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Twitter, the net’s networking success story, is intriguing and intimidating because of its message limitations: they can be 140 characters, and no more.

This is to say; each message sent on Twitter can be no larger than the previous sentence. Not an additional letter, space, period or dash can be added. These limitations have proven to be the greatest asset and the greatest challenge for people trying to use Twitter for any number of purposes.

On the advantageous side, the short messages have created an entire culture of Twitter-fluent writers. The brevity of the message stretches creative muscles, making people use every trick to get the most information into the fewest characters. On the other hand it creates a severe headache for the marketing minded, as it doesn’t leave much room to present a case. Thus the vast majority of Tweets are short little social comments or updates, and most marketing revolves around calling attention to particular links.

Of course, there are always ways around limitations, and Twitter is something that every seriously market-minded organization needs to embrace in order to see continued success on the web. In the case of short message services like Twitter, the key lies as much in the peripheral data that builds up around the message as in the content itself.

Be SEO Minded

Twitter profiles are now ranked by search engines, Google in particular. Every SEO technique you’ve learned now has a new, exciting purpose.

For example, consider the biography you’re able to construct using Twitter. This is a ripe opportunity to develop some brand recognition right away. Put the title of the brand you’re marketing in the bio, and consider including the most relevant keywords in your profile. As ever, do so in a way that respects the user’s intelligence, and gives them something worth reading. Simply stringing together a chain of keywords is not the way to go.

Include keywords in your Tweets as well, taking care not to be terribly obvious about it. The first 20-30 characters are the best place, as later words are of decreased importance in a Google ranking search.

Identify Your Audience

Each brand rises and falls on the whim of the audience, known in this case as tweeple.

There are a number of applications available to help you with the process of identifying the tweeple that you want to cultivate into an audience. Twitterholic can help you identify the movers and shakers based on their Twitter traffic and their location. If you know your field or brand well, you can use this to locate groups with similar interests and woo them to your feed. Tweepz is a similar tool, focusing on location, and Twitter itself has a ‘near this location’ feature that can be used to identify tweeple nearby your center of business.

Let’s Give Them Something to Tweet About

Yes, Twitter is an effective way to quickly distribute information. But its real power is in its ability to create conversations about something interesting.

In theory you could simply gather up a large user list of tweeple and start spamming them with links promoting your latest gig. This is a surefire way to get flagged for abuse or ignored entirely, and thus is rather counterproductive to good marketing goals.

Instead, consider using alternative methods to drum up those conversations that travel like wildfire.

For example, there is the technique of Alternate Reality Gaming. This is a phenomenon based on the idea of taking ‘real’ events and building a game out of them. Last Call Poker was an ARG that intended to drum up sales for an upcoming video game, GUN.

LCP spread out information about gatherings, online incentives, and other attractions to get people excited about the western theme of the game. Tokens such as poker chips and other goodies were given out at these events, and GUN went on to have a very successful launch. People were invited into the world of the western, and the chatter eventually included 8 million participants.

This kind of rogue advertising is tailor-made to work with Twitter. Locations and dates can easily fall within the 140 character limitation, as can short explanations. Consider creating an ARG with a short story designed to work within 140 characters, locate an audience with the assorted Twitter tools at your disposal, and plan some exciting events to promote your brand. The chance to get involved always gets people talking, and the more esoteric games can span entire continents.

There are other methods, some more appropriate to each individual brand. Perhaps a modest bicycling business isn’t suited to promote a large ARG experience. They could, however, organize a bicycling flash mob by hopping onto the local bike hobbyist twitter feed and posting a date and time. The trick is less which technique you use, and more that you do your best to make it relevant. As always, strong content and clear presentation will win out over gimmicks and sales speak.

Also, consider one last thought. The introductory statements of each section in this article are Twitter compatible, and so is this one. Good luck and happy Tweeting.

Author Bio: Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to Brandsplat.com or visit our blog at http://www.ibrandcasting.com

It is instructive and inspiring to take a look at the people who have succeeded in your field. Whether it’s an attempt to learn from their mistakes and victories or just a pause to reflect on the admirable accomplishments of another, studying the work of those who’ve set the benchmark can inspire reflection and spur us on to greater heights.

