Tweet

A tweet is a short message that can be sent via the microblogging service Twitter.

What is a tweet?

A tweet is a status message on Twitter that can be up to 280 characters long. Tweets used to be limited to 140 characters, but this was increased to 280 in September 2017. Due to the limited space for text, URLs for use in tweets are usually shortened with a URL shortener. Users who are interested in the tweets of other persons or companies can become their followers. These tweets are the displayed in the news feed of the follower, and sorted chronologically according to their topicality. Accordingly, the more followers a Twitter account has, the more people read their tweets. Each user can freely decide whether all users or only certain groups of people can see the tweets.

In the third quarter of 2013, Twitter registered around 232 million active users, and more than 500 million tweets per day all over the world.

Optimization of tweets

According to a survey, it is possible to optimize tweets in such a way that click rates can be increased or improved. For this, the following design options are considered:

• Link in the first quarter of the text
• Use Twitter commands such as RT (Retweet), @ or Via
• Preferred use of verbs and adverbs instead of too many nouns and adjectives
• Not too many tweets per hour
• Tweets mainly in the afternoon
• Preference of weekends for tweets

Significance for search engine optimization

Tweets are included in the Google index and are therefore very important for search engine optimization. The so-called social signals, for example the frequency of mentioning a website in tweets, are becoming increasingly important for the ranking of a website. Social signals are an important ranking factor for Google as they are difficult to manipulate; although you can buy Twitter followers, it is difficult to encourage them to recommend a company or website directly. In this YouTube video, Matt Cutts explains to what extent tweets can be relevant for the ranking of a website, in this YouTube video, on the question "Does Google use data from social media for the ranking?". In order to ensure that your own activities on Twitter are better perceived, some optimization work can be carried out:

• Twitter name with important keyword
• Fill in Twitter biography like the meta description of a website
• Use hashtags (#) regularly
• Using keywords in tweets
• Regular responses to the tweets of other users
• Enter the URL of the website in the Twitter profile
• no automatic tweets via Submitter software