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Yes, I know that Twitter and Facebook are 2 different legal entities. But for the purposes of SEO and social marketing they are like twins, they complete each other.  And ideally they should only be used in combination. You initiate your acquaintance through Twitter, then send your friends to Facebook to nurture this new relationship, share photos, comments, etc.

Both social networks play ever growing role as a sources for social proof and authority. It’s not just a coincidence that Google SERP algorithm now gives even higher weights to the links coming from such sites.

In fact, both Google and Bing (finally worthy search engine from Microsoft!) both now have a non-exclusive agreement with Twitter and Facebook for using their live-time updates in the SERPs.

It does make a lot of sense. People on Twitter and Facebook share the most recent information with each other, something that is as close to “fresh meat” as you can get.
And in the light of these news Twitter RTs now play a very special role. In order to determine tweet’s position in the SERPs, both search engines now take in consideration (for their SERP algorithms) such parameters as number of Rts for the particular tweet and the number of followers of the person who posted the message or RTed.

The more followers the account has, the bigger is weight assigned to tweet, the more RTs the higher is importance.

For those who don’t know what RTs are, they are re-tweets, special commands used on Twitter to share with your followers’ posts published by your friends.

In other words, when somebody thinks that your tweets are worthy reading, and follows you, when you post a tweet in your account, your follower sees it instantly within her/his Twitter account.

So if you tweet something that is re-tweeted by other tweeple, all their followers will see your update. This means your message will be repeated again and again.

Facebook has similar option, but instead of re-sending the message to your followers, you can vote for the message(“like” it), which is essentially the same. All your followers see the message that you voted up. The more “likes” for the message, the bigger the weight assigned to it. Simple.

While RT parameter makes sense, the number of followers is debatable as a valid estimator of tweet’s importance.

Let’s take a closer look. Since both search engines pay a lot of attention to real time posts and events, the more Rts the tweet has, the higher is frequency of its appearance in live time search within the twitter for particular keywords, and hence the more weight will be assigned to this tweet for this keyword. That’s where presumably the “Rt  frequency” or “number of RTs” as a new parameter for SERP’s relevancy derived from.

But if tweeter just started recently, s/he won’t have many followers. However this use may be a real pro in particular industry s/he tweets about, and her/his opinion might be well worth listening too. Plus user can provide a lot of valuable resources and information on the topic. Yet s/he won’t get big weight simply because the account is young.

Sure, the more mature is the account and more followers it has, the more authority it carries (potentially). Yet this leaves an operating space for spammers, and the logic is flawed.

Hopefully search engines will find more suitable parameter for this purpose soon.

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