Twitter was initially meant to be a tool to answer the two commonly asked questions – “What you are doing?” and “Where are you?”. But soon after its launch twitter exploded. It became a social networking phenomenon that very few people initially expected it to be. Twitter is now a golden tool for Marketing and Networking, and maintaining a twitter network is more important than you probably think. Here are five tools to get you started.

Arrow Build Your Network

Arrow Twubble : Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow. Twubble’s suggestions are ordered based on the number of your friends that are following the tweeter. Every suggestion is accompanied by a list of your friends who are following the particular user, his twitter profile picture, link to Google Search page for the person and the Follow button.

Arrow Twits Like Me : This service analyzes your tweets and suggests other Twitter users with similar tweets.

Arrow TwitterLocal : TwitterLocal allows you to find tweeters in your neighborhood. All you have to do is enter your location and TwitterLocal would generate an RSS or XML Feed to filter out tweets around your area. TwitterLocal is also available as an Adobe AIR app so that you can follow folks from your neighborhood right from your desktop.

Arrow Maintain Your Network

Arrow Twitter Karma : This tool allows you to quickly check out which of your friends are not following you, or which of your followers you are yet to follow. Best of all it allows you to bulk follow/unfollow users. However, there are some issues with this tool and sometimes it displays outdated data.
Still, its an awesome tool and can really come in handy when you are looking to clean up your network. (This utility is currently non-operational, but stay tuned.)

Arrow My Tweeple : Like Twitter Karma, My Tweeple displays who you are following and who is following you. While Twitter Karma displays a quick overview about your Twitter contacts, My Tweeple provides a more detailed representation of your twitter contacts. It gives you the option to Follow/Unfollow/Block any user. Additionally you get the option to Ding a user. When you Ding a user the user id gets reported to My Tweeple as a spammer and it uses this data to warn others about the rotten apple in the Twitter community.

I hope you find this article useful. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

I seem to have created a little controversy, in Twitter, to some of the comments of the above post.  I wanted to take the time to make it clear that I do not mean to say that Twitter has no SEO value.

Indeed, syndicated links can provide some ‘link juice’ which can be seen as a potential SEO advantage.  For those of you unaware with this concept, the idea of syndication is that RSS feeds (which do not have the ‘nofollow’ tag) can in fact be used to provide some RSS value to the links you post in Twitter.

I have made an effort over the past couple days to find a single URL that has been indexed as a result of a single syndicated RSS feed.  So while some people, as I have said before have had some varying amount of results providing direct SEO value from Twitter, it proves to be an inefficient venue.

This means that syndication of Twitter is not a widely developed idea.  It might be a great idea for someone to develop a chatter application, but even then we are limited to the potential hope that this will be picked up by the search engines.  In short, it seems like a lot of effort to propagate a link, and resources are probably better utilized if your goal is SEO.

Hope for the future?  Absolutely.  One potential, most likely move, is Twitter will begin to use bit.ly exclusively for their URL shortening services.  For those who are not aware of this relationship, bit.ly is a product of Summize, which has been purchased by Twitter.

This as I understand will have some serious SEO chops. Bit.ly analyzes all shortened URLs through Open Calais (developed by some friends of mine at a company I used to work for), and making this data available in public RSS feeds.  As Thomson Reuters, and Bit.ly, look to find other ways of presenting this content and creating toolkits for development teams through Open Calais, the possibilities could be mind-boggling.

There is a serious future for it.

That said, Twitter remains primarily a way of building your relationships online.  As an SEO tool it remains pretty inefficient.  Would I say not to use it?  Never.  Twitter is a valuable marketing tool, and its influences will grow over time.  There is no doubt about that fact in my mind.

However, I would, as a seasoned Product Manager, suggest tempering value vs. effort when pitching it as an SEO application in your organization or to a potential client.  I believe that you risk creating expectations, or potentially creating a project where effort exceeds the return.

“…does Twitter have any SEO value?”

This question came to George via Twitter last night about the value of using Twitter as a part of your SEO strategy.  Twitter is a great social networking tool to create relationships with your ‘followers’ about the activities of your business.

From a structural standpoint, Twitter creates a “nofollow” tag advising Search Engines to ignore all posted links.  While it is not primarily an influential SEO tool, it is an invaluable SMO (Social Media Optimization) tool.

Twitter and other social media tools, like Twitter, are primarily extensions for your branding and awareness strategy, which will allow you to manage your credibility as a source for influencing the generation of SEO opportunities.

From a traffic perspective, many bloggers and businesses are using Twitter as an incremental source of traffic and link juice with varying degrees of success.  Twitter’s primary benefit is the ability to create a viral marketing tool delivered to a willing audience.

Take, as an example, @ricksanchezcnn.  In July Rick Schanchez of CNN began to use Twitter as a means to communicate with and market to his viewers.  As a result he has claimed to have seen a rise in his ratings as a result of the interactivity between himself and his viewers via Twitter.

Rick Sanchez has been able to convert his Twitter activity to an increased audience.  If you follow Mr. Sanchez, you will notice that his posts are not just questions about news items.  Often times you will find him posting about his family time, or impressions of something he just saw on TV.

Social Media tools allow you to put a personality behind your brand, learn more about your customers through interaction.  When thinking about Twitter as a source of traffic, think about how your personality builds the type of goodwill and awareness into business.

It is telling how the further we stray from the corner store, Social Media has inserted those concepts and values that made the corner store the engine that drove our commercial decisions.

In short, Twitter is not an SEO tool. Twitter is one of the great online PR and marketing tools that can be used to build your brand and client base through “word of mouth” and personality.