By now, you’ve likely heard at least something about Twitter, the social networking website where users can “tweet” 140 characters at a time. People use Twitter for all kinds of stuff — keeping in touch with friends, finding out what’s going on at a particular place, joining conversations and, most important to this blog post, marketing.

How does a website where people seem to just be writing about everyday personal things — “What a beautiful day!” “Just saw a superlative movie!” “I’m eating food at a restaurant!” — have the potential to be a marketing platform? you may wonder.

Look closely at Twitter. Spend some time looking around at what people are saying, or, even better, type in a keyword at search.twitter.com. When you do that, you’ll start to notice something: Twitter has a ton of potential when it comes to marketing your business.

And businesses are no stranger to using Twitter as a marketing platform. Just look at Skittles — for one day a couple of weeks ago, going to Skittles.com brought up a search for “#skittles” on search.twitter.com, so any time a Twitter user mentioned Skittles, it’d show up in the search feed. Needless to say, a few jokers took the opportunity to write inappropriate remarks about the brand, but for the most part the chatter was positive. Skittles got exactly what they wanted: for people to talk about Skittles! And, hey, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now, so it clearly worked.

Countless other companies are already on Twitter, as they’ve quickly realized its social media marketing potential. Companies like Whole Foods, General Motors, Comcast and JetBlue use Twitter to actually interact with their customers, and they even provide customer service through it. That’s a brilliant way to use Twitter, since it seems customers truly appreciate when a human from a business actually takes the time to speak to them. A personal reply online seems so little and basic, but imagine how well this kind of customer service resonates with people.

It’s incredibly easy to make Twitter one-way and just send out self-promotional tweets, a mistake that countless businesses are making right now. Doing it that way is not only lazy, it’s a missed opportunity. Making it two-way (where you are actively replying to other users and engaging in conversation) is exactly how Twitter is meant to be used. Interaction is essential if you’re going to effectively use Twitter as a marketing platform.

This morning at PubCon South, Google’s Matt Cutts gave the keynote address. Besides announcing the Google Friend Connect API, something that’ll be officially announced to the public later this morning, Matt Cutts answered a few questions from PubCon attendees.

One of our favorite questions was from someone who asked Matt for his top five tips for on-page search engine optimization. He dished some pretty basic but very helpful tips:

1. URL structure and site architecture. Make sure your site is organized and easy to navigate.
2. Titles: Have good titles with keywords that people actually search for.
3. Titles and URLs of blog posts: Using keywords, make your title and URL slightly different. For an example, look at this post. It’s titled “Matt Cutts Does PubCon South,” but the URL is “/matt-cuts-website-optimization-tips.”
4. Check your server logs to look at stuff you’re close on in order to figure out how to rank on page one.
5. Add a page of content a day.

Another interesting tidbit from Cutts’ Pubcon South keynote: Someone asked if Google gives higher ranking to Twitter user accounts depending on the amount of followers the person has. The answer, simply put, was no.

And there you have it.

PubCon South is upon us! If you’re coming from out of town and aren’t familiar with Austin, we wanted to point out a few places near Norris Conference Center that might be worth checking out. This map shows North Austin bars, restaurants, coffeehouses, grocery stores, a karaoke place and the closest Post Office — zoom in to take a better look at what’s there.
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See you at PubCon South!