Thursday, 14, Jan 2010 09:15
Businesses using Twitter as part of their online marketing campaigns may want to pay attention to recent comments made by a Google engineer explaining how it ranks tweets.
Amit Singhal of Google told Technology Review - which is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - that the search engine's algorithm for Twitter posts is similar to that for standard web pages.
With Twitter, Google looks at how reputable a particular user's followers are to determine how highly they rank that person's tweets, he explained.
This is akin to the method of collecting links from high-quality sites when it comes to standard search engine optimisation (SEO), he suggested.
Mr Singhal said: "As high-quality pages link to another page on the web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up.
"Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."
The comments may be helpful to those harnessing social networking to promote their products and services while also utilising SEO.
According to Experian Hitwise, Twitter currently accounts for two per cent of all UK visits to social media websites.
It ranks behind Facebook, YouTube and Bebo in terms of the most popular social networking sites among British web users.
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