Top tips on how you can benefit from the new Twitter search

Twitter June 10, 2011 2 Comments

Following their announcement to introduce photo and video results into the Twitter search engine, some features are beginning to be rolled out for users. The changes to Twitter search present a lot of new opportunities to brands that getting ahead of the curve and making the most of the new functionality available. While we’re not suggesting you radically change your Twitter activity purely to benefit from a search perspective – your followers will probably not appreaciate if you’re writing for a search engine – but there are some good rules that you can follow to make the most of the new functionality

Use keywords in photo uploads

As well as adding the ability to upload photos within the Twitter interface, Twitter also integrated photo and video listings into search results. So while you could always add photos into tweets via third party services such as Twitpic or Yfrog, these weren’t searchable by photos alone. As the screenshot below shows, you can now display photos when searching for particular keywords, which will affect how you write your tweets slightly. As users will be drawn to the new photo content, you should help ensure your photos are appearing by writing one or two keywords within the update itself and, if possible, the url. Photo results are shown below for the keyword Foursquare :

Upload photos regularly

To help ensure that your content is discoverable, you should make sure that you’re regularly uploading photos with tweets, where this applies. A lot of the commentary surrounding Twitter’s announcement has focused on the fact that the integration of photo and video will change the way people interact with Twitter overall, turning it into a much more visual, multi-media platform. There is going to be an increased appetite for this content now it’s added into search, so you should help ensure people are finding your content by uploading regularly, with a variety of related keywords and hashtags.

More links in your tweets

Along with Twitter’s announcements to the changes within their own interface, also came the addition of Twitter search in-browser through the Mozilla plugin, which can be downloaded here. This has changed the Twiter search experience in 2 ways. Firstly, you can choose to select Twitter from the dropdown options in the top right address bar :

Secondly, you can search within the address bar itself, once the addon is installed. Here you can type the hashtag or username in the address bar to be taken to that search result page in Twitter. The bird in the left hand corner will also flash to notify you of new tweets for your search term :

I think this addition actually presents a good opportunity for brands to include more links in their tweets. With Twitter search moving more into the in-browser experience, it’s starting to directly compete with Google and become a more mainstream search experience. But this is only useful for consumers up to a point, as your search results are still limited to the 14o character tweet limit. By including relevant links with your tweets however (that hopefully go through to your website), you can provide people with more information, that will hopefully see them engaged with your content in a new way, leaving Twitter to go through to your own site.

Use more hashtags

The new addon within Firefox allows you to search for Twitter content in the url bar itself, only when you precede the search with an @ symbol or hashtag. For this reason you should start adding more hashtags into your tweets to increase the likelihood of your tweets being found. You could have all the right content, but risk missing out on a potential audience who are using the new Twitter search in this way :

Beat the competition with video

Twitter’s integration of video also presents a new opportunity for brands on Twitter, to get ahead of the competition and show more of your content in search results. Not many brands are adding video within tweets at the moment, and even less so for content that they own as opposed to Youtube links to other videos. This is a valuable place in the new Twitter search that you can hope to appear in, but uploading regular video with tweets. These don’t need to be high-produced videos, but try a daily webcam video discussing a current topic or piece of news you have. Tag this in the right way and you can help to appear in a new place on the search engine result page on Twitter

Own your brand usernames

Another change to the Twitter search interface sees related usernames pulled into the top right hand side :

As these usernames are pulled in related to the keyword searched for, you should also treat this as another piece of the Twitter search ‘real estate’ that you should try and appear for. Make sure your house is in order and you’ve reserved the usernames related to your brand, such as ‘brandname_location’ , or relevant keywords such as ‘brandname_customerservice’ if you run more than one Twitter account.This username should contain your full brand name as opposed to an acronym, as if someone is searching for your brand name on Twitter, you want to increase the likelihood that they’ll find the right channel to reach you in.

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