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Why You Should Use Twitter to Build Links

Twitter is a powerful tool that can be used to promote your business, increase your online visibility and drive tons of traffic to your site—but to build links? It might not be the first source webmasters think of when they want to develop a link building strategy, but Twitter is the perfect site for finding niche experts and people specific to an industry—all excellent ingredients to building links.

Here is how you can leverage Twitter for guest posts, contests and other link building efforts.

Promote Contests For Link Building

Let’s say you’re promoting an iPad giveaway contest to build links. You can use Twitter search queries to find other contests and see how they’re getting links. Once you find a contest in your industry, use Open Site Explorer to find sites that are linking to the contest. Then you can reach out to those sites to see if they’d be willing to link to your contest.

Find Guest Posts

If you promote casinos with live poker rooms, search for “poker,” “online poker,” “live poker tournaments,” etc., in guest posts.  This will help you find industry bloggers to link to. Some guest authors publish on multiple blogs which gives you an opportunity to find sites that accept guest posts that might not have popped up in your initial query.

Search For Industry Questions

Find people who are asking questions in your industry by using the search operator “?” and your industry. Then you can use RowFeeder to find those Tweeters who have websites. When you find a user that has a website, reach out to them and ask if you can do a guest post on their blog.

Need help managing your tweets? We recommend Hootsuite. This Social Media Dashboard can manage and measure multiple social profiles, schedule messages and tweets, track brand mentions and analyze social media traffic.

Use Google Reader’s Twitter Search

Google Reader’s Twitter Search can help you track guest posts, contests, directories and other basic linking strategies. This is a great way to find linking opportunities without doing all of the legwork.

Looking to mass syndicate your content, including Tweets? Magic Submitter software can help. It supports many different platforms and can submit your content from social bookmarking and article directory sites to press release sites.

Find What’s New and Popular

Even though you should be on the pulse of what’s new and popular in your industry, searching Twitter can help you tap into what’s trending; i.e. the hot topic of the day. Look up some keywords and figure out who the top tweeters are in this area. This can create many link building opportunities.

Do you use Twitter to build links? If so, what has been your experience? Let us know in the comments below.