Twitter is essential for small business Internet marketing -

If you're a small business, one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to creating sales, customers, clients, or new business is through social media. Social media marketing - as we noted in a recent WhiteSpace blog post – should be a core component of your small business Inbound marketing strategy for 2011. Twitter for example, has a huge upside. It's important for building online reach. 

As a Toronto Internet marketing agency our partnerships are mostly with small businesses that have more on their minds than Tweeting. There are so many other things to do, and it’s hard to step away from focusing on the tasks that can generate visitors to your small business website from the Googles of the world. But stay with me as we'll show you how Twitter can actually help influence your search ranking indirectly. And in happens when your followers link to your website from their blog or website.

Twitter may have some influence on search engine rankings -

Authority creates traction -
Using social search tools is completely different from what happens when you do an ordinary web search. Google and Bing use a complex recipe or algorithm of signals to determine rankings. Both search engines have ways to determine if someone seems to be an authority or a trusted figure on Twitter, which they use within their social search features. Who you are on Google and Bing can impact how well a page does in regular web search. It seems that who you are counts - authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet. 

Here's a recap:

• look at how many people you follow and how many follow you
• calculate the authority of someone who tweets
• calculates the value of a link depending on the person who tweets it
• track links shared within Facebook – and that includes Fan pages
• lastly, retweets serve as a new form of link building, especially if authoritative people mention your page in tweets.

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WhiteSpace is a Toronto Internet marketing agency that helps small businesses grow with winning design and marketing, from website redesign and graphic design, to branding, social media marketing, and online marketing strategies. Call 416-449-9559 for a free no-obligation website consultation.