Social media and networking sites have become extremely popular in the last few years, and Twitter is no exception.  Many people are using Twitter to promote their personal businesses or other personal endeavors.  If you are one of the many people using Twitter to promote their personal business, you will want to get peoples’ attention with your headlines.

The headline is probably the most important part of grabbing the attention of your readers, but it is also the most difficult to form.  The headline must grab the reader’s attention within a few seconds or the headline has failed.  This rule applies to Twitter headlines even more so than direct mail headlines, as the reader can just click the website away if they are not interested. Twitter headlines can be the maximum of one hundred and forty characters long, so use these characters wisely.  Here are five keys to making the best Twitter headline as well as making it SEO friendly.

• When you are working to write the best headlines, the first thing you can do is use the benefits of your products or services in your headlines.  Write a headline that points out the benefits to your target market.  Mentioning the main benefit of your product is the effective way to get the attention of your reader.
• Next, you will want to make your headline as straight forward as possible. Whatever your product or service may be, let it be known in your headline.  You will want your target market to be able to recognize you can do for them.
• Make sure your headline is understandable.  As fore mentioned, you want to get your readers’ attention within a few seconds.  Simple headlines are great headlines.
• The next two keys to writing a good Twitter headline have to do with using the words that get most peoples’ attention.  Starting your headline with “how” or “now” is a good way to get people to read your headline.
• The best Twitter headline is using power words.  There are certain words that get many peoples’ attention.  Cash, love, hate and huge are four power words that are great for getting peoples’ attention.  These four words can also be easily used by most people when they are writing a headline.

A good starting point for YouTube optimization is to make videos that are short, sweet, and straight to the point. People want instant gratification, not wanting to sit around watching a 30-minute video on how to use a cell phone headset. Videos should be kept to a few minutes to reduce production time, upload time, and download times. Have a script prepared so you do not mutter or stumble upon your words. Film the video in the highest quality format you can. Crisp, clean videos will receive more attention than grainy, hard to see videos. Do not make videos private and always allow for comments. This user interaction can help increase video views and move you up the YouTube video rankings. Using Annotations, text boxes in your video, can help deliver your message or promote your website or company. Make sure not too over use annotations as they can become annoying and distracting from your videos main purpose.

Since the search engine spiders cannot read or comprehend videos you must use the text fields to optimize your videos appropriately. This means doing keyword research and making sure your keywords appear in the title, description, and tags of your video is imperative to a successful YouTube marketing campaign. Maximize on the amount of text you can have in these fields. More text means a better chance of someone finding and clicking into your video. Make sure you use original titles and descriptions otherwise your video will get lost in the millions of videos with similar names. Original content is what YouTube wants to see. The more originality you add the better off you will be. You also want to have a user name with your brand or website name so it is easily remembered.

You have to put everything into perspective to increase views, as the average video only receives one hundred views annually. According to YouTube guidelines there are many factors that influence rankings and can help optimize your videos. These include the video title, the description, tags, incoming links, comments, subscribers, ratings, playlist additions, flagging, embeds, shares, age of video, channel views, subscribers, views, and the number and quality of sites that host or point to your video. You want to interact on YouTube by watching other videos, commenting, subscribing, creating channels, and making friends. Interaction helps with the viral marketing, where one person tells another person about the video. This person tells five others and so on. Doing this will increase your video network and views. All these factor into ranking high for YouTube optimization.

If you’ve been the owner of a website or a blog for any length of time, you’re probably striving continuously to improve the SEO of your website or blog. The more effort you put into SEO, the better your ranking will be on the various search engines, which in turn means your website or blog will enjoy more traffic as a result.

Of course, even though you more than likely already use several social networking sites, you may not yet be sure of how much those sites can help improve your rankings. One of the best sites to take advantage of is LinkedIn. The main reason for this is that the site already enjoys phenomenal rankings due to the profiles which are hosted on it.

In the event that you already have a LinkedIn account then you can already begin improving your website’s SEO with your LinkedIn account. In fact, let’s take a look at a few simple ways for using LinkedIn in order to improve the SEO of your website or blog:

Step 1: Making Use of Anchor Text and Links

Even though this is incredibly simple, it’s of the utmost importance, if you want to increase the SEO of your site. You need to use anchor text in order to link to your website from your LinkedIn profile. When you create links to your various websites, it results in potentially profitable backlinks, and this is why it’s important to use anchor text which makes use of specific keywords which are relevant to your website.

You need to bear in mind that major search engines such as Google will quite literally scrutinize anchor text when they rank websites. This of course means that if you had web site specific key words to your anchor text, your SEO will be vastly improved. In other words you need to avoid using names like “My Website” or George’s Blog, but instead, you should try to be a little bit more creative.

Step 2: Keyword Focus When Composing Your Profile

When you sit down to type up your LinkedIn profile, it’s imperative that you focus on using the most relevant keywords. During the process you’ll be required to include a headline, personal interests, summary, and also job descriptions and etc. Without over doing it, try to keep your profile rich with relevant keywords relating to your specific website or blog.

Step 3: Add Connections

The importance of using LinkedIn for adding connections simply cannot be stressed enough, particularly if your goal is to improve the SEO of your website. In doing this, you’ll effectively be making your website more visible, bearing in mind that the more connections you have, the more visible your site will be to people out there in cyberspace. Over and above increasing your website’s visibility on the LinkedIn site, you’ll also be increasing the overall visibility of your own website or blog on the internet.

Step 4: Customize Your URL

Lastly but not least, you need to customize the URL which you have on the LinkedIn site, bearing in mind that LinkedIn members have an opportunity to customize their profile URL, rather than making do with the default one. In fact, you can even choose to change the URL to your own name, the name of your company, or even the name of your website. You can rest assured that if you do this it will result in your profile becoming far more visible, and this in turn goes a long way towards improving the SEO of your website.

