Keyword Research with Social Media: Twitter

Twitter is a good tool for carrying out keyword research.  It’s not just about finding keywords that are searched on, but discovering what people are actually talking about.   If you run a blog, posting on topical subjects will help your posts rank.  Google is hungry for quality topical blog posts around trending subjects – this is called Google QDF algorithm (Query deserves freshness).

A search for ipods saw a people discussing,  ipod touch, ipod shuffle, 160GB ipod classic, ipod downloads, ipod songs, giving a good listed of related keywords you may want to consider targeting.

Along with acting as a keyword tools, Twitter search will also help you with local research and reputation management.  If you have a local business, say a pizza delivery shop, Twitter will also show you local discussions about ‘pizza’ close to your business.  What are your potential customers talking about? Are they saying negative things about you or a competitor? Twitter is a great FREE monitoring tool which should be used by any business.

If you want to continually monitor your keyword social activity you can use the rss feed from the search query to help monitor the data.