Search engine optimization for social media is a new and evolving world, and figuring out how to bring it all together is still like finding your way in a forest (or New York City) without a compass.
Today, following my guest lecture for an NYU graduate class on SEO and Social Media, one of the students presented a great question: is it possible to get all the twitter accounts for all the top managers at a company to show up in the search results for that company? My on-the-spot answer was “I’m not sure”, but I said I’d find out more.
Your Brand on Twitter is YOU, Not Your Company
After I got home from my trip to the city, I started searching around, both for people who had possibly written on this topic, and doing some tests of my own using sites and people who I know to have pretty strong presences on Twitter.
I didn’t find any definitive writings on the subject, but some limited testing did yield some answers. It appears Google does not connect and group multiple twitter accounts for people at the same company or brand all on the same search results page. In fact, in my testing, I searched for a small company where the principal is very active in social media, especially twitter, yet in the search results for the company, her twitter account did not show up. This is despite the fact that even on her About page, she mentions her Twitter account. I got similar results for a prominent web media firm. Search for the brand name, and none of the contributing writer’s Twitter accounts show up, despite the fact that each of their bio pages has a link to the writer’s Twitter account.
However, if you search for a person with an active social media presence, for example the above-mentioned small business entrepreneur, you will probably see: their twitter account, their company web site, their Facebook profile, their LinkedIn profile, and any other social media results that may involve them.
So it would seem that Google does not connect people’s social media accounts to their company, despite how you may try to connect them with the proper keywords and links. At least, not today; who knows what Google will do with social media connections in the future.
How to Aggregate Your Company’s Social Media Content
Given that it appears you cannot control search results in this way, what’s the next best solution? I would recommend putting a Twitter feed on your company’s web site. There are a number of solutions out there using Javascript or platform plug-ins such as WordPress that will display all the tweets for a hash tag. Then whenever someone is tweeting about the company or brand, they just use that hash tag and the tweet will show up on the web site.
Of course, remember as I mention in my SEO presentation, depending on how you implement the Twitter feed, the content of that feed may or may not (often the latter) actually be indexed as part of the content of your page. But even if it is not, at least all your social media content will be visible to site visitors in one place.
What have you found? Have you figured out a way to aggregate all your company’s social media content in search results?