5 Marketing Action Items from Twitter's Search Update

Kipp Bodnar
Kipp Bodnar

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Twitter Search has long been an important tool for marketers. It has been a free tool for monitoring mentions of your brand and industry. Today, Twitter rolled out updates to its search platform that make the tool better for People discovery. This new update to the Twitter Search interface recommends people to follow based on a keyword phrase. As shown on the screenshot below, recommended users appear in two places. The top four users for a keyword are constantly displayed.

For example, here are the recommendations you would see when searching for "inbound marketing:"

New Twitter People Search resized 600

Twitter understands that in order to build a base of sticky and active users, it must connect its members to one another through relevant connections. This update also provides Twitter with additional advertising inventory for its monetization strategy.

5 Marketing Action Items from Twitter's Search Update

1. Optimize Bio and Tweets for Important Keywords - Twitter's Search update makes it even more important to include relevant keywords in your Twitter bio and messages. After doing a dozen or so queries, I could tell that Twitter was using bio information to help recommend People results. Yet Twitter was also recommending people based on whether they tweet about that topic regularly. So identify the keywords you want to be recommended for and make sure they appear in your bio and in your tweets.

2. Leverage for Influencer Identification - Another factor that seems to be important in the ranking of recommended users is number of Twitter followers. In this way Twitter is making it easier for you to conduct influencer research. By searching important industry keywords you can identify key influencers to partner with for building reach and lead generation efforts on Twitter.

3. Monitor Competitors - These People recommendations could become quite competitive. Regularly monitor important keywords to understand where you rank in comparison to your competitors in the People tab of Twitter Search. If a competitor outranks you, analyze how your Twitter marketing and keyword relevance is different than theirs, and determine strategies for improvement.

4. Build Reach - Social media reach is quickly becoming the new PageRank or inbound link. Reach is becoming a common metric for determining authority on the social Web. While it might not be the best ranking method, the number of Twitter followers your company has will become increasingly more important. It will not only affect your ranking in Twitter Search results, but also impact your visibility in Google and Bing. The updated Twitter Search is only one more reason to focus on building your business reach through attracting more followers.

5. Look For Integration - On the social Web product updates like this new one from Twitter Search have far-reaching implications beyond Twitter.com users. This ability to discover new users and influencers will likely make it to an API feature and be found in third-party Twitter applications and other software solutions. Look for tools that integrate this new type of data with existing marketing tools and functions. While this new data is valuable, it becomes more valuable when integrated with other marketing functions.

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