1.) Search results continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook pages, groups and applications. Therefore what you’ve done to date still works. The gravity of Facebook groups, which some thought lame, will increase as Facebook internal search is adopted.

2.) Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors.  Read it and understand. Stay up to speed on changes in the Facebook blog, as they will certainly occur. Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy. As people learn to spam these results, Facebook will react and SEOs will want more information.

3.) In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever.

4.) Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag. If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

5.) If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select “everyone” in privacy settings > search. Though it’s possible users might not be happy if they were aware, existing accounts default to “everyone,” understanding this is a cool inside tip for early success.

6.) When “everyone” is selected, others may see your data regardless of whether or not you are friends.  Reciprocally, users should uncheck if they want to exclude their profile from wider Facebook SERPs. It would not be surprising if users protest when folks start to discover that all of a sudden some of their personal sharing is visible to everyone.

7.) Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.” It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function.

8.) Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot.

9.) Contribute continually. A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

10.) Be there or be square! Stay tuned for attributes, in and out of Facebook, may factor in the search results as Facebook evolves.

You’d have to be blind to be missing the Twitter hype machine at the moment. Not since Facebook has the mass media swooned so lustfully over a social based start up. Yet whereas the momentum behind Facebook was largely driven by the groundswell, Twitter buzz is being driven directly from the top. Whether it’s Madonna, Perez, Britney or Oprah, celebrity endorsement is pushing Twitter hype beyond anything ever seen before it. And with all the mainstream media attention, it’s inevitable that marketers have begun to ponder exactly how they can use it within their own their business. With that in mind, I’ve put together an overview of the practical marketing applications of Twitter.

While some believe that customer support is the only viable business use for Twitter, the reality is that Twitter has a range of practical applications as a marketing tool. Twitter can mean different things to different businesses based upon their objectives, resourcing and social media savvy. Indeed, many businesses have found their own unique way of making Twitter work for them. Below I’ve listed the core uses of Twitter as a marketing channel:

1.) Supporting

Customer support is perhaps the most obvious and practical application of Twitter. Consumers talk about brands on Twitter everyday, often asking support related questions or complaining about a product, which creates an opportunity for brands to monitor Twitter conversations and respond accordingly. Comcast, Intuit & Telstra are just a handful of brands utilising Twitter to provide proactive customer support.

From a marketing perspective, the beauty of a customer support initiative is that it drives customer retention and positive word of mouth. Negative situations (customer complaints) can be transformed into positive outcomes with appropriate intervention. And of course, Twitter provides the perfect medium for affected customers to tell others about their positive experience!

2.) Learning

For some organisations, jumping head first into Twitter is a bridge too far. But that doesn’t mean they can’t derive real marketing value from Twitter. Indeed, ongoing monitoring of Twitter provides immense opportunities to source immediate (and genuine) customer feedback. Oh yea, did I mention it’s free!

Twitter’s search functionality provides marketers with the best real time customer research tool on the planet. Want to know what customers are saying about your brand right now? Just do a Twitter search.

3.) Informing

The transmission of real time information is Twitter’s key strength. Disaster situations such as Mumbai are a classic example of Twitter’s ability to meet a huge thirst for immediate knowledge. Businesses can leverage the instant nature of Twitter communications to provide real time information to their customers. Sporting organisations are perhaps the best example, with teams such as the Chicago Bulls providing live commentary and updates during basketball games.

Beyond the sporting arena, real time information dissemination can become invaluable in managing a crisis situation. For example, telecommunications company TDS used Twitter to keep customers up to date with progress during a service outage. An auto manufacturer might find a similar use during a product recall. Of course, adopting a participation style based upon informing is only suited when real time information is valuable. If your customer’s can afford to wait for the news, it may be best to consider another use for Twitter.

4.) Promoting

While Twitter is a conversational medium, some brands have found success in utilising the channel purely as a promotional tool. Typically this entails a broadcast approach in which the brand uses Twitter to send offers to subscribers, much like many companies use email marketing. Dell is perhaps the most famous example, claiming they have generated over $1 million in sales via Twitter. Other brands to adopt the promotional approach include JetBlue and Hertz.

A word of warning on Twitter as a promotional tool though. Generally only the largest and most popular brands are successful with a promotional approach. If customers don’t love your product/brand, they’re unlikely to follow you via Twitter.

5.) Building Discussion

Marketers have long been using hashtags on Twitter as a technique to aggregate community discussion. Practically every marketing conference on the planet now produces a hashtag to enable attendees to connect and interact with each other via Twitter. Brands are now starting to follow suit.

Land Rover recently launched the first high profile attempt from a brand to create widespread community word of mouth around a hashtag (#LRNY). They created the specific hashtag to centralise discussion around the launch of a new vehicle at the New York motor show. The hashtag was then promoted in both online and offline channels to generate conversation and word of mouth via Twitter. And the campaign seems to have been a success, generating an overwhelmingly positive sentiment via Twitter, while also generating a flood of free PR within the mainstream media for the innovative marketing campaign.

6.) Branding

For some businesses, Twitter serves as a good old fashioned branding tool. Rather than seeking directly measurable/ tangible benefits, a number of companies are using Twitter to successfully reaffirm brand values to existing customers. Review the Twitter accounts of Popeye’s Chicken and Dunkin’ Donuts and you’ll struggle to detect any clear business objective. But dig a little deeper and you’ll realise that their participation is heavily based around branding to Gen Y. Quirky and humourous messages consolidate their desired brand position in a channel of increasing relevance to their customers.