SERP Features Course: Triggering and Maintaining Twitter Boxes
Script from the lesson The SERP Features Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Twitter Boxes. Why are they important and how do you get them? The situation: Twitter feeds directly into Google, Twitter tweets right into Google’s ear. That means anything that you put on there is injected directly into the brain of Google. This Brand SERP is a bit dull. Twitter Boxes make it look much, much better, especially on mobile.
Jason Barnard speaking: Plus, those Twitter Boxes take up two places on the SERP and that means you have control over more real estates. Plus because it covers more space, often one blue link disappears off the bottom of the page. You have one less element to control, one less piece of content to deal with. So, with the Twitter Boxes up there just below your homepage and Rich Sitelinks, you’re covering almost half the SERP and that’s a lot, and there’ll probably be only five or six blue links underneath.
Jason Barnard speaking: That’s going to be much easier to control with the 10 blue links you initially started with. If you have ads, then you’ll almost certainly be covering everything above the fold on desktop with content that you control directly. Twitter Boxes look extra good on mobile if you use images or videos in your tweets. Here’s an example that I tweeted that looked really great.
Jason Barnard speaking: I’ve got an animated GIF that immediately attracts the eye and here’s one with video content. We’re getting some nice multimedia content up there on the SERP easily and quickly through Twitter. So, what you tweet on Twitter is injected directly into Google and is shown on the SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: You have direct control, you control the message and that’s a big, big plus. Even better, Google shows them in real time. Here, we’ve got a tweet with embedded video that looks great and it took 17 seconds from the moment I tweeted it, better still. It changes every time you tweet. It’s fresh content, it’s your voice in real time.
Jason Barnard speaking: You can communicate up to the minute news or even snap offers to your audience, including existing customers because many of your clients will navigate to your site by searching your brand name in Google. So, some existing clients see this SERP many many times, potentially multiple times per day. Each time they come back, they see a new Twitter Box with fresh new content and they know you’re present and that you’re active. Plus, the SERP stays interesting for them every time, that’s all positive for your brand image.
Jason Barnard speaking: Twitter Boxes are the only example I can think of in Google search where you can inject directly into Google and it’s on your Brand SERP. That’s incredibly powerful.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, Google only shows your tweets in these boxes on your Brand SERP. Nothing anybody else tweets about you will appear there, no will replies to your tweets, no will your replies to other tweets nor even your retweets. It only shows things you say and even then only the initial tweet you post, and that’s a lot of control you have there. Now, what do you need to do to get these Twitter Boxes?
Jason Barnard speaking: It’s quite simple, but quite a lot of work, and you need patience. You have to tweet every single day, multiple times per day, wherever possible. You don’t have to tweet every hour unless you really have something useful and helpful to say to your audience. Between one and four times a day is absolutely fine.
Jason Barnard speaking: Beyond that, everything is about engagement. That is what demonstrates to Google that the content is valuable to users searching your brand name. Okay, now some rules about this ongoing tweeting. Rule number one, retweets aren’t as valuable as original tweets. Continue retweeting, but make sure you have a good number of original tweets.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number two, don’t only talk about yourself. You won’t be able to generate the user engagement necessary to trigger the Twitter Boxes. You’re the star of your own film, but if you talk only about yourself, people aren’t going to be interested for very long. Of course your Twitter account does represent you. You should still tweet about yourself, but not only about yourself. Talk also about others. We come back to the idea of empathy for the person with whom you’re trying to communicate.
Jason Barnard speaking: Think about what they want to hear, what value your tweets can bring to them. That’s the way you’ll trigger the Twitter Boxes and it’s also the best way to run a Twitter account.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number three, be relevant and useful. You need to bring value to your audience and share things that are of interest to both your existing audience and any wider audience you’re trying to reach. Once again, think about their needs. Think about what they want. Be empathetic. Obviously, Twitter is a platform where people tweet about lots of different things, so don’t always stay a 100% on topic since people expect something a little bit off the beaten path from time to time, but don’t diverge so much that your account loses its focus.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule four, dialogue. Reply to the replies that you get. Think of it as a very short conversation. Anyone reading your Twitter homepage should see a series of relevant conversations between you and your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number five, engage back. Like the replies you get, like the retweets. Show that you are actually interested in the engagement generated by this content you shared.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number six, use lots of hashtags, but hashtag wisely. Hashtags push your content out to a wider audience, which is great, but better still to push it out to an audience who will engage with it. When well-chosen, hashtags introduce your brand to a new audience that is pertinent to your business, which is a double win.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule seven, you want to try to attract influencers especially those who already have their Twitter Boxes on their personal Brand SERPs. Twitter and Google know they’re important people, so that’s a strong signal, but stick to people relevant to your market, the more niche, the better. It doesn’t have to be people with a humongously big following, attract people with smaller followings when they are very, very, very relevant.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, don’t bully them. You need empathy for people if you want them to react positively to you. Reach out to them by tagging them into something that they will truly find interesting. You need to bring something valuable to them. If, when they see what you’ve tagged them in, they think, wow, yes, this is interesting for me, then you’ve got it about right.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, think of all of that as a flywheel, it takes a lot of work from you to start it turning. Then it starts off painfully slowly. You’ll sometimes feel that you’re going backwards, but keep working and bit by bit that flywheel will pick up speed and gain some momentum, and you end up with this kind of effect where it just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. At that point, when you have that momentum and your tweets naturally get engagement, there’s a nice buzz around your brand, and that will trigger the Twitter Boxes.
