There are two types of keywords on Twitter. The actual keyword as it exists, such as “college” and the hash tag “#college” version of the keyword.

Searching for either of these will display two different sets of results.

It goes without saying that the natural method of search is to type in the keyword without a hash. If someone is interested in tweets about Star Trek, they are more likely to search for “Star Trek” than “#startrek”.

Because there are two ways to perform this search, there are two ways to optimize tweets for these searches. You can optimize for the hash tag version and the actual version of the keyword.

For this article, I am going to focus on how to optimize for the actual version of the keyword, the one without the hash tags.

Keyword Search Frequency

In my research, I found that there is more competition in keywords without the hash tags. I performed a search with the hash tag and without it. I noticed that the time between tweets is much smaller without the hash tag, which proves that the keyword appears on a higher frequency.

This means that the competition to rank for this keyword will be much higher. Which means as a performance marketer, you have to keyword optimize every opportunity you are given.

Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization in general is a well-covered topic. But I am going to introduce a method that is not currently being utilized on Twitter. But you can rest assured that as soon as people become aware of this technique it will spread like a wildfire.

A huge missed opportunity is in the shortened links people use on Twitter. Why do we post these links? We post these links to drive traffic to them. What if we could create keyword rich shortened links as easily as we create them now?

Of these two links, which has more SEO value?

http://9mp.com/t7x

http://college.9mp.com/t7x

From a purely cosmetic point of view the link with “college” is generally preferred because it gives insight into what the link is about.

There is an even greater value in including keywords in your shortened URL’s. Yes, you guessed it, through the keyword that is in the URL. Twitter takes these keywords into consideration in their search results.

Want proof? Here is an update I posted today from my personal Twitter account @JoshuaOdmark as a test:

Ashford University ranks high on the list for an online school. Checkout their listing here: http://college.9mp.com/t7x

Twitter Search Results

As you can see, the keyword “college” is not anywhere in the tweet except for in the URL. Here is a search result after this message was posted:

The 2nd result shows that my tweet showed up for a keyword that only existed in the shortened URL.

This proves that the keywords in a shortened URL are a huge opportunity for SEO on Twitter.

How To Get Branded Shortened URL’s

I recommend using a URL Shortener such as http://9mp.com because not only does it offer detailed statistics, free usage, vanity url’s, and all the features you are used to with the hundreds of URL shorteners out there, but you can also brand your URL’s for free.

http://9mp.com gives you the option of branding your URL’s with any sub domain you wish. It also allows you to tag on keywords at the end of your URL for additional SEO on Twitter.

http://college.9mp.com/t7x/education

This URL gives you two extra keywords to maximize your SEO on Twitter.

If you are into any form of performance marketing from selling purses online to music album promotion, and you are not using branded URL’s, you are missing the biggest opportunity available on Twitter right now.

Contact Information

Contact a representative at branding@9mp.com to receive information on how to secure your own custom branded URL. It took less than 10 minutes for my custom branded URL to be setup and available for usage inside of my 9mp.com account.

How can someone possibly follow that many people? Clearly they are not on twitter to follow 39,000 people. Their theory is that if they can follow the maximum amount of people that Twitter will allow them to follow, that a percentage of them will follow them back. Thus increasing the amount of people that are following their twitter account. Which gives them an audience to broadcast their “tweets” to.

This is spam. This is devaluation.

An associate recently sent me a link to tweepme.com.  If you join this site, they promise to increase your followers into the thousands in a very short amount of time.

This is spam.

How can they do this? The idea behind this site is for every member that joins the site, all the previous members will follow this person. Thus, as the site gets larger from members signing up, the “benefit” they can provide the registered user increases. This is a good model considering the reason they are on the site is to increase their followers.

This is devaluation.

A great benefit of Twitter is the ability to gain connections to like-minded individuals that allows you to share short bursts of communication that benefits the followers of the individual sending the transmission.

Services such as TweepMe are popping up all over the Internet with the purpose of gaming the Twitter system for some sort of measurable gain.

