Many businesses have turned to Twitter as part of their off-page SEO strategy, and rightly so. Twitter, the micro-blog and social media network, presents an opportunity to reach hundreds of thousands of internet users and foster inbound links in one fell swoop. The going is never easy, however, and strategies need to be developed for your entire Twitter campaign.

Developing content suitable for Twitter is difficult enough, with your message and SEO tactics squeezed into a 140-character space. Worse still, though, is worry about where it’s going. Posts on Twitter are just like contact in any other social media. They are a waste of time if no-one is reading them. More than that, you want your users to ‘re-tweet’ your messages, passing them on to their own readers and creating a sort of ‘mini-viral’ with every post.

Re-tweets are incredibly valuable to your search engine optimisation campaign because they pass your message on whole. Micro-blogs take effort to write, despite being so small. It can be helpful to have professional advice, and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about Twitter and your SEO. After you have crafted your optimised tweet, however, you want it to travel as a whole. The answer is getting users to re-tweet.

Here are some of the things you need to consider when trying to foster re-tweets:

• Simply ask. Users are slow to re-tweet without a little prompting. Just like advertising, your tweet needs to contain a call to action. Not only does this ask the first user to forward the message, it asks everyone after them. Tweets without calls to action may be picked up by your user, but will stop after the first re-tweet.

• Use the magic word. Research has shown that most re-tweets contain the word ‘please’.

• Know your lingo. If your users are Twitter users, they’ll be used to Twitter code. ‘RT’ takes up fewer characters than ‘re-tweet’, and most users will recognise the term.

• Bait the hook. Asking for every tweet to be re-tweeted looks greedy. Choose the tweets you want to travel, and use different tactics when trying to get them re-tweeted. Common calls to action, other than ‘please RT’, include ‘Check out [link]‘, ‘please vote at [link]‘, ‘follow [username]‘, ‘What do you think?’ and the ever effective, ‘help me.’

• Link up. More than two-thirds of re-tweets simply contain a link. This is good news when distributing your link is your aim.

• A word in the right place. Fitting your message into 140 characters is difficult. When you want re-tweets, you need to allow room for users to add their message. This means you need to keep your tweet down to 100 characters or less. One way to do this is to tweet your main message, then post the tweet you wish to be re-tweeted, for example talking about a new video in one tweet and posting the link in another.

A specific search engine optimisation campaign can benefit from exploiting Twitter, but Twitter savoir faire is a must for success.

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