Twitter, Real Time Search & Real Time SEO (SMX Advanced 2010)

Up first is Danny Sullivan:

  • Overview of basic search vs. real time search.
  • Google : 88 billion searches per month.
  • Search marketing is more than web, more than keywords
  • Search marketing means being visible where someone has overtly expressed a need or desire
  • “Normal” search is a many-to-many platform
  • Many marketers reach out to many searchers at the same time
  • Real Time search: when people ask questions that anyone can see that anyone can answers – in seconds! You know exactly who is asking and who is answering.
  • Real Time search marketing is largely a one-to-one platform. See the tweet. Reply to the tweet.
  • RT Search: easy to do, very effective, well-known but equal to ranking for your own brand
  • With RT search, your profile can rank for pizza, luggage, and other awesome keywords. How cool!
  • Plug for searchengineland.com
  • Check out Replyz.com, an entire site that monitors questions on twitter for all sorts of topics
  • Real Time link search: many-to-many
  • Google now features these links in static form in SERPs
  • Links can help build long-term credit for the “normal” search results
  • Put your links out there; build retweets/sharing
  • Yes, twitter nofollows all links. But other services that grab your tweets are dofollow. Good point.
  • Relevancy over Recency: first in, last out is changing
  • Relevant results getting more hang time
  • With 18 billions searches per month on Twitter (double the number of searches that Yahoo does each month), changes may make Twitter Search more many-to-many
  • Twitter beta test for ads is currently running. Buy your way to the top.
  • Facebook: one-to-none. You can see posts, but you can’t reach out, can’t reply to people. Ads might improve for search. Search results themselves may change.

Next up: Stew Langille, Vice President, Marketing, Mint.com

  • How real-time drives seo and social acquisition for Mint.com
  • Develop strong content for real timeSEOConstantly monitor strong topics. Produce content around that trending topic. And then you can rank for the trending term(s).
  • Energize your communitiesDevelop active communities. All communities act differently. Develop content targeted for each community.
  • Leverage assets like data
  • Driving traffic for merchant and category specific keywords (black friday, wal-mart). Partnering with Google on Local Search Trends. Q&A driving more searches in universal search lately.
  • Tracking and analyticsIntegrate API’s from Google Trends, Twitter – matching KWs to trending topics. No current tools to track Twitter feed traffic from SEO. Build what you can’t buy. Free tools: klout.com, hootsuite

Next up: John Shehata, Director of SEO & Social Media, Advance Internet, Inc.

  • Ranking factors for real-time: some very similar to traditional ranking factors, some very different and new
  • Bing and Yahoo focus mainly on twitter, but Google focuses on many more sites.
  • Google recently added recent updates for images
  • RT ranking factors: user authority, microblogging freshness, number of followers, quality of followers, ratio of followers in contrast to the number of people followed, URL real-time resolution (look at how many of your links go to good neighborhoods vs bad neighborhoods), # of people retweeting your posts in the last minute, hour, day
  • Reputation & Popularity: It’s not about how many followers you have. It’s about how reputable those followers are.
  • Having followers with high authority theoretically helps your tweets rank higher in Google real-time search
  • Influence & Impact: influence is the likelihood that a twitter user will A) retweet something a user posted and/or B) reference the user. (The number of followers a user has. The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter. The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted. And a few more.)
  • Other possibly factors: recent activity. User name. Age of account. External links. Tweet quantity. Ratio of followed vs follow. Lists: how many lists do you appear in?
  • Check the firehose. Use the from:username feature in Twitter Search to see if your tweets are being fed to Google
  • Get your fans/customers to share your brand on social services
  • Limit sharing options
  • Make it easy to have your readers share your links, tweets and status updates
  • Encourage retweets by tweeting shorter tweets (less than 120 characters)
  • Produce content that appeals to social-savvy audiences
  • Employ content that encourages news users to engage socially
  • Don’t update multiple accounts. Re-tweet instead.
  • Connect your social profiles.
  • Attract reputable followers.
  • How to identify hot trends: Google insights, Trends, etc… Also determine your seasonal keyword trends.
  • Google News Suggest: different results than Google universal results.
  • How do online users search for news – People on search 5 ways: names, place, event/showname, hot subject/topic, organizations
  • Don’t use multiple hash tags. Looks spammy. Breaks the display in Google.
  • Tracking: Track your Google and Bing twitter referrals. Can’t do it (easily) in Yahoo. He says no way to find out right now.

Next up: Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance

  • Develop a twitter strategy. Consumers first. Time and resource needs. Goals.
  • Pizza Hut hired a “tweetologist” – a fulltime employee who tweets
  • Hugo Chavez hired 200 people to manage his twitter account
  • Full-time person (high degree engagement), part-time person (less engaged), static automation (mostly notifications, little interaction), Smart Automation (engaged, though impersonal)
  • Intelligent Agents: twitter.com/sp411 – use direct messaging to ask it questions, it will post answers
  • Use twitter search to discover how consumers need to interact with you. Monitor for topics for your business. Find people who are looking for products, answers related to your business = finding customers.
  • Twitter.com/DealMapDenver – pretty cool deal page for a locality. A great idea if you have locations in different cities.
  • Use OAuth to show source of status updates.
  • Lists may be the future. Lists allow you to target very focused groups for particular topics.
  • Automate updates from Blog, RSS: twitterfeed, dlvr.it (can set up multiple streams across multiple social accounts). cool stuff indeed!
  • Blackhats are setting up multiple feeds on Twitter. They watch Google Trends, and use it to their advantage. No way. I don’t believe that. Pause. Not! Of course they are. Blackhats forever!
  • Closely.com – for small business social media management.
  • Average twitter username is 9 characters long. Interesting.
  • Encourage retweets: shorts tweets, include call-to-action, use common words that are retweeted more often, use special characters to grab attention, URL shortening with keywords in the URLs