The Online-Marketer’s Guide to The New Google-Twitter Deal

Search trends are changing, and they are changing fast. Users are no longer solely using Google to search for information; they are increasingly heading over to social media search engines to find real time, topical information. One might say that Twitter, Facebook, and all the other popular social media platforms are the new Google. And, Google is coming to this realization fast…

Up until now, your tweets couldn’t be viewed on Google search. But, on February 4, Google and Twitter announced a deal that would allow tweets to be searchable on the Google search stream in real time.

This partnership opens yet another new channel for the online marketer to establish niche authority, engage their target audience and to distribute social content that will be widely visible.

Here’s a quick guide on how the Google-Twitter deal will work and how marketers can leverage the partnership:

Life Before the Google-Twitter Relationship

In 2011, Google had agreed to show tweets in real time on its search pages but that collaboration fell through shortly. Since then, you could hardly see live tweets if you searched them on Google. Less than 1% of tweets would show on Google’s search stream but these were old and not real time tweets.

Presently, Google has to crawl Twitter to index real time tweets to be able to show these on Google search pages. Given the massive amount of tweets sent out per minute (approximately 350,000 to be precise) crawling and indexing each tweet is not only cumbersome for existing Google infrastructure but it would also weigh down on Twitter’s speed and functionality.

The alternative?

As the deal rolls out, Google will instead receive real time tweets from Twitter through a data feed. This ensures that there will be no or very little time delay between the moment a tweet is sent out and when it appears on Google search pages! This also means that more tweets will show up on the search pages than was the case previously.

The winners of the deal

Both Twitter and Google stand to benefit from this partnership. But more importantly, online marketers too will have their share of advantages from this new deal.

For Twitter, having tweets show up on Google in real time is a great way of increasing its exposure and making Twitter content more discoverable and at a much faster pace. This in turn may encourage more people to sign up to the social service.

For Google, absorbing Twitter information could be a helpful additional method of finding and indexing more webpages. This is especially true for webpages or links that are tweeted out from high authority Twitter accounts.

How You Can Make the Most of The Deal

The Google-Twitter deal certainly has some relevance when it comes to SEO and traffic generation. Already, a lot of experimental studies are showing that the more a piece of content is shared via Twitter, the greater the chances Google will index it faster and rank it higher on its search pages, thereby driving organic traffic to your website. This emphasizes the importance of creating high value content that your Twitter fans will be willing to share, retweet, favorite, and comment on.

Regularly including relevant images and links in your tweets could also help to boost the value of these tweets as well as increase engagement from your audience.

Widespread engagement is likely what Google will be looking for when indexing and ranking tweets. The greater the engagement your content is receiving, the more Google will focus on this content as a source of authority, value and relevancy.

Relationships are equally important. As mentioned earlier, Google will likely be using links in tweets to discover new websites. Google algorithms will probably focus more on links tweeted out from authoritative Twitter accounts. This means that your site stands a better chance of being noticed by Google if many high authority users tweet out links pointing to your content. In a Google-Twitter era, those online social relationships become increasingly valuable.

Make the Most of Twitter

For a long time, marketers have wondered whether social signals significantly impact rankings on Google. With the new Google-Twitter deal, this question has been laid to rest. Your social engagement, value of social content and the relationships you forge online will now have a direct impact on SEO and traffic generation efforts. This should be good news for any smart marketer who understands the power of social. Now, I’ll be off to go tweet this article!