By: Brad Cohen (@supnah)
Yesterday, in a post on my personal blog, I called Twitter a “Real Time Capable Social Search Engine.” Little did I know that elsewhere on the web, Lew Moorman was proposing Twitter as Google’s first real threat to search dominance. I am not prepared to go that far - I think that Google will remain dominant in search even as Twitter becomes more and more mainstream. However, I am absolutely in agreement that Twitter will be used increasingly as a search engine by its users, and is certainly poised to play a major role as social search matures. And because this is the case, Enterprise level organizations must begin to think of brand management on Twitter not just as a marketing initiative or social media initiative, but also as a form of social search optimization.
Make Regular Appearances in the Chronology
Results are returned (for the time being) based on chronology rather than authority, though there are a few third party applications available that return results based on their own authority algorithms based on metrics like numbers of followers and how often a user is retweeted. You want to make sure that, as the brand manager on Twitter, you enter the conversation at regular intervals (at the very minimum) so that your identity shows up regularly in the comment stream. It is this comment stram that will be returned in searches related to your brand. In this way, your visibility in Twitter search results is maintained at regular intervals in the chronological order, and whenever a user performs a Twitter search related to your brand, you will have a presence.
Real Time Search: Engage Your Customers, Defend Your Brand
fighting off negative comments - if someone says something bad about your brand, you want to see/hear it immediately via social listening, and respond. This gives a chance to make a good impression and change that person’s mind. Your response is also chronologically newer than the complaint, so a search on Twitter for your brand will result in your response being higher on the page than their complaint - effectively you have a better search result to put it in terms of Google’s page rank, but the effect, in terms of searcher eye-tracking is similar. You hit their eyes first. They know you responded before they even read that there was a problem to begin with. Also, if you have spent the time to build the equity in your Twitter account, if someone performs a Google search in which these tweets might appear, your account is likely to rank higher in the results than that of the complainer, again beating out the negative messaging for the prime real estate on the results page.
Tweet Expiration and Maintaining an Active API Archive
It’s important to understand how your tweets are available to searchers. This may be an appropriate subject for a separate post, but I’ll try to cover the basics quickly. A user searching via search.twitter.com or any of the applications that provide Twitter search by accessing the Twitter API are limited to about 4 months (maximum) of archived Tweets. This means that about four months after posting them, your messages disappear for all of these services, and whatever searches for which they might have served as results will no longer return them to the user. For that reason it’s important to maintain an active API archive of tweets, especially if there are specific brand-image issues you want to stay on top of. If there is a particular PR nightmare you want your own posts (your own side of the story) to stay relevant for, posting on that topic regularly enough so that 4 months don’t go by between messages will ensure you always have active Tweets in the API archive for that subject.
Third Party Indexing of Tweets - Where They Live Forever
Not every service provides search of tweets by accessing the Twitter API. Some services archive and index the tweets on their own - like Google, FriendFeed, and RSSmixer to name a few, and tweets can appear in searches in these applications theoretically back to your very first tweet. This is good news, because it means that you can get some long-lasting equity out of individual tweets, and their effect is not as ephemeral as it is when strictly viewed through API-based search services. It means that if you invest the time and effort to build the equity and authority of your Twitter account, you can leverage that value into your ranking to help your brand in other web services like Google.
Build Your Equity, Expand Your Coverage in Google Searches
Just because I don’t think Twitter is going to be the David to Google’s Goliath anytime in the immediate future, doesn’t mean Google won’t be defending its turf. Google is going to be working hard to index social search results to prevent loss of search volume to direct searches through Twitter and/or other social search engines. Building equity in your Twitter account will help it to rank in Google searches about your brand or your Twitter username. This is great news, not just for you brand identity, but because it has the additional benefit of being from another domain, and therefore potentially extending your results page coverage by another two spaces. If your own domain is already ranking well you could rank number one and two from your domain, and three and four from your Twitter account. Also, if you can build importance around your Twitter account, then any links from that account back to your domain are very valuable, and you have just created an asset that you can continually leverage into linking strategies to boost your Google rankings and traffic numbers. This is a gift that keeps on giving.
People are Discovering Twitter - Shouldn’t You Be There to Greet Them?
Twitter is growing like crazy. Really. It’s already gone mainstream with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore taking up residence. Stephen Frye singing its praises on the UK’s version of Leno (or Letterman, or more like both combined probably) sparked a massive adoption spurt across the UK, putting a hockey stick on what was already an incredible growth year in that region. Yes, there are competing services like FriendFeed, but the point is that a lot of your customers are already here, using these social media, and more are coming every day. Don’t you think you should be here to greet them?
Last 5 posts by BradCohen
- Open Graph and SEO - April 27th, 2010
- Streisand Effect - A Lesson for Enterprise - August 5th, 2009
- Best Buy Twitter Commercial - TwelpForce - July 23rd, 2009
- Twitter URL Expansion Arrives at Last - July 18th, 2009
- Twitter Messaging - May 21st, 2009
Tags: Enterprise, marketing, Social Media, social search
