Google and Twitter have announced that they‘ve finally struck a deal to allow the indexing of tweets by Google in real time. This means that as soon as a tweet is posted it will be indexed by Google, and will therefore appear in search results alongside webpages. In addition, we should see a separate carousel or section for tweets at the top of the search results page should there be a large number of tweets related to a particular search term. There is no official roll out date yet, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has revealed that the integration will start sometime in May. So what does this mean for marketing and SEO?
Essentially, this integration means that businesses are going to have to pay more attention to optimising their social media posts for SEO. As Google is now indexing tweets in real time and using them to determine its search rankings, our approach to writing tweets is going to have to change. Whereas before using keywords and phrases in tweets was not a priority; now it definitely is. Start optimising your tweets as soon as possible, and you should see the difference in your ranking and in the results of your keyword searches very soon.
However, many businesses are also worried about the negative effect this deal could have on their marketing, mainly related to how customers see their business. For example, if your business receives a complaint on Twitter that gains a lot of traction, you might previously have been able to handle this complaint in the same way you would any customer service inquiry and be done with it. But now, however, that complaint may turn up in Google searches for your business, and, depending on how the ranking algorithm works for tweets, it could rank fairly high, or even on the first page – and a complaint is not one of the first things you want prospective customers to see related to your business.
As such, experts are predicting that this integration deal will also cause many businesses to rethink and tighten up their customer service processes and CRM, so as to avoid this kind of situation.
