I know, I know, everyone is tired of hearing about Twitter and its amazingness. But what can I say, I’m a fan of being able to reach millions of people at once…for free! I’m fairly new to social media marketing, but what I’ve learned in the past few days has changed the direction of my blog topics.

USE TWITTER TRENDS! I can’t stress this enough. For the most part, whatever is trending on Twitter is probably a hot topic all over the web. Now, this might not always be the case, because comparing Twitter Trends to Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz will leave you scrapping for similarities. Simply from experience, however, I’ve found that whatever people are talking about on Twitter, they're probably searching for on Google.

Here’s my example: this week, Patrick Swayze blew up Twitter with his death rumors. As morbid as this sounds, all SEO and social marketing gurus know how quickly rumors spread on Twitter. And for those of us who do not check the facts, details can always get shady.

It reminds me of playing telephone as a kid. Somehow the original message gets lost, and the next thing you know ‘Tommy kissed Lisa on Sunday,’ when in fact ‘Tommy missed pizza party day.’ You know how that works.

So, since I work for a health care company that is keen on social media marketing, I took the Patrick Swayze died story and tweaked it to our benefit. I utilized the keyword Patrick Swayze, and literally turned the story into an education on pancreatic cancer. It worked wonderfully, and our blog traffic literally blew up. It went through the roof, simply due to the keyword ‘Patrick Swayze’ that everyone was looking for.

Lesson learned, I used what was trending on Twitter and tweaked it into a relevant blog for our health care site. Trust me, it works. If you’re a good PR writer, you can tweak just about anything to make it work.