Social media networking has become a part of many businesses’ SEO strategies. There is a lot of chat out there in the SEO community about how social media marketing can help with an SEO campaign. There is less talk about exactly how valuable social media networks are as a research tool.

If the internet was the real world, social media networks would be a room full of conversation, a series of hand-written letters sweeping back and forth, and a phone tap all in one. Millions of conversations happen on social media networks with the same natural ease as they do in real life. The difference when it comes to social media networks, sinister as it sounds, is that these conversations are unintentionally public and can be studied and learnt from.

These networks are a wealth of riches for SEOs, market researchers and online business in general. The best thing of all is that the social media networks themselves are creating keyword research tools.

Crazy, isn’t it? With such resources freely available, any company that does not use social media to research is going to fall behind the competition.

Of all the social media networks, Twitter is one that offers constant, up-to-date information on what people are thinking. This is because of the immediacy of the form of this micro-blog. Although there was nothing to stop Twitter from being a foreshortened version of every other blogging service on the net, it became a site where updating anything less than a couple of times a day was against the etiquette. As a consequence, Twitter is exactly what it advertises itself to be, a giant tree occupied by the constant sound of hundreds of voices.

This ‘constant’ is the important thing when it comes to monitoring internet trends. Business enterprises have found, both to their joy and detriment, that Twitter has foreshortened the time that social rumour spreads across the world. A good example of this is cinema box office sales. An adequately hyped movie used to be able to count on good sales for at least the first weekend before the opinions came through. At the start of July this year, however, several big summer blockbusters bombed after their first night because celebrities attending premiers Twittered their opinions. This is a significant shift in parameters for the cinema industry.

Such large shifts are unlikely to affect the average business, but the changes are interesting. If rumours are to be believed, the social network has its eyes set on real-time search. This makes its role even more important in the world of search engine optimisation, and it will be interesting to see how the situation develops. This just adds to the reasons it makes good sense to keep your internet eye on Twitter.

Many businesses are launching a profile on Twitter, and while this can involve a lot of work, it can increase your internet visibility incredibly. The focus of Twitter on keywords makes it easier for others to find your tweets. There are many keyword notification tools for Twitter, and more are added every month. Most of these tools notify when a tweet is added for a particular keyword or series of keywords. These tools provide a direct link between your content and your ideal viewers.

Even if you aren’t ready to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, the social network can be helpful to your keyword research. Talk to us at SEO Consult about how you can use social media tools to assist your search engine optimisation.

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