The world of branding success stories is one of the most fickle, given the rise of the web. Every day, there is more new information generated and discarded than has existed for most of human history. Trends and fads come and go with ever-increasing speed, and things considered hilarious and exciting baffle people just a few months later. Then there are successes that fundamentally change the way the world sees things. They become so ingrained that everyone wonders where they’d been the whole time.

Wikipedia

There is not enough good in the world to say about the Wiki project. Those who would criticize it for lacking accuracy and scholarly rigor have totally missed the point. Wikipedia is the spirit of what the web is meant to be. It is cooperative, self-correcting, open to interpretation, controversial and dynamic. Ever changing and yet extremely distinct, it represents the purest expression of what the web can and is meant to do. People are talking about Web 2.0, but it’s honestly already here in the form of the Wiki.

Wikipedia is a simple idea, one so straightforward that it could be imagined it shouldn’t work – an encyclopedia free of charge, open for anyone in the world to edit. It shouldn’t continue to exist, by all logic. The internet is full of trolls who will eagerly fax sheets of black paper to people they’re displeased with, over and over until the receiving machine runs out of ink and seizes up. What in the world is to stop them from vandalizing the heck out of every Wiki page they come across, a fate that many other Wikis indeed have succumbed to?

The answer is that Wiki has taken its audience seriously, appealing to its sense of pride and self-interest.

For every troll who hops onto a Wikipedia or Wikiquote article and scrawls quotes calling the moral and social behaviors of the editors into question, there is someone else who is incredibly well-informed about that page, backed up by both a number of authoritative sources and a deep pride in their work. Vandalism is steadily defeated through pride and reversion, and the sheer scale of people who want a good, quality resource.

In allowing anyone to edit, and treating those edits as matters worth discussing on cooperative terms, the Wiki project has ignited a sense of pride in people. Now they want the articles to succeed; they want to see their hard work displayed on the front page as a featured article.

Additionally, the Wiki project chose an iconic visual aesthetic for itself: White background, clean lines, plain text and simple images. Yes, anyone can edit a page as they like, but the project rewards pages that comply with its style guides and presentational standards. So whenever someone says “Wiki,” people imagine that little puzzle-globe logo, the way a page is set up and the little blue edit tabs in the corner.

Of course, one of the best ways to judge the success of a project is to judge that of its emulators. So for comparison’s sake, let us consider a relative newcomer even to the open-source editing style: TV Tropes.

TV Tropes

A trope is a rhetorical device. The damsel in distress is a trope, as is the idea of having just one bullet left in the final sequence of an action film. They aren’t exactly cliches, though they can become so. Rather, they are patterns that people have learned to recognize in conversation, argument and entertainment that form the basis of all communication.

TV Tropes is a website based on two ideas: First, tropes are awesome things that deserve discussion, admiration and study, and second, everyone has something to contribute. The site does not use the Wiki format, but does have an open policy on allowing people to comment and post about the tropes they find interesting.

Pages on the TV Tropes site range from those discussing a specific trope to those showing a film or book and listing the tropes present in it. All are freely editable.

The success of the TV Tropes project may not be measurable monetarily like Wikipedia’s or other more commercial ventures. However, the project has become intensely popular all the same. It has the same “well, I’ll click one more link” popularity that Wikipedia had cornered for itself, and the same “I can talk about what I like here and be taken seriously” appeal as all open source projects. People reference tropes in casual conversation on message boards, and it’s creating a communal language.

That really is the key behind these two projects – brain extension. They’ve taken a good idea and brought it into the common discourse, allowing people to communicate with each other. People can discuss differing myths from literature, and realize they’re talking about the same trope, even if it’s not the same story. People automatically click to Wiki for information if they need some quick discussion material. For those who want to take a lesson from the Wiki style of success, remember that it emphasizes not the product, but the way the audience is using and sharing words, language and information.