Jason Barnard speaking: The timeframe is hard to predict. It depends on where you are starting from. If you already have a nice buzz, it will be very quick, maybe a month or two. If not, it could be six months. It might take a year but stick with it. My example took me six months. I did everything I said on this list. Tweeted every day, reached out to people in my industry, used lots of hashtags, used the Like button quite a lot, made sure there was a real dialogue going on, and I triggered the Twitter Boxes after six months.
Jason Barnard speaking: Initially, once I got them, if I didn’t tweet for one day, the Twitter Boxes disappeared. As soon as I tweeted again, they came back. A few months after that, they would still be there after two days without a tweet. Now, it’s about three days. Over time, it appears that the Twitter Boxes become more stable, so once you’ve triggered your Twitter Boxes you don’t have to make so much effort. But then again, once you’ve got them, it means you’re popular. It means people are following you. So you have every interest in pushing that Twitter account more. So with this Twitter Box strategy, you win on Google and you win on Twitter and that’s brilliant.
Jason Barnard speaking: Once you have those Twitter Boxes, you don’t want to lose them. You’ve done all the really hard work at this point. You need to continue tweeting every single day to stabilize the boxes. After a couple of months, you’ll be able to drop to once every two days. Less than that and the account has lost its dynamics and the boxes may well disappear.
Jason Barnard speaking: You need to continue getting engagement too, you need to continually prove that people are interested in what you have to say on Twitter. In short, your best bet is just to continue doing what you were doing in order to trigger the boxes, but what is great is that you won’t need to work quite so hard to get the engagement and keep things rolling.
Jason Barnard speaking: Your flywheel is spinning. Short, mid, and long term, you want to be relevant, you want to be active, you want to be fresh, and you want to be consistent and you get some bonuses. There are some really obvious ones such as your super dynamic and interesting Twitter account will impress your existing followers. Your activity will also get your brand in front of a wider audience and it will help you to acquire new clients.
Jason Barnard speaking: But in addition to that, there are two bonuses that are specifically Brand SERP related. We tend to think of YouTube when we think of Video Boxes, but here’s an example where Twitter videos are ranking and they have triggered the Video Boxes on their own. Please watch the Video Boxes episode to see how those work. Twitter also brings up images even without the Twitter Boxes, your tweets will show an image if there is one, plus they rank well on image search and potentially in Image Boxes. That’s two more convincing reasons to use video and images in your tweets whenever you can and integrate Twitter into your wider content strategy. And for a deeper explanation of that, please watch the episode about Content Strategy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, advertising. Advertising is great right at the start because it helps you gain traction. It gets that flywheel turning. I used advertising to kickstart my Twitter account and it worked a treat for me, but it can be costly so be a little bit careful. I found Twitter to be quite expensive in terms of getting that engagement I needed to get the flywheel going, but it definitely helped me. It’s not a magic bullet though. It’s not sustainable. Twitter will never pay if you rely purely on advertising. You need to use that advertising to drive your engagement forwards right at the start. But the aim has to be to make the account self-sustaining and get that flywheel going, and then you won’t need the advertising anymore anyway.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, what not to do. Please do be sure to watch the episode about Tactics to Avoid and Mistakes not to Make. Don’t spam influencers. Don’t tag them into something they’re not going to be interested in or that doesn’t concern them. They’ll get really annoyed really quickly. You would too if someone did that to you. And remember Twitter feeds directly into Google, Google will see that they’re not interacting with you, that you’re reaching out to them and they’re not interested.
Jason Barnard speaking: That’s a very negative signal you want to avoid. Don’t buy engagement. By that, I don’t mean don’t advertise, I mean don’t pay click farms to click on your name or to engage with you or buy followers. Twitter injects directly into Google, Google will find you out sooner or later, you might get away with it today, but you won’t get away with it after a while.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, if you can get that flywheel going, you won’t need to cheat. But if you go down the black hat buying engagement path, as soon as you stop, the whole engagement stops and the flywheel stops, Google will see that in an instant. Don’t build an irrelevant audience. Don’t build up a bigger audience just for the sake of building up a big audience, build up a big audience because there is a real interest from that audience and what you were saying on Twitter.
Jason Barnard speaking: The important thing is not the size of your audience, it’s how relevant the audience is and how much they engage with you.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
