I think we can all agree that Twitter has started to play an increasingly key role in journalism. Why else would Twitter publish a best Practices Guide for Journalists? Twitter for Newsrooms is a new initiative intended to help journalists understand the best ways to search for authoritative domain experts, learn about trending topics, and leverage the Twittersphere to advance stories more quickly. The benefits of using Twitter in professional practice are immense and the pressure to get in front of a story is constantly mounting inversely compared to the velocity of news. Even old-school journalists have taken flight with the little blue bird because they know that this is fertile ground for discovery and a necessary component in the overall goal of being competitive. What does this have to do with SEO? Just about everything. Journalism drives traffic. But to get in front of journalists, it’s becoming obvious that their discovery model has been slowly shifting away from traditional approaches, such as press releases, to modern solutions that run at a much higher velocity. Journalists Love RSS Why? Because it’s a form of automated awareness. They are informed when new stories are published into the feed. They no longer visit your newsroom to see if there’s anything new. They simply wait and when you have something new to say, RSS delivers it to their desktops and mobile devices. An emerging SEO requirement is to make sure your news and other product announcements can be found in RSS feeds. There are many RSS-specific search engines that can provide additional visibility. RSS can be Integrated Into Twitter Once you have useful and interesting RSS feeds, you can automate publishing into Twitter. This makes it possible to maintain an ongoing presence in Twitter, increasing the chances that your customers and journalists tracking your industry will find you.

Bill French, Advisor to Altruik

September 30, 2011