Photo courtesy Tina White Lights via Flickr
Lots of people are talking about Twitter’s new List functionality. In a feature long overdue, Twitter now allows you to divide up the people you follow into manageable chunks, based on topics, geography or anything else you like. The idea is similar to Facebook Lists, which we’ve covered here before. Playing around with Twitter Lists, it seems like a useful way to organize your contacts (if a little buggy at first). Still, there’s an aspect of this that’s attracting less attention but is just as important: Lists come with dedicated URLs that you can make public, providing a big opportunity for search engine optimization.
Search engines like Google love social content because it’s frequently updated, and helping people find your content through search is a growing focus for professional communicators trying to ensure visibility for their key messages. That’s the idea behind a session I’ll lead with Edelman Digital’s Gary Goldhammer at PRSA International next month titled Leverage the Power of Pull [PDF]. Twitter Lists are perfect for this: any list of tweeters you create is given a dedicated URL consisting of your username and up to 25 characters that you specify, such as http://twitter.com/jaykrall/a-few-folks-at-cision. If you make it public, anyone logged in to Twitter can then view tweets from the people you have chosen.
As Google and Microsoft Bing begin indexing more content from social sites, Lists may offer us a new way to curate information in highly useful and visible ways. What groups of people can you pull together that others might find interesting?
Related posts:
- Managing your personal and professional presence on Facebook through Friend Lists Now you can have your cake and tag yourself in...
Tags: Bing, Google, SEO, Twitter Lists
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Your Twitter post is good and brings up some valid points, glad I found your post! I believe that social media is going to be the future home for any and all advertising and marketing. With Google’s real-time search and other search engines catching on quickly you will see many SEO Companies becoming Twitter SEO Companies very soon! I wrote a post that you may be interested to read about Twitter SEO
I am an avid Twitter user and focus on building the value that I add to the rest of my social network, I help to promote any and everyone that asks me for help (as long as they are not loco in la cabessa!). I believe that optimizing your profiles is very important, just as optimizing your website is, but the most important part of any SEO efforts is having quality content. The same goes for Twitter, you need quality content and updates for people to read and link to. If you tweet about the right subjects you will notice more and more incoming links to your twitter profile when your tweets start being republished on other people’s blogs (provides some temporary page rank). Also you can do your own personal “Social Media Press Release” and some good old fashioned article directory link building with your Twitter profile.
Social media is the first step to an “open-source” media and news. My twitter username is @gohewitt for anyone looking to follow. I am excited to see what comes of all of this and feel that we still don’t have a clue what being “Connected” really means just yet!
Thanks for your comment!