We’ve said it before, Social Media Works to Expand Your Exposure and Reach and with each passing year, we find there are more and more ways for you to increase visibility through social media and other organic search engine optimization.

Last week, Twitter made an agreement with Microsoft and Google that will allow these companies to mine Twitter data for their search engines.

What does that mean for you if you are Twittering and make your tweets public? It means that any tweets you compose could appear in searches that people conduct for a topic related to your products and services. If you are not tweeting or your tweets are protected and your settings only allow certain people to see your tweets, then you will not be able to benefit from the possible additional SEO boost.

(By the way, these same rules will soon apply for Facebook status messages as well. If your status messages are can be viewed publicly, they too will pop up in search engine results.)

Just as with websites, tweets are ranked. For example, Microsoft’s Bing will be looking at who wrote the tweet, its content, and if the tweet gets re-tweeted at all. (If you don’t know, a re-tweet is when someone decides to pass along your tweet, in the form of a tweet). So just any old tweet cannot make it to the top, the same way any old web page cannot be at the top of search results.

If you want to take advantage of these new outlets to increase SEO, but are reluctant to let your personal Twitter or Facebook account become public, why not create accounts just for your business? That way, you can let those be viewed by all and control the content, without having to put your name out there. Company accounts can be created and managed by more than one person, so you don’t have to be burdened with trying to do your job and write all of the updates yourself.

And if you are confused and don’t know a tweet from a twitter, contact Increase Visibility, we would be more that happy to get you started in social media.