Twitter has always been known as a great business tool when it comes to marketing online due to its popularity amongst the Internet. By using tweets to announce news, offers and other information followers of profiles are able to keep up to date with followed Twitter accounts. Not only is this a great advertisement method but it is also free (to an extent) which is probably one of the reasons Twitter is so popular within companies.
Now Twitter have announced a new feature which is available to developers – soon to be rolled out to the public. This feature allows annotations to be embedded into tweets giving even more information than what is available at the moment. At this time you are only able to tweet with 140 characters, but once the annotation feature is available another 512 bytes are available. This gives Twitter users the chance to add meta data such as websites, locations, reviews, events and more topics.
So why is this good for search engine optimisation fanatics? By being able to include metadata within tweets you have more chance of attracting new followers to your account which consequently allows you to advertise to an even bigger fan base than you would be able to initially. Yes there are programs which allow you to follow huge amounts of Twitter profiles in hope of gaining followers but this may be seen as a black hat technique which can get your profile penalised in the process.
This is only speculation at this time, but by being able to add metadata such as websites is definitely a reason for companies which haven’t got a Twitter account to register now and prepare for Twitter to take over when it comes to search engine optimisation.
