance out the seemingly left-leaning recommendations that Twitter makes:

No Fox News or Tea Baggers there among the Huffington Post, CNN, NPR and Congressional Quarterly! Actually, the latter three are arguably more middle in the road, though you might not see it that way, if you’re on the right.

How About Some Tea?

For fun, let’s do some side-by-side. How about Tea Party?

Bing is on the left-side (literally and figuratively) suggesting anti-Tea Party pundit Keith Olbermann. As for Estate 44, its aim is to “expose” Tea Party conservatives online.

Twitter’s on the right, listing accounts that are pro-Tea Party.

Oh, and what’s the California flag doing as a background to Twitter’s recommendations? That’s just how it looks on the new Twitter, when I view these through my account, which uses the California flag as a background (and yes, I’m proudly from California).

Delivering Democrats

What do we get for a search on Democrats?

Both Bing and Twitter bring up the main account for the Democratic party. Twitter brings up accounts for the Democrats in the House Of Representatives and in the Senate, as well as the Young Democrats.

In contrast, Bing only offers the Nam Vet account, which appears to be a pro-Democrat Vietnam War veteran who tweets. Because the account links to the official Democrats web site, I think the textual match is causing Bing to see it as relevant for a Democrats search.

As For Republicans…

How about for a search on Republicans?

Bing goes with Robert Reich, President Clinton’s former secretary of labor and who also endorsed current President Obama. Twitter, meanwhile, recommends various official Republican accounts, from the Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee to Ohio Republicans.

When GOP Doesn’t Mean Republican

Wondering why important accounts like House Republicans or the Republican party overall aren’t listed by Twitter? Especially when they are for the Democrats?

Time for a little Twitter account SEO lesson. If you want to rank well in words any search engine — including search engines that list Twitter accounts — it helps to use those words in key areas. For Twitter, this especially seems to mean using those words in your name or Twitter account name.

The House Republicans go with this information in their profile:

Name: House GOP Leader Twitter Account Name: @GOPLeader Description: Official Twitter account for the Office of House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH)

Tough situation. There’s not enough room to have the name “House Republican Leader.” Twitter’s length restrictions would only allow for “House Republican Lead.” But making the name “House Republicans,” even though this is for the leader of the Republicans in the house, might help this show up for searches on Twitter for both “GOP” and “Republicans.” Sadly, despite “Republican” being in the description, that doesn’t seem to help.

As for the Republican Party’s Twitter account, it goes with:

Name: RNC Twitter Account Name: @RNC Description: Updates from the Republican National Committee

Pump that name up, RNC! Plenty of space to say “Republican Party” or even “The Republican Party.”

Doing The Right Thing

Of course, ultimately, any search engine should do the right thing. While Bing says its new feature isn’t focused on finding “official” accounts, I think people will still have that expectation. That’s even more so for Twitter.

As for offering related or “interesting” suggestions on a topic, you can see this can be fraught with peril. One thing Twitter does well is its “Suggestions For You” feature, which offers suggestions not based on what you search for but around the type of people you already follow. I’ve found it works amazingly well. MG Siegler over at TechCrunch also likes it and posted today about recent tweeks to improve it.

Recommendations For “Sarah Palin”

Having started this off with Sarah Palin, I was curious what Bing and Twitter would suggest as people to follow, in a search on her name:

On the left-side, Bing gives the official Sarah Palin account, followed by the aforementioned Keith Olbermann and Jason Easley of the liberal Politicususa blog.

On the right, Twitter lists the official Sarah Palin account as well, followed by an unofficial blog about Palin, plus a news blog about Palin is listed.

Oh, and there’s also the Twitter account for Sarah Palin’s Vagina listed. This is clearly an impersonation and not clearly identifying itself as a parody, in violation of Twitter’s policy about parody accounts.

Then again, I’m not sure if that policy applies to parts of the body. And I think we all knew it was a parody, didn’t we?

More, More!

Some related articles you may find of interest:

• Watching The Democrats & Republicans Go At It, Twitter-Style
• The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide
• Bing Social Search Now Recommends People To Follow On Twitter