10 Ingenious Ways to Use Twitter
Posted on 21. Mar, 2010 in Blog, SEO, Social Media
Twitter is not just untethered SMS…
While Twitter is ridiculed by Twitnoobs and amateurs for mundane updates such as “I’m watching my cat… asleep”, the service has been taken to the next level by those who have embraced its realtime, geo-tagged, verbose and follower-driven world. Here are 10 clever ways to use Twitter that demonstrate its potential.
Use Twitter for Server Status and Job Reports
Twitter is, at heart, one big messaging system. If you have endless email and server jobs running that fire off success/failure emails, why not ditch the emails and get the cron jobs to Tweet out the result? You can create a Twitter ID with private tweets so only you and permitted followers can see the data. Personally, I’d rather receive Tweets than email for “this just happened” status updates.
Use Twitter for Inventory Alerts
Want to create some buzz among your customers when only 10 widgets are left, or there’s been a sudden price drop on a hot product? Rather than post updates to your website or print flyers, it’s simple to create a quick Tweet driven by your inventory system. There’s never been a more effective way to communicate time-sensitive price and inventory events to your customer base. And “once it’s gone, it’s gone”-style offers tend to generate a dedicated following.
Use Twitter to Find Your Most Effective Keywords
Getting traffic-rich keywords is the holy grail of SEO – it’s hard to do, but if you track your Tweets with tools such as su.pr, you can quickly start to see which topics interest your audience and drive your website’s content around those keywords. Su.pr provides metrics around which links are being followed (among many other things), and your most popular Tweets and keywords are probably not the ones you think they are.
Use Twitter Lists for SEO
If you use Twitter, you’re probably using lists by now, but maybe haven’t realized the inherent SEO benefits created by Google indexing:
- Make your lists public.
- Make lists selective (20-40 users).
- Embed keyword phrases in your list names (“Texas SEO advice”, not just “SEO”).
- Refer to your Twitter lists in blog posts and Tweet them (they have real URLs such as this SEO experts list).
Use Twitter to Monitor Your Competitors
Twitter for the most part is completely open and public. For many industries, it provides a rich source for understanding your competitors’ behavior, especially since you can mine their Tweet history. What time of month are they sending out specials? What kind of promotions are they pushing? What’s their retweet ratio (search RT @mycompetitor in Google)? While you’re there, take a look at their followers and followees, and follow the most active and appropriate users.
Use Twitter for Instant Crowdsourced Responses
On my private Twitter ID (@jbeswick), I’ve managed to get immediate and useful advice on topics as diverse from the best proconsumer camcorders to the best breakfast tacos in Austin. This isn’t restricted to your follower list: a properly tagged question will be found by thousands of other users who watch hashtags such as #canon #taco and #keepaustinweird. The truly remarkable part is the speed in which people respond, and the quality of advice crammed into 140 characters.
Use Twitter to Find Local Customers
Want to know what people around you are saying about your products, industry or services? The Twitter advanced search allows you to search for pertinent keywords, phrases or hashtags that are happening around a certain area (such as what people think about Costco within 50 miles of San Francisco). There are no other tools – online or offline – that could provide this realtime local insight to provide leads and potential customers.
Use Twitter to Find Employees
Companies are getting deluged with applications whenever they post open jobs in the traditional venues, and social media is starting to become the new way to match employees and employees more successfully. Amidst sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter is rapidly becoming an effective way to reach out into your network to find designers, programmers, kitchen staff, gardeners, copywriters, and pretty much anything else.
Use Twitter to Water Your Plants
Interestingly, MakeZine wrote a piece about how to make your plants Tweet when they need water – while this might seem a little esoteric, it’s representative of what happens as practically everything gets an IP address and becomes connected to the network. Imagine if your home security system could tweet a break-in or your car tweeted a schedule service request: essentially, anything that can’t communicate that needs regular attention could tweet for your attention.
Use Twitter to Write a Book
If the average book is 80,000 words with around 5 letters per word, it could take nearly 3,000 Tweets to reach the end. In 2008, 5 of the top 10 bestsellers in Japan were cellphone novels, built by one or many writers 140 characters at a time. Now there are over 1,000,000 cellphone novels so the Tweetbook shouldn’t be far behind.
James Beswick is the founder of One Uproar and the author of Getting Productive With Google Apps and The 50 Fastest Ways to Great SEO, neither of which are tweetable.