Twitter and Google Rekindle Their Flame: What It Means for Your Business

In early February, Google and Twitter rekindled their flame by forming back into a strategic partnership. I use the work “rekindled” because this isn’t the first time these companies have gotten snug as a bug in a rug. In 2009, the two companies inked a deal allowing Google to index tweets, and the duo has done it again. How does this affect Google and Twitter? More importantly, what does this mean for you and your business? Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s clear up what “indexing” is with Google. When you go to Google to search, you’re not actually searching the web. You’re searching Google’s index of the web. Google encourages us to think of their index like an index you’d see in a library. Library indexes list all of the books in that library and where to find them. With Google, it’s exactly the same except books are websites. This is so important because Google holds 75% of the web search market share positioning it to be the most trafficked website in the world. Fun fact: Google’s index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes. *Insert jaw-dropped emoji* The incentive for Google to partner with Twitter is that Google will now have very specific, time-sensitive, relevant content in its index. The key word here is time sensitive. Sure, Google already has very specific and relevant content in its index through blogs, but blogs don’t happen as quick, easy and as often as tweets do. Now Google will have very specific and relevant content indexed literally as it’s happening. There haven’t been many details about this strategic partnership yet. Both companies have been very hush hush about it so far, for example, ad revenue has yet to be discussed, but from my research, once a user clicks on the tweet within Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), they will be taken to a feature hosted on Twitter’s domain called Instant Timeline. This is where the incentive for Twitter comes in. Twitter has a world domination plan to become “one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world” said Twitter’s CFO Anthony Noto. Their target is $14 billion in revenue by the year 2024, mind you the social networking company produced $1.4 billion in revenue in 2014. To achieve this strenuous goal, Twitter must grow it’s user base in order to successfully diversify it’s advertising catalog. Therefore having more unique options for advertisers and the audience base to do so. All this talk of strategic partnerships and billions of dollars is great, but what does it mean for you and your privately held, small business? Why should you care about Google indexing Twitter’s tweets? Let’s take a look.

Welcome to the Twittersphere

If you’re not on Twitter already, I get it. Personally, Twitter isn’t something I’m excited to keep up with (like Instagram), but if we professionally want to stay relevant we have to be on Twitter. So saddle up! Create a Twitter account, follow an everyone relevant to your industry, and tweet away. Linking social media with search is undoubtedly the direction search will be taking, so welcome aboard. Oh! Be sure to use Call-to-Actions (CTAs) in your tweets.

Discoverability

With masses of people using Google to search, of course, there is going to be an increase in traffic on Twitter. It’s not going to be a slight increase in traffic either, it’s going to be a substantial increase. If a small business does it’s research and uses Twitter to the fullest extent, the Google partnership will be revolutionary to small businesses because of the instant, discoverability factor.

Real-Time Marketing

Indexing tweets in real-time places a higher emphasis on real-time marketing. When users interact with you, engaging quickly is key. Participating in trending topics or an event that has recently happened will also generate more traffic to your Twitter, therefore, generating more traffic to your website. Good indexing tweets is a win-win for both companies and yours. So what’s the catch? There has to be a downfall somewhere in the mix. You’re right. There is. Businesses have to be ever-more careful on what they say in their tweets because Google’s index will forever keep the content on the web and discoverable. If a business wants to change its brand and message, the messages and tweets given in the past will forever be linked to that same business even if your brand and message are different.

But how will it actually work?

People who have been a part of the Twittersphere probably know about Twitter’s Top Tweets. Top Tweets is a Twitter page retweeting the most trafficked, engaging and trending tweets. Experts are expecting Google to take in Twitter’s data and index them like Top Tweets does. It’s all algorithmic. Search Engine Land spoke to Twitter’s Chief Scientist, Abdur Chowdhury, asking him to further explain how Top Tweets works: “Top Tweets is a new algorithm we developed that finds tweets that are catching the attention of other users,” he says. “The algorithm looks at all kinds of interactions with tweets including retweets, favorites, and more to identify the tweets with the highest velocity beyond expectations.” Brace yourselves, people. Pretty soon we will see real-time marketing, search and Twitter drastically change. With the traffic Twitter has under its fingertips, Twitter may surpass the power of Facebook. Connect with us on Twitter @digitalbrew_co. We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the Google/Twitter partnership.