Author Bio: Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to Brandsplat.com or visit our blog at http://www.ibrandcasting.com

We’ve previously discussed the Web’s amazing tendency to take very good ideas and adapt them to techniques largely unrelated to their original intent. Nowhere is this more currently prevalent than in the realm of Social Media Networking.

SM sites were intended to allow people to present a profile and keep in touch with interested parties. In essence a combination of email and webpage, they exploded in popularity with the sort of overnight success prevalent on the Web. Of course users drive popularity, and where there are users, there is a captive audience – and businesses are always keen to adopt a potential audience.

Now Web writing and development resumes often need to include Social Media Networking experience, and businesses have their own Facebook pages. The Web is ever sensitive to the principles of competition and advertisement, so in the wake of this upsurge in popularity and usage come the techniques and principles of Social Media SEO.

Search engines rate all websites based on their internal criteria, and this increasingly includes Social Media pages such as Facebook. With that in mind, let’s consider five key ways you can apply SEO techniques to Facebook in order to drive interest.

Method 1 – Respect Your Audience

We’ve covered the power of individuality on the Web. While it is true the Web offers exceptional degrees of anonymity and collective activity, at the end of the day every user has his/her own judgments to make, and will make those judgments known via clicks and comments. There are websites solely devoted to expounding on peoples’ bad experiences, such as the popular Not Always Right. Rest assured that if you stick to sales pitches and infomercials, your work will be forgotten or derided quite quickly.

Instead, focus on promoting interesting, non-sales material on your Facebook page. Comment on interesting developments, or explain a personal angle from one of your employees that helps people connect with your organization. Some of the most profitable sites on the Web don’t make any major sales pitches, so take advantage of the chance to have a conversation and keep people interested.

Method 2 – Identify and Use Your Keywords

We’ve talked about keywords before, and they remain relevant still. Search engines are able to provide more precise listings based on effective keyword usage, and good placement in a search return is often dependent on how your keywords relate to user searches.

Keyword usage requires research. It isn’t a matter of simply plugging in all the buzzwords in every awkward conversation – this is a good way to get sites to blacklist or penalize you in their rankings. Take the time to really examine what key roles your business works toward, and then research the keyword usage of related activities. Pick out those keywords that seem most relevant, and then work them into your site as naturally as you can.

However, keyword use doesn’t always require focusing on the content and writing portions. Your Facebook profile includes an ‘about’ section. Putting your core keywords here is a good idea but keep it concise; more than two or three keywords risks diluting the impact of your message.

Method 3 – Remember Reciprocity

The interesting thing about your Facebook page is that your company website doesn’t host it – Facebook does. This puts your content in two distinct places on the Web, potentially doubling the coverage you can receive during Web searches. Take advantage of that by remembering to provide links from each site to the other. Your company homepage should be linked from your Facebook profile, and vice-versa. This will increase traffic to each site by bringing in visitors from the sister sites, and takes less than a minute to implement.

Method 4 – Harness Multiple Media

Broadband is common now. Perhaps it was still acceptable to lack significant video content in an online venture ten or even five years ago, but modern broadband connections cost customers less than the first dialup connections, and can channel extraordinary amounts of video and audio.

Given the social nature of Facebook, it’s an appropriate page to include ‘related’ content to your venture that isn’t strictly relevant in the normal sense. Consider a site focused on pet care and related products. Rather than tying in a sales video, post the latest adorable kitten video from one of the many cat websites on the Internet. Tag it with keywords related to your focus by all means, but the key here is to give people additional reasons to visit your site and help drive your numbers.

Method 5 – Learn From the Best

A writer once commented that every good story has already been written – what remains is for the good writer to borrow judiciously. If there is one thing the Internet is good for, it is copious amounts of free information. Take a look at popular Facebook sites and take notes on what they’re doing. You do not exist in a bubble, but rather a network of ideas and interactions. Consider adopting different approaches that others are making work, or putting your own spin on them for even more success. Creativity drives much of the Web, so feel free to experiment.

Author Bio: Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to Brandsplat.com or visit our blog at http://www.ibrandcasting.com

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