I was sent a link today for a product that I thought at first glance was a joke. I was fooled last week by an elaborate hoax site on a fictional smart phone that was actually a tourism ad for Nova Scotia. So forgive me if I was a bit reluctant to bite on this one. The product is called Go-Girl and after careful examination of the site I determined that it was a real product and that I would put it out there in the twittersphere and ask the question: “Ok so I am not sure whr 2 go w/ this so I am just putting it out there. I had no idea there was a demand 4 this? http://www.go-girl.com/“. Now normally I would have either pasted the URL in the TweetDeck URL shortening field or posted the site via The Hootsuite javascript button in my Safari Bar and it would have looked like http://tinyurl.com/btp55y. This is pretty much the norm for a lot of links in tweets so that users can add as much context to the posted link as possible [remember 140 characters maximum]. Now because I did not do that, the URL went into the Twitter stream as is and un-compromised. Sending in the raw URL meant that if the fine marketing folks at Go Girl had a Twitter alert service activated and actively searching for the branded url they would be notified of the comment. They then could asses the comment and take action. Well the do and did just that. Within minutes I received the following: “Go_Girls: @jaypiddy you better believe it! The women have spoken! Over 40,000 visitors to our website yesterday! It almost crashed! xx” So they were able to talk about the brand and maybe change my mind on it.
I call this Twitter Search Engine Optimization and it will become more and more important as the Twitter base grows in the coming years. In fact the real time search functionality twitter is so powerful that I suspect that Google is trying to figure out how much the acquisition is going to cost and whether or not they have more in their war chest of cash to fend off Microsoft in the in the deal. But the Twitter Search Engine Optimization of your branded URL only works if clean un-shortened URL or your brand is mentioned by name in the tweet stream. Quite often tweets only include the URL and not your brand name in order to save the precious characters for the tweet comment.
Now if I had posted this from a tiny URL service like this “Ok so I am not sure whr 2 go w/ this so I am just putting it out there. I had no idea there was a demand 4 this? http://tinyurl.com/btp55y” there would have been no response from the company. My post and the subsequent conversations with others would have gone completely un-noticed by the Go Girl team that was monitoring the conversation on Twitter.
Companies and brands will need to figure out ways that their brands and branded URLs get into the Twitterstream the same way that they are concerned about key words getting picked up by search engine crawlers if they are to take full advantage of Twitters search capabilities.
I have one idea but would like to open the floor on the topic and see how others feel about the situation. The idea that I have for companies is to place their own “Tweet this” buttons in stories and articles, like Digg and Share this etc, that would invoke their own branded tiny URL service so that the Twitterstream would receive a shortened yet TSEO link back to the original content. Sony would have http://sony.com/A34f and I would have http://powershiftermedia.com/34E etc. I am not totally sure how it would work but I know that through javascript and an API key there would be a simple way to create this for your site.
The floor is now open. What are your thoughts on this and who will step up and create this application if it’s needed. If ya make a million or two off of the deal then you can buy me lunch.