Get Ready for TEO: Twitter Event Optimization

/ Adam Nash

That’s right, everyone.  A new acronym is born.

Get ready for consultants, product managers, marketing executives, and knowledgeable technorati everywhere to be talking about the most important traffic driver since… SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

That’s right, 2009 is the year of TEO.  Twitter Event Optimization.

The logic is simple enough.  Twitter is growing by incredible rates, and it’s inherently a high activity, highly connected distribution model.  That means that pushing out events to Twitter can help drive traffic to your application or service.

When a user pushes out a link to your content, it magnifies distribution a large number of ways:

  • The tweet/link is pushed to all of their followers (sometimes to multiple clients/locations)
  • The tweet is sometimes retweeted (at a fractional rate) to a 2nd degree of followers
  • The tweet shows up in countless Twitter searches for terms/keywords
  • The tweet is indexed in Google for natural search
  • The tweet, if hashtagged, comes up for anyone reviewing that particular topic.  (Topics on Twitter are often flagged with a # symbol.  Example: #swineflu)

One of the hardest problems that websites face is traffic generation, and I can see it in the eyes of marketing and media executives everyone.  They look at Twitter, and they see… engagement.  attention.  TRAFFIC.

And they want it.

Thus, TEO is born.  Like SEO before it, there will be a range of skillsets that will quickly be developed, and then sold to countless companies everywhere:

  • Optimizing your website to get users to issue events to Twitter (manually or automatically)
  • Optimizing the content of an event to promote click-through
  • Optimizing the content of an event to trigger retweeting (RT)
  • Optimizing the tracking of the links on Twitter for effectiveness (already happening)
  • Optimizing the landing pages of your site, so that non-members who click through from Twitter get a good experience and “convert” to direct users.
  • The list goes on…

I really haven’t seen this much collective energy around a new traffic source since Google really hit the scene in volume, and everyone realized that an alternative to paying for search advertising was to invest in optimizing your content for natural search.

It’s hard to argue that this will be good for the Twitter eco-system.  Google has fielded armies of engineers and incredibly advanced technology to help keep natural search effective.  One of the challenges Twitter will definitely face is keeping their stream relatively “clean” of manufactured content.  Whether that’s something that can be done by end users, or whether deep technology will be needed is yet to be determined.

In any case, I’m not sure if I am the first to coin the term… it’s hard to believe that with the huge buzz around Twitter that this one hasn’t been claimed already.  But, just in case you heard it here first, remember:

2009 is all about TEO

3 thoughts on “Get Ready for TEO: Twitter Event Optimization”

  2. Yes. It is an interesting topic. But I have never had a problem getting traffic to a website. The problem lies with in conversion of that traffic and thus what should be added to this model is a flow chart that optimizes the full “sales flow” from tweet to buy. That would be really interesting.

    Also. I think a big part of an eventual “TEO” will be to help companies and people to write relaxed an personal in order to be able to build real, rather than fake relationships which in turn will increase visibility and conversion rates as re-tweets and diggs will come from trusted sources.

    But it is an interesting idea, and a whell of consultancy fees to be distributed… lol 🙂

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