By Lydia Chen Shah, Director Marketing Communications
The search marketing world fluttered with excitement last week when Bing and Google announced separately deals with the microblogging company Twitter to bring tweets, or Twitter posts, to the search engines’ results.
Why is this significant?
This revolutionizes the perception of content, for marketers, consumers/users, and what the search engines value as content. Social influence, or rather human influence delivered from social platforms like Twitter and Facebook now impact directly what consumers will see and find in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Quick example:
Let’s look at http://www.bing.com/twitter and search for “halloween costumes”.
Search results include two main categories:
- Most recent tweets about Halloween costumes
- Top links shared in tweets about Halloween costumes
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What may have been considered previously as buzz or hype when brands tap social media venues has now become a relevant, valuable source for search engines.
Yes, real-time search is still evolving but it is evolving quickly. And, it still has some challenges to overcome. Is recency, e.g. most recent tweets, always going to determine the top results? How will the search engines filter spam? When and how will the engines integrate real-time search into universal search?
Final thought for this post: Brands serious about growing and creating market share need to keep a close, keen eye on the social layer of information introduced, which has gained formal acknowledgment by the major search engines.
We’ll be testing, staying vigilant of the quality of SERPs, and making sure we evolve too as real-time search changes the game.