Great mar­ket­ing is about reach­ing and engag­ing your audi­ence. That starts with great con­tent. There is no SEO short­cut for get­ting tweets indexed by Google. Whether your goal is to use Twit­ter to grow brand reach, grow your audi­ence, man­age your rep­u­ta­tion, or sell prod­ucts by get­ting tweets indexed, that result must be pre­ced­ed by a long-term invest­ment in brand con­tent and sto­ry­telling.

With the news last month that Google will once again have access to the Twit­ter API (fire­hose) for faster and more effi­cient index­ing of rel­e­vant tweets in search, mar­keters have been exam­in­ing how this change may impact organ­ic search and social strate­gies.

Google and Twit­ter had a sim­i­lar deal that began in 2009 and expired in 2011. Since that deal lapsed, Google has had to crawl Twitter’s site for tweets, which was slow, was time-con­sum­ing, and did­n’t allow for the quick­er index­ing of time-sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion.

For Twit­ter, this new deal with Google gives more expo­sure and oppor­tu­ni­ty to mar­ket to logged out users.

What The Twitter-Google Deal Means For Your Brand

Should you re-exam­ine your strat­e­gy to gain more vis­i­bil­i­ty in search engines using Twit­ter?

A mar­ket­ing plan or cam­paign should nev­er start with tac­tics. The time hon­ored tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing process of “first goal, then strate­gies, and then tac­tics” is more rel­e­vant now than ever. Smart brands wor­ry less about get­ting their tweets indexed and more about the brand strat­e­gy that dri­ves that oppor­tu­ni­ty.

The say­ing, “The more things change, the more they stay the same” applies here. Though Google hav­ing access again to Twit­ter’s fire­hose of tweets should be con­sid­ered part of the over­all dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, it needs to be dri­ven by brand mar­ket­ing efforts of a clear content/communications strat­e­gy.

The oppor­tu­ni­ty for tweets to be indexed high­lights the con­tin­ued impor­tance of inte­grat­ing SEO into brand mar­ket­ing efforts.

Inte­gra­tion will be more impor­tant than ever. If SEO is left out of the process, the tech­ni­cal, rel­e­vance, and author­i­ty sig­nals that help brand tweets get indexed will be missed. Con­verse­ly, if SEO focus­es on tweet index­a­tion with­out brand immer­sion and access to brand con­tent strat­e­gy and assets, their efforts for index­a­tion will be less effec­tive.

Eric Enge, pres­i­dent of Stone Tem­ple Con­sult­ing and co-author of “The Art of SEO” did an in-depth study of Google’s index­a­tion of tweets. The analy­sis, which exam­ined 138,635 tweets, found that Google is cur­rent­ly index­ing just 7.4 per­cent of tweets. That per­cent­age will def­i­nite­ly increase and become more rel­e­vant to brands as Google gains full API access.

Is your brand poised to ben­e­fit from this organ­ic search and brand reach oppor­tu­ni­ty? Here are four ways brands can increase vis­i­bil­i­ty.

1. Focus On Strategic, Documented Content Strategies & Methodology

Whether it’s cau­sa­tion or cor­re­la­tion, brands that have a strong con­tent strat­e­gy upon which mul­ti­ple mar­ket­ing teams align will take the lion’s share of indexed tweets. Tweet index­a­tion also high­lights the need to have a strate­gic, doc­u­ment­ed con­tent strat­e­gy and guide­lines for those exe­cut­ing the strat­e­gy.

Some­times that con­tent strat­e­gy is so excep­tion­al that it dri­ves mul­ti­ple chan­nel rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the search results.

This exam­ple from “The Lego Movie” (inter­est­ing aside: this piece of brand sto­ry­telling nev­er includ­ed the word “Lego” in the movie) shows how a strong con­tent strat­e­gy dri­ves inclu­sion of the Twit­ter pro­file (note that Google is serv­ing video, local, and social results).

Once a strong content/communications strat­e­gy is cre­at­ed, then a chan­nel inte­gra­tion plan becomes the focus. Greater index­a­tion of tweets may tempt brands to push siloed focus on Twit­ter, but brands doing this well, as in the Lego exam­ple, are defin­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­e­gy first, then the chan­nel.

When doc­u­men­ta­tion, method­ol­o­gy, and process­es aren’t in place, an even larg­er audi­ence beyond just your fol­low­ers could see a dam­ag­ing brand tweet when Google index­es that con­tent.

Tweet­ing in align­ment with your goals and brand voice helps keep the brand sto­ry rel­e­vant. That focus may help your tweets inter­sect with Google’s goal of pro­vid­ing excep­tion­al search results.

2. Focus On Engagement

The read­ing, shar­ing, and link­ing to of con­tent has been, and will con­tin­ue to be, the bench­mark of great con­tent.

Though the word “engage­ment” means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent mar­keters, it can be agreed upon that adding images, hash­tags, and links make con­tent more engag­ing. Enge’s study showed that tweets with images, hash­tags and links are more like­ly to be indexed.

3. Focus On Audience Development

Audi­ence devel­op­ment, with a focus on qual­i­ty rather than just the quan­ti­ty of fol­low­ers, should be a ded­i­cat­ed, ongo­ing effort for brands. Mea­sur­ing this KPI should also be includ­ed when mea­sur­ing brand val­ue and reach.

Peo­ple with at least 10,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers gen­er­at­ed more than 40 per­cent of the tweets in Enge’s study. The shar­ing of and link­ing to of brand tweets that will sig­nal Google to index tweets will be improved with strong audi­ence devel­op­ment.

With lim­it­ed organ­ic reach in most social chan­nels, the launch of Twit­ter’s Part­ner Audi­ences last week makes it eas­i­er to grow an audi­ence once you under­stand your tar­get seg­ments.

4. Use Twitter Ads To Amplify Your Efforts

Though the num­ber of tweets indexed by Google may be viewed as an organ­ic search or social met­ric, paid social media should play a key part in your efforts to grow your Twit­ter reach.

Brands lever­age Twit­ter ads to achieve many mar­ket­ing objec­tives. In the fol­low­ing exam­ple, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing soft­ware provider Buz­zStream used Pro­mot­ed Tweets with @username tar­get­ing to reach peo­ple sim­i­lar to the fol­low­ers of nine dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing influ­encers. These influ­encers were either con­trib­u­tors to BuzzStream’s guide, or known for dis­cussing top­ics cov­ered in the book.

Buz­zStream achieved their down­load objec­tives and their tweets were also indexed. Buz­zStream is just one exam­ple of a cam­paign that requires con­tent strat­e­gy and plan­ning.

With more tweets show­ing in Google search, do you have a strat­e­gy to help increase your online vis­i­bil­i­ty?