Twitter’s New Enhancement Good for SEO?

Effectively using social media is a new must for businesses. Social networking sites like Facebook and microblogging sites like Twitter are both enormously popular with consumers, and if used well, enormously effective in helping businesses increase traffic and build their online brand. But using Twitter has its limitations: how can you reach potential consumers, clients, and contacts using only 140 characters per tweet? A new enhancement that will soon be available to developers will help businesses optimize their tweets and provide more information for consumers and search engines. 

The new Twitter feature will allow businesses to embed annotations into each tweet. Whereas currently there is the 140 character maximum, developers will have an addition 512 bytes available for use.  With this newfound bounty, businesses can add “meta data,” including web addresses, reviews, physical addresses, upcoming events, and much more. 

Twitter’s growth has been explosive: in 2008, the site featured 6 million users in the United States alone, which accounted for just over 11 percent of the adult Internet using world. Just a year later, they boasted of 18 million users, and 2010 is projected to yield an additional 8 million users. In the UK, there are an estimated 5.5 million Twitter users. These numbers certainly indicate a large potential target audience for your business and building a visible online profile is more important than ever. 

Facebook, too, remains a valuable tool for SEO, and in many ways, is even more effective than Twitter in generating traffic and keeping consumers informed and engaged. When optimizing your business’s profile, there is nothing more important than having fresh content.  The social media phenomenon demands that you continually feed the information-hungry public with relevant content, whether news, updates, announcements, and other features of value to them.