Why Twitter is wicked, and why PR needs SEO

"Dinner with the girls" is something I have been participating in since my friends started renting and buying. Long gone are the sporadic drunken weekday meetings filled with risqué conversation. Now it's a long process involving diary checking, rescheduling, and conversations where we talk about babies, mortgages, complain about jobs, complain about the government, complain about money... all part and parcel of entering our late 20's. Once, at one of these dinners, I was talking to my friend about Twitter because does the marketing for a huge, world famous brand. She shrugged, ‘I don’t see the point in Twitter’. Now, this is not the first time I have had to defend Twitter.

Twitter has got a bad rep because of trolls, 'beliebers', mouthy footballers, and other idiots who actually say the word 'hashtag' without knowing what it means. I can understand why some people don’t use it and don’t ‘get it’.

I was explaining the benefits of it and how she could integrate it into her work. Twitter is the perfect place to find out what people think of a brand and it enables you to communicate directly with your customers. It's a free focus group: something I thought was already known and integrated into all marketing companies.

What is it with companies who don’t realise what is good for them and what will benefit them?

I'm mainly thinking of PR agencies' lack of SEO, and vice versa. Many PR agencies don’t understand that Google and social media are essential for their audience outreach. And sure, SEO can work well alone; creating backlinks and getting rankings (oooo rrraankingss) – but most of SEO content is weak and just focuses on keywords, and anyway, who knows if this content is being exposed in the most effective way? This is why PR and SEO would work so well together. SEO could create white hat content; quality, relevant content that is meaty and interesting, and PR would get it out there, creating a network of links that the audience actually want to see, thus the better they will rank! (And I mean ethically rank, not bought rankings)

If you want to get anywhere in your business, you can’t waste time believing that ‘old school’ methods work, you need to wake up to what your audience are doing TODAY. It seems very obvious to me, which is why it frustrates me when people are ignorant to social media and shrug it off as a waste of time. How silly will they feel when they are left behind!