Do you follow businesses on Twitter? Or are you a business on Twitter? Either way, you follow your favorite businesses to get real-time notifications about the latest hapennings and special offers or you promote your own business to connect with supporters and share news. We have talked about the positive role Twitter plays in search engines’ algorthims, which determine what websites are the most relevant – meaning, in large part, which sites are most liked by fellow internet users (people searching and shopping on the internet).

MG Siegler of TechCrunch talked to Twitter’s Adam Bain about newly promoted tweets:

“It turns out that on Twitter, users are already interacting with ads on a level that most would be surprised by,” Bain says. He notes that while traditional online display ads only get a click-through rate of something like 0.05 percent, some Promoted Tweets are seeing engagement in the double-digit percentages. “Engagement matters,” Bain says.

“Users want to be updated when brands have updates or exclusive content. The one problem we’ve heard from users is that when there is exclusive content or deals, there’s a chance they might miss them,” he says. “If the brand tweets at 9 AM, and the person comes in at 9:15 AM, they’ll miss them.”

“Resonance is also really important to us. This is about the realtime opportunity. And that expires fairly quickly,” Bain goes on, saying that in the ideal scenario, the things brands tweet will be “good, not loud”.

Bain says that the realtime aspect of the product is also vital to how Twitter places them. Because hot topics that people are Tweeting about can happen at any time, Twitter needs to be able to talk to a brand and quickly place an appropriate Tweet. “It’s realtime marketing at scale,” he says. “That’s the whole value proposition of the platform.”

We know positive reviews help local businesses by acting as recommendations or referrals for internet users considering purchasing a product or service. The more positive reviews a business gets, the easier it becomes for search engines to notice that business and consider it a relevant search result for users (consumers). Click on this link to read up on how reviews effect your marketing strategy. The post also discusses the impact fake reviews made by a competitor in the moving industry had on a number of moving companies. Read up on that story here.

Search engines like accurate, thorough content and they like fresh content. Beyond meta data, the more indicators that point to your business (outside links, reviews, “likes”, tweets, regularly updated content) the more important and valid search engines consider you to be and therefore the more likely you will have a strong internet presence in organic search. So vehicles like your website, blog and social media where you can endlessly update your site and/or profiles as often as possible are a great way to reach potential customers vis a vis search engine results and customers directly if they keep up with your sites on their own.

All that being said, you can see how Twitter plays an important role in “talking” to the search engines. It’s a place where new content appears in real time. The more, the merrier! Check out this blog post that walks you through the steps of a basic Twitter strategy for your business. Recently, an app called Breath Bird for Twitter was released for people who cannot use their fingers and who have problems speaking. I haven’t used it but I think the concept is great and there should probably be more apps created for handicapped people. Learn more about the app here.

There are reports that Twitter is releasing their own photo sharing service. No, Twitpic is not Twitter. Some are wondering why Twitter would continue to alienate third parties like Twitpic and YFrog that support them … or why not just acquire Twitpic?

Bottom line = Twitter is looking to make money.

Mathew Ingram, in a post on GiGaom pointed out:

Twitter may have inadvertently chosen the perfect time to launch such a service, judging by some of the backlash Twitpic has been enduring recently. Twitpic has been widely criticized for changes to its terms of service that give it the right to license user photos to an entertainment news service, without sharing any of that revenue with the original owner. A number of users have said they plan to boycott Twitpic as a result, which gives Twitter a large window of opportunity. That and easy integration with Twitter’s various software clients should give it a pretty big runway.

We all know how popular photo-sharing has become, so there’s no need to get into why that’s a good thing surrounding Twitter. Beyond implementing a tool to further engage your users, naturally – there’s ad revenue that could make this an even better thing for Twitter.