Twitter’s largest problem is going to be combating spam. It is the same problem Google is facing and will continue to face.

One of the problems is how easy it is to game the system with the Twitter API. In just two hours, I was able to replicate Twollow.com’s service and setup a system of cron jobs that effectively maxed out the Twitter API daily limitations. I can autofollow and then unfollow people over a certain period of time. My script will autofollow people based on search results. It is a very handy script that allows me to create a valuable twitter account automatically. I am not using it to game the system by gaining as many followers as I can, I am using it to find people who WILL be interested in my tweets.

Part of the problem is that twitter gives anyone the ability to gain access to search results on a massive scale on a daily basis. By logging these “tweets” from people who display them publicly (anyone on Twitter), I can create a massive amount of relationships between the tweets and myself.

This opens the door to many people who would consider black hat tactics.

Personally, I think the Twitter API is fantastic. I love spending time playing around with all of the data that can be retrieved through their API. It truly is inspiring to pull the data locally and manipulate it into something that can be useful. For example, I can pull tweets relating to backpacking in Washington State to compile a backpacking in Washington State resource. With innovative search techniques, I could build a valuable resource for anyone interested in that niche. Now plug in any topic you can imagine into the above example.

When all the cards are on the table, I believe Twitter’s biggest problem will be combating spam. Facebook is going to run into the same problem as Twitter. And Google has already been fighting this problem for years.

I remember a distinct point in time where I started to notice the Google Results being less accurate due to people spamming their way to the top.

It is only a matter of time before Twitter is taken over by spam.

When there were reports of Twitter being purchased, I instantly thought of Google. If spam is the one thing that could topple Twitter, it would make sense to strike a deal with the company who has the best chance at beating it.

Twitter spam has been minimal up until this point, but you WILL see it become an issue yet this year.

How Twitter handles it will make or break them.

Here are a couple resources aimed to stop the twitter spam:

Stop Twitter Spam

Twitter Blog About Spam

TechCrunch on Twitter Spam

Mashable on Twitter Spam

Don’t even bother googling it, it doesn’t exist. I just made it up.

After spending a little time watching the evolution of Twitter, which quickly followed the revolution of media, I find myself blown away at the incredible rate at which innovation is occurring. Each new week represents a different week than the past one. A new product, service, or feature pops up almost seemingly daily.

The actual idea of Twitter seems somewhat useless to me as it stands now, or atleast it is a fad. But something that grows as quickly as Twitter and gains a following the size the Twitter has, means that there is clearly something to it.

Facebook should also be mentioned on this note, because it to, has grown rapidly.

What have both Twitter and Facebook given us? They have inspired innovation into those who thought they could not be innovative. Every day I spend searching Facebook or Twitter yields another creative individual who has reached out in someway, shape, or form. Which is truly incredible if you think about it.

As social media uses the Internet as its medium, it reminds me of what the printing press did for the distribution of literature. By taking an author and directly connecting him/her to a reader, it is creating an intimate connection between the two that could not possibly have had the same effect if it required an intermediary. Nothing is lost in translation.

Social media gives the “little guy” the means to overcome the various barriers to entry that exist in society as a whole. Whether it be lack of opportunity, lack of wealth, or the absence of a voice, social media reestablishes the dialogue between author/reader and creates a real-time dialogue.

The rapid rate of innovation in the social media market, due in part to services like heroku & herokugarden, seems to be accelerating when an application can be built quickly thanks to the Twitter API.

Sometimes when life is coming at you so fast, you can miss quite obvious things. Today I realized that the innovation that is happening online right now is unprecedented. All across the world people are connecting together through all sorts of innovative ideas sprung from the social media platform. The most exciting part is the fact that this is just the beginning.

I predict that a companies social media standing will have an undeniable affect on the repor that they hold with their customers. Which is why AT&T will be the last company to give into social media, the top dogs in the auto industry won’t even get a chance to take a swing, and @oprah will turn into a phenomina.