In a previous post, we talked about the ways that Facebook can help your online reputation by boosting your brand visibility and contributing to your SEO and the SEO of pages you control—boosting your page rank. But there are other social networking tools out there that can contribute to an overall positive online reputation, like Twitter.

Both Google and Bing have publicly stated that they use Twitter to determine search results and page rank. In fact, Twitter may be even more powerful than Facebook when it comes to determining page rank in search results.

But keep in mind that on Twitter the authority of the person tweeting determines the weight that Google places on the link that was tweeted for page rank purposes. In other words, a retweet (RT) from someone with 1000 followers is more powerful than a tweet from someone with 5.

But all links are good links on Twitter, so the point is to try and get as many people sharing positive information and stories about your brand as possible. So how do you do it? Here are some tips.

1. Create a company Twitter profile

First and foremost, you need to create an official Twitter account for your organization if you haven’t done so already. First, capture your company name (i.e. @AwesomeCompany). Doing so will prevent anyone else from grabbing it and pretending to tweet from your company. And now anyone searching for you on Twitter will be able to find your official feed and know that they are getting correct information about your company.

2. Tweet good links

Keep in mind that your tweets matter more depending on how many followers you have and haw many of them regularly RT your tweets. So tweet links to good information about your company and your broader niche. You can tweet links to articles from your company blog, but make sure that you tweet other interesting information and blog posts as well. If you only tweet about yourself, no one will want to listen. In fact, for some great tweeting guidelines, check out this article.

3. Build followers and relationships

Twitter isn’t about simply sending tweets out into the ether; it’s about building relationships with other people who are interested in your company and your market. RT great links from other people, thank people for following you, and use #FF (follow Friday) as a way to point users to useful information about your niche. When your followers feel that you care about them, then they will return the favor by RT’ing your links—which is the ultimate goal.

4. Use your organization to your advantage

It’s hard to start a Twitter empire by yourself. But you already have an entire organization you can leverage; use them to build your Twitter clout. Encourage as many people as possible in your organization to get on Twitter and create personal accounts (unrelated to your company), and encourage them to RT links to favorable news and information about your company when you share it through your official account. If you have 1000 people in your organization and just 200 of them RT a link to a positive story about your company, that can result in huge SEO benefits for that page, helping your online reputation management campaign immensely.

5. Target specific pages

For a Twitter campaign to work and push positive results to the top of a Google search for your company name, make sure you target specific pages you want to rank. Use your company name in the tweet when you share the link and share it multiple times over a series of weeks, using specific hashtags and including phrases like “pls RT” (please retweet), in order to get the most traction out of your campaign.

In the end, if you can properly leverage your organization and become a trusted resource on Twitter for your niche, you’ll be able to help the SEO of pages you want to rank for your company name, boosting your company image and helping control your online reputation.