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How to leverage Twitter as an SEO? Take a look at my top tips and tools to use twitter as an SEO Specialist, from identifying the latest news, exchanging with other SEOs to distribute and amplify your own information, check it out.

You can also watch this video and leave a comment over YouTube. To follow more updates on Crawling Mondays, subscribe to the YouTube channel and follow to @CrawlingMondays in Twitter.

Video Transcription

Welcome to a Twitter special edition of Crawling Mondays. The other day I reached the 66,666 followers, and then I promised that I will be sharing about how I leverage Twitter for SEO, so here we go.

I believe the Twitter has helped me in SEO, especially in three different ways. The first one, back 2007 when I was starting in SEO, I also around the same time, and started using Twitter for the best way I found at that time to start using Twitter was to start learning more about SEO. I remember that I started following the SEO’s account, the more prominent SEOs at that time.

This how I started learning more about SEO in general, interacting more of their community, and in fact, just one of the most important aspects I believe with Twitter, it hasn’t only allowed me to keep updated about the latest SEO topics, but has also allowed me to interact and get to know very interesting, knowledgable people, the industry leaders, that otherwise I wouldn’t have never had the chance to meet. And for a long time, I have ended up meeting at conferences that I have had the chance to start attending and speaking at, but it has been after a while. At the beginning, it was only over Twitter, so I think that this is big opportunity.

One hand, you are able to keep updated about SEO if you follow the SEO relevant accounts and professionals that are sharing a lot over Twitter, which is very positive on one hand, and then on the other hand, these are real connections and interactions that you can have and ended up being friends with. For example, for me, a long time ago, one of these people were [inaudible 00:01:51], and then funnily enough, just a few days later, I ended up getting to know, finally, Miriam Schwab, right.

And I had been a Twitter connection, even a Facebook connection with her for many years already but it was like just a few days later that I ended up meeting her. Yes I know that a lot of people think that Twitter can be a huge waste of time. If you don’t focus, you can end up procrastinating a lot of hours. And then on the other hand, that there are trolls over Twitter, ask. There are good and bad people in all places, but what I will say is to focus on positive, to try to on one hand follow the people that you identify they are sharing value, and can provide meaningful, insightful input about SEO on a daily basis.

So besides Twitter to follow up with SEO news by following the SEO blocks and professional’s accounts and Twitter to develop meaningful connection with community that you can later on get to know in real life. There’s this other aspect with Twitter that it can help you a lot to distribute your own content as a promotional channel because if you interact with the community, you share meaningful, relevant news and information, at some point you will end up also sharing yours in a very natural way, and you will tend to end up being distributed in a much more easy way.

Community management 101, right? Really useful to promote your content, to distribute your content, and what I do sometimes is even sharing initially an idea over Twitter, and if I see that it gets traction enough, it can help me to validate that is a good idea, and I end up developing or creating a Crawling Mondays edition, like in this particular case for example with the content pruning optimization flow chart, or writing a blog post, for example a topic that I am passionate about, really care about, and I was sharing over Twitter, a lot about progressive web apps and SEO.

But initially, these were topics that I talked about at the beginning over Twitter, and I saw that people were interested and this is why I ended up covering these topics, whether presentation or longer blog posts or even with a Crawling Mondays. So it can be a source of inspiration too, and validation, besides promotion. So there’s another positive of Twitter.

And I know that a few people say that there are a lot of [inaudible 00:04:13] over Twitter. That is why I have a maximum number of people that I follow. I follow a maximum 699 people, which I know that is a completely random number that I chose at some point; however, I have found that this is a good number that allows me to keep updated, not only about SEO, but all of the different topics that I care about. And you are more than welcome to take a look at who I am following and I follow people not only in English, but also in Spanish and a little bit of French too, from all over the world. Not only about SEO, but also web development, feed optimization, progressive web apps, mobile development, WordPress, so you can see a lot of it of who I am following, and you can maybe identify a few good accounts that you think that might be valuable for you to follow too.

Here are a few tools that I use to be able to keep up with the news and information and resources that are shared over Twitter without procrastinating and getting lost amongst so much information. So I use Nuzzel. Nuzzel is a really, really useful tool that you can connect with your social media accounts, and it will tell you which are the news that are being shared within your community. So for example, if I am disconnected for whole afternoon, I can come back and I can see which have been those interesting type of resources that I have likely missed.
Then SparkToro is a little bit similar than Nuzzel. It has this very straightforward, much clearer type of viewing, completely focused up with Twitter too.

Then I also use BuzzSumo too to follow up with specific topics, so for example, I can see all of the Twitter shares about marketing, and I have the same for SEO and other topics, guys. So you can set trending feeds, trending alerts, and you can select from where do you want to see information from. So I can identify also resources to share that might be valuable.

And then, on the other hand, another good way to identify what is much more meaningful is a social media tracker. And I know that there is Twitter analytics, but sorry, it’s not [inaudible 00:06:16] useful, I have to say. The way that things are displayed, unfortunately, there’s a long way to go. So I use SEMrush social media tracker, which is great because it doesn’t only allow you to follow your own presence over many different social media platform, but also your competitors or your leaders, those that you want to have as a reference. You think that from where you can identify something meaningful to share too.

So for example, here’s my profile and I can see activity, engagement, and these are other accounts that I also tracked and follow to identify also opportunities. I can see the activities, those that have had more engagement, I can see the hashtags that have been more popular, the people who have mentioned me too, important accounts during this timeline, so I can change the time, and the top mentions that I have gotten. So this a good way to identify who are your top followers, the top mentions, what is really interesting for your audience, those tweets that have generally much more engagement, not only from you but also your competitor, and your activity all of the time to see if you are growing as expected or not. Also identify what is liked or not, the ways that you can optimize all the time.

So with these tools, I hope that also your Twitter activity is much more focused, and again, my recommendation here is to keep focus on the positive, be nice to people. That is the first rule that we should all follow in whatever we do. Hopefully you will be able to use more Twitter to keep up with your news, use more Twitter to build connection, and be able to interact with more nice people within the industry that you can end up learning from and also meeting from real life.

And last but not least, use Twitter as an application channel, distribution channel, and you can use these tools also to identify more meaningful news, trends, to track your activity over time, to identify what are the people also doing well or not, and identify opportunities also too. Engage in a much better way and make Twitter meaningful for your SEO day to day. Hopefully, this has been useful for you. Thank you very much and see you in the next Crawling Mondays.