Social Media Link Building With Twitter
July 15th 2009 9:00 AM
Categories: 
Link building may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Twitter. Its potential in this regard should not be underestimated however. It is one of the best tools you can use to gain highly targeted, relevant, and natural links to your content. Just like any link building campaign, the use of Twitter for building links must be executed properly or you risk wasting lots of time with poor results.
Here are 5 Tips to Build Links Using Twitter:
1. Focus On A Niche
Select a specific topic related to the content you are building links for, and build your entire profile around that niche. The more focused and defined your profile is, the higher your chances of attracting useful followers and links.
If you have multiple websites or cover several unrelated niches, build a separate Twitter profile for each one. HootSuite is a great tool for managing multiple Twitter profiles.
To reflect your focused niche, you should Personalize Your Profile through your screen name, description, who you follow, your website, the content of your tweets, and a custom Twitter background.
2. Gain Targeted Followers
Resist the urge to blindly obtain as many followers as you can. A more productive use of your time is to find people within the niche or subject area you have based your profile on. This drives more relevant followers to your site, which improves the chances of obtaining links and retweets. A high proportion of Targeted Followers also act as a way to brand your Twitter identity.
3. Provide Relevant, Focused, and Valuable Tweets
Regularly tweet news, content, and links that are relevant to your identified subject area and followers. If you persistently Tweet Valuable Information to your followers, they will return the favor.
Try to limit the tweets about your personal life to under 25%. Personal information is fine and creates a closer relationship, just don’t overdo it.
Also make sure the majority of links in your tweets are not to your own websites and content. This goes a long way in making your profile more natural. Tweeters today are pretty good at filtering out accounts that seem overly spammy or automated. Use Twitter primarily to network and identify opportunities within the community, as opposed to only gain inbound links and traffic.
4. Find The Heavy Hitters
Twitter is a great research tool to identify the movers and shakers in your subject area. Many of the influential personalities in any field now have Twitter accounts, and many qualified followers. It is easy to find them with a little bit of research. Simply search for keywords in your niche using Twitter search tools such as Twitter Search and Twazzup.
Once you have found these valuable profiles you can network with them using Twitter or other channels such as email or directly. Requesting links does not have to be done through Twitter, and the location of the links themselves do not necessarily have to reside on Twitter either.
Twitter is an excellent way to find authorities in your field you can request links from. To improve your chances of obtaining a link, make sure to come up with a value proposition that will be of benefit to them.
5. Integrate Twitter on Your Website
Not everyone will reach your website from Twitter, so provide a highly visible Follow Me On Twitter button. This is a simple and effective way to obtain targeted Twitter followers.
Embed widgets that make it easy for people to re-tweet your content from your website. This will increase exposure to your profile, gaining you more followers, traffic, and links in return. I find the TweetMeme widget to be useful and reliable.
Excellent Profile Example
An example of a very well done profile is TheRealPRMan for the reasons I’ve highlighted in this article. You will find Steve Farnsworth’s Profile Page, as well as his followers to be highly focused and relevant to online marketing. His retweet of 6 Great Social Media Monitoring Tools gave me a nice traffic spike and showed me first hand Twitter’s ability to attract valuable visitors.
Implementing the above strategies and tips should help you gain higher quality traffic and links to your website. In link building today, the name of the game is quality. Several very high quality links should be preferred over many mediocre ones.
Having your mind set to obtaining quality and relevant followers pays dividends in your link building efforts.
Do you use Twitter for link building? How has it helped you? What useful advice do you have for using it to build links?
