Twitter, Tweets, Re-tweets and the no follow tag
12/10/2010
Are tweets good for your business? Often, No
- Are tweets useful for SEO? Often No, Sometimes Yes.
- Does our business need a twitter account? Maybe
There has been so much hype about Twitter, and is a certainly very popular but is it useful?
The answer as is often the case depends on what you want to do. There are some businesses, especially involving customer service where tweets form the perfect communication method. Examples include hosting companies (server status), transport companies (updates on delays) and news. These work if tweets are at the right frequency; not too often but relevant and timely when needed.
They have also been used as the new ‘link building’ within SEO and Search. And the usefulness of tweets to search (specifically SEO) is rather like a yo-yo. It was very useful, then not at all, then quite useful (re-tweets), then not, then useful again. Keeping up with the yo-yoing importance of twitter on SEO effectiveness can be confusing.
Tweets can generate links, so this was seen as a good link building technique, and when new it was fantastic for a short while (maybe as short as 2-3 months).
The no-follow tag killed this game very quickly, and generating tweets was mostly ineffective for SEO.
But then re-tweets were discovered as a way of bypassing the no-follow tag. And this neat little technique was used successfully for while. But as this became acknowledged as an SEO technique, the percentage of real useful re-tweets deceased as more and more re-tweeting was done offshore as part of monthly SEO contracts.
It appears Google now places less emphasis on this, and is in fact placing more emphasis again on the original tweets. This certainly appears to be the case with Bing.
So should Twitter be used for SEO? In general this would not be a first priority, but for long term strategic SEO a strategy which makes use of effective tweeting and does not rely on short term algorithm gains is likely to be a winner. This is mostly because it will be future proof to likely changes in Google algorithm.
And should Twitter be used for Business? Many businesses fail to manage this well, and a poorly run twitter account gives a bad impression.
