In our last post we talked about the joys of running an inbound marketing strategy for your business, guided by the wise words of HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan.

Your second installment from IMUK13 goes a little deeper in to the inbound marketing process with Twitter data tips from SEO Gadget’s Richard Baxter that will revolutionise your Tweeting habits.

Twitter is often considered a business luxury, overlooked and undervalued it can become an abused channel that is only used to send the odd tweet about the trails and tribulations of the daily commute. Interesting stuff… Wake-up folks, you are missing out an amazing inbound marketing opportunity here.

Richard Baxter lifts the veil on Twitter to reveal a mine of data waiting to be harvested. We now see Twitter through Baxter’s eyes – and it’s marketing friendly, full of graphs and charts. In this post you will learn how Baxter:

• Improves your SEO with Twitter
• Builds a Twitter data mine in Excel 
• Targets influencers and builds SEO friendly relationships

Improve your SEO with Twitter

You heard us right, Twitter can help to improve your SEO. You can turn all those hard-earned followers into potential inbound marketing relationships to bridge the SEO gap that recent Google algorithm updates has carved.

Inbound marketing as we know, is the way to maximise on content and online presence to attract leads to your offers. The method behind Baxter’s Twitter skills is all thanks to his amazing SEO toolkit of online and free software (he’s like SEO Batman). With these on your side (belt whatever you prefer) you can begin your Twitter data harvest and find out where your audience are looking to make sure you are there too.

Build a Twitter data mine in Excel

Twitter curates all the contacts that you follow for information and updates on the industry and all the others that you don’t yet know exist. It’s also a great inbound marketing portal to nurture productive relationships with key individuals or get the attention of those you are targeting.

In Baxter’s words: “People in your target market are telling you what content they love and where they're finding it [On Twitter]. Using that data is really targeted — we know where to be if we want to speak to our audience.” – Moz Blog

Twitter data mining combines a number of modern marketing strategies and analytics to pinpoint your key targets. TAGS (Twitter Archiving Google Spread sheet) is your first step in the process. Download this from Martin Hawksey and watch his demo on how to set it up correctly. There are a few techy steps you need to take in order to set up your Twitter data spread sheet but once done will be one of your most useful inbound marketing assets.

The second tool you will need is FollowerWonk. This handy online tool lets you highlight the profiles you want to add to your TAGS spread sheet. By querying FollowerWonk for search terms you are interested in such as ‘CEO’ or ‘Snowboarding’ you can find the profiles that are the most influential. The TAGS spread sheet will then update hourly and build a picture of the links these profiles are sharing regularly. You then know where you need to have a presence to get their attention. Magic.

The last essential is SEO Gadgets’ SEO Gadget for Excel, available to download for free it makes your real-time data spread sheet creation much easier. Once you have all of this set-up you can start to turn the real-time data in to easy to view and easy to analyse charts. You might be surprised what you find.

Target influencers and build SEO friendly relationships

The next step requires a little traditional marketing to approach your targets and begin to build a mutual inbound relationship. If your results are saying you should be on ‘coolblog.com’ because your target audience are viewing and sharing it regularly, then that is where you need to be.

Ok, so how do we get there? Baxter has the answer with another help from more of his online tools. Twitter can again offer a pathway to tracking down the editors, bloggers and journalists you need.

Once you have highlighted the sites you want to publish content on, you can then go back to FollowerWonk and search the site name directly. Try a few queries such as ‘editor CoolBlog’, ‘journalist CoolBlog’ and ‘contributor CoolBlog’ to search thoroughly for the right people.

Once you have their account and profile details there are a number of other magical online software tools you can use to verify their email address.

• Mail Tester lets you check alternations of the usual business email formula: firstname.lastname@companyname.com and see which account is active.
• Rapportive that can find all the social accounts connected to that email address and confirm it is the one you are looking for.
• Full Contact can turn partial contacts in to full contact profiles.

As soon as you have confirmed that the contact details you have are accurate you can reach out to them. One top-tip that Baxter gave away at IMUK13 was to use your own research into their website as your trade currency. Send them a link or snippet of the data you have collected to tempt their interest and proposition them for an article contribution or coverage of your business. Before you know it, you will be the link shared by your target audience on CoolBlog – mission accomplished.

In the final instalment of our Inbound Marketing UK conference coverage, you will learn the secrets of creating sharable content from the content wizard himself, Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners.