Generally speaking, Twitter is used to syndicate online social activities into snippets of short messages. 140 characters is the ideal compression format to digest the overwhelming amount of information that springs out of the social Web. Twitter is commonly used to syndicate activities from social networks (Youtube), Social Bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon), blogs, and social aggregators (Friendfeed). Twitter is not limited to syndicating social activities, but this dimension alone adds a lot of value to the magic of the San Francisco-based company.
I appreciate the social network for its real social virtues, and the direct benefits of syndicating and broadcasting my social activities on Twitter. Unfortunately, this inward distribution model does not provide me enough satisfaction when the SEO beast within me awakens.
Twitter SEO
In terms of SEO, Twitter shows more potential if you take the outward distribution approach. Outward means, instead of syndicating and broadcasting on Twitter, Twitter is the content-generating source that feeds other publishing services.
The benefits of the outward distribution approach are three-fold:
- A tweet is a piece of content that can be sourced in infinitely diverse ways, manually or automatically.
- The content generation flow can be managed from anywhere (your mobile phone).
- With the proper tools applied, a Twitter account becomes a publicly-shared bundle of relevant links that can be recycled to serve other SEO purposes.