It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. Thats more like a real-time search, right?

Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:

Were not indexing all of Twitter at this time just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitters public API to surface Tweets in people search. Wed love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

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Now, when you view Followers or Following, youre presented with a lot more information, almost eliminating the need to click over to the persons page to get the full scoop on them. Now youll see not only their avatar and username, but also their real name, latest tweet and location. On the righthand side where the Follow button used to be, theres now a new button. Click on it and youre presented with several action options: @ Mention xxxx, Direct Message xxxx, Follow xxxx, and Unfollow xxxx. So its nice in that theres a lot more information available in one place and theres less clicking involved.

Heres a quick peek at my Followers page so you can see the changes (click to view full size):

Whats this mean for search engine optimization? Well, we all know by now that SEO is far more than just link building. Its also a lot of marketing, and if youre on Twitter its an excellent way to market your website. I was a little late in the game getting my site involved with Twitter, but not too late, and it is definitely paying off in terms of gaining new traffic, new loyal readers, new readers, and even some advertisers. It also helps us to connect with our readers in a way thats just not possible through comment forms on our site alone. This UI update really helps to save time in checking out potential followers, or people you want to follow, especially if youre constantly bombarded with new followers or manually hunt for new ones to follow yourself.

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Get Started the Right Way

When I started using Twitter, I went about it the wrong way. My user name wasn’t my name and I tried to create a profile that wasn’t tied to my company or me. Because of this no one really paid attention to my Twitter profile and cared about what I tweeted. So if you are new to Twitter, make sure your profile represents you.

On top of that you need to make your profile is inviting. For example you want to use a picture of yourself and design your profile instead of just using the generic designs Twitter gives you. And when doing so make sure you take into account colors, because you don’t want it to be too distracting and causes people to ignore your tweets.

Building a Following

When you first sign up for Twitter there are two ways you can get followers. The first is the quantity route and the second is the quality route. If you go for the quantity route you can do a few things:

• Look for people you already know.
• Tweet your blog, so every time you write a blog posts it goes to Twitter. You also want to make sure your twitter profile is linked to from your blog.
• Offer your followers freebies and gifts. The more you offer to them, the more people will follow you. A good way to do this is through contests.
• Every time someone tweets you, make sure you respond to them.
• Put your Twitter name in your email signature.

If you are looking to get quality users, you can:

• Identify and follow the experts in your industry.
• Gain people’s friendship by doing things such as replying to their tweets.
• Always give more than you take by doing things such as giving other people advice and when they ask for it.

The Art of Tweeting

As you probably already know, I don’t tweet too often. I have only made a few hundred tweets in a year to 2 years. After reading Twitter Power, I finally understood how I should be tweeting.

• Follow Twitter etiquette. For example you never want to spam (which I have done), you want to give credits when retweeting, and most importantly you want to stick with 140 characters (don’t create multiple tweets to get across a message).
• You want to join the conversation. I always just tweeted what I wanted, but my profile never grew. The main reason for this is because I never joined the conversation and contributed to it.
• Make sure you are interesting on Twitter. If you want to tweet crap, that’s fine, but you will probably gain a lot more followers if you are interesting.

Conclusion

There is a lot more great information that you can learn by reading Twitter Power. I personally loved it so much that I recommend you get out there right now and buy a copy. If you don’t you will regret it!

By the way, you should also Twitter about Twitter Power.

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