Using Twitter To Find Guest Post Opportunities

Guest Post - Today's host is Caeden M MacGregor, who looks at Three ways Twitter can help you find high ranking, relevant sites for gust posts.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has been the way to communicate what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, and what you’re eating to the world. It’s true; with more than 100 million people logging on every month to tweet their pet pictures, share upcoming local events, and the latest and greatest events in their day, Twitter users share every thought and whim in real-time with their followers.

However, for SEOs and link builders specifically (we use Twitter to identify link building opportunities at the SEO company I work for all the time) Twitter offers more than a simple opportunity to share what pub you’re at or what movie you just caught. Twitter offers much in the way of link building targeting—meaning high ranking, highly followed sites that you can approach for guest post opportunities in exchange for a back link.

As far as making your online presence known to high ranking, relevant sites, Twitter is the place to be…or rather Tweet. This social media platform offers the perfect foundation for you to follow, retweet, and connect with the sites and readers you are targeting just by re-tweeting and replying to their tweets to making your presence obvious. This way, when you approach them with a guest post, they will be more likely to respond and accept it.

Here are three ways you can use Twitter to find guest post opportunities…

1. Key Influencers
One really quick way to identify high ranking blogs with lots of visitors within your target niche is with key influencer tools. A tool like Twiping exports the data on any Twitter account—including important measuring data like number of follows and URLs, which indicates a strong blog and strong back link potential. These are the sites you want to approach for back links.

2. Twitter Lists
Twitter Lists is another tool that can tell you exactly which blogs and websites on the platform are in your niche or relevant to your site. Make your own custom Twitter list by scanning some of the key lists and using a tool like Tweet Deck to monitor those sites in your target niche. This way you can quickly retweet and reply to their tweets to build up a connection and identify potential guest post opportunities that arise from the relationship.

3. Established Connections
I get new followers all the time on Twitter and I had zero idea who they were. Obviously they were interested in what I was Tweeting about so I assumed they would be interested in reading my blog (and bookmarking it) as well, right? And if they would be interested in bookmarking my site, they might be interested in linking to it too, right? That’s when I decided to find out exactly who my followers were. I did this by:

• First, exporting my Twitter profile information using the Twiping tool (same as above)
• Then I got my list of followers and cut their URLs into a list
• Low and behold, I had a list of my follower’s sites
• I used this list to reach out for guest posting opportunities—with mention that they already followed me on Twitter

Facebook Makes It Harder to Post From Google Blogger

Want to share a post from your blog on Facebook? If it’s aBlogger site, that just got harder.Facebook just added a Captcha check — a dialog box that asks you to type in hard-to-read text presented as a graphic — for any post shared from Blogger. Captcha tests are designed to filter out spam, since the bots that try to post spam links generally can’t read the words (and sometimeshumans have trouble, too).

The change does not appear to affect all Blogger sites. If you try posting from, say, the Official Google Mobile Blog, for example, there is no Captcha. However, if you want to post something from a lesser-known site, likethis blog about a cat named Abbie, then there is one. It appears that if your blog is popular enough, the Captcha is lifted.

Of course, this isn’t the first service for which Facebook has used a Captcha to prevent spam, If you try posting from a Tumblr site, chances are you’ll get the same treatment. However, Facebook lets you post from most other major blogging services — LiveJournal, WordPress, TypePad and Squarespace — Captcha-free.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Captcha: What You DON’T Need to Type

Blogger, of course, is owned by Google and uses the blogspot.com domain. Facebook and Google have been fighting something of a digital cold war the last few years — both services making it difficult to share contact lists with the other, to name just one example. The war arguably turned hot last year when Google directly invaded Facebook’s market by launching its own social network, Google+.

More recently, when Google changed its search engine to include social-media links, it gave Google+ preferential treatment over Facebook, even though the latter is much more popular. Engineers from Facebook and other social sites responded with a tool (pointedly named Don’t Be Evil, a Google tagline) that supposedly “corrects” the search results with social links from other services.

Reps for Facebook and Google didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

What do you think of Facebook’s change to how it treats Blogger links? Just housekeeping to address spam, or another skirmish in its platform war with Google? Share your opinion in the comments.