Why You need to take Twitter a lot more seriously

You know, for a long time, I have not really thought too much about Twitter. At present I have about 150 followers and I am on 5 separate lists i.e. 5 lists are following me.

Sure I have it as a part of my marketing mix. My blog posts get automatically tweeted and I have a 'follow me' link on my blog. But that's it. I have not given it much extra thought.

I have read one or two Twitter WSOs just to see if someone else has got the thing cracked and could help me see where it would best fit into what I am doing and, perhaps more to the point, why I should be concerned about it.

None of the information I gathered from the web and the WSOs really explained the power of the platform and many of the systems consisted of following as many people as you could in order to get reciprocal following. Apparently there are tools that do this kind of thing and you can ditch people after they follow you etc etc. None of that appeals to me.

But today, as sometimes happens to me, I relalised exactly why I need to take Twitter a lot more seriously.

I was doing a bit of keyword research. By the way, this is not my most favourite of tasks and if anyone knows of a good service, I would love to hear of it. However, I realised that my site has a number #2 position on page #1 for a 'time management' related term. So I decided to actually type 'time management' into Ms G.

I wasn't on page #1 for that term, but scanning the page I noticed something very interesting. The company I used to work for were on page #1 of Google!

Now, I genuinely was just about to draft a congratulatory email to my old colleague, the marketing manager, because that company, as good as it was (and still is) at what it does, actually normally has crap rankings in Google. I initially thought what a great job that he must have done.

But then ... it hit me!

The reason that the company was on page #1 was nothing to do with how well their SEO was getting at all. It was for the following two reasons:

1. I was logged into my Google account
2. I follow that company on Twitter

Now stay with me here, because this may not have struck you before either.

Sure you need pages that are optimised for the relevant terms, but you can get Twitter traffic without backlinks because you can clearly get page #1 listings in the SERPS for those people who follow you.

OK, now I know there will be people who might want to chip in and say stuff like: yeah, well that's only if they are logged into Google and that's true. But do you know something, with Google+ and the +1 button plus gMail, Adsense and a whole host of other reasons, my view is that more and more people ARE going to be logged into Google when they use the search engine in the future.

So, let it sink in if it hasn't already, and before today it simply hadn't for me, you need to work on getting a huge Twitter following because, in the future, the SERPS results for YOUR Twitter followers will be heavily influenced in YOUR favour.

Will