Something I came across recently that I thought was interesting and mostly true: Facebook is for communicating with those you know; Twitter is for communicating with those you want to know - I think this is particularly applicable with overall branding efforts. So, what is the best way to reach out to those you don't know on Twitter and even gain something from it - especially when it comes to keyword research?

As Twitter has emerged as a dominant social media tool, so too has its power to aid in keyword research. With the use of hashtags (including the # symbol in front of a keyword) in your Twitter posts, posts are able to be classified and searched by topic. Hashtags are a quick way to qualify the topic of a message and they are effective because someone may refer to an event with one abbreviation and another person could come up with a second version – by using hashtags people can ensure that everyone is speaking about things the same way. And in turn, users can easily search for and find a topic of the related posts. And since Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, hashtags tend to be short which could be different from other keywords and keyword phrases you are trying to capitalize on.

Hastags.org will show you what the popular trends are on Twitter in real time, citing the number of mentions. It can give you a good idea of what people are talking about and help you discern where you or your brand fits into the conversation.

In addition to traditional keyword research will indicate the search volume of relevant keywords and keyword phrases that may pertain to your Web site, Twitter may be able to help identify keyword trends in the social media arena - something you definitely want to pay attention to.

Search engines such as Google and Bing are already indexing tweets (although not in real-time) so Twitter pages and even individual tweets have already started appearing in Google search results. Some say that Google or other search engines could give high visibility to a Web page that contains tweets or other data for a particular hash tag.

Other SEO Considerations with Twitter

• Like your Web site's title tags, it is believed that the first 42 characters are a factor into each tweet's title tag making it identifiable to the search engines so what you say first matters most. This is where you will want to concentrate your keywords in addition to the hashtag.
• While urls inside of of Twitter posts are no-follow (meaning they will not count as part of your Web site's link popularity) links can still drive a lot of traffic to your Web site and give you a lot more mileage than 140 characters.
• Advance your branding and SEO initiative using your Twitter page and posts by continuously and consistently using your keyword phrases so your Twitter page and posts will be shown in search results.

So as Twitter continues to grow in popularity and relevance, I think it's a good idea to pay attention to the trends and data it is able to provide us with and use it when appropriate. To me Twitter is all about getting out there, joining in the conversation and being part of the dialogue - especially when and where it concerns your brand. So if you can benefit from the use of hashtags or what those hashtags reveal, go for it. It could even improve your SEO efforts and search engine ranking.