Have you heard about one of the most important deals in the digital marketing space that happened recently? No? Well, you simply can’t afford to miss out on this one: Earlier this month, Twitter announced its partnership with Google! Dick Costolo, CEO of the world’s biggest microblogging company revealed that they have struck a deal with Google, granting it an access to their fire hose of tweets and the stream of live conversations. This deal, as per Costolo, is all about “eyeballs.” Simply put, this means that tweets will now become more searchable online. Well, if you’ve been closely following these two Internet companies, you would ask, “Haven’t we been here before?” Yes, remember ‘Google Realtime Search’ before it was allowed to lapse in 2011? So, now that the two companies have inked a deal once again, they’ve left many agencies and marketers wondering what it really means for them and how should they alter their existing online marketing plans? Here’s a quick look at the good, the bad and the tweety implications of this ‘mysterious’ partnership:
For starters, if you’re not aware by now, you should know that Twitter already has a deal in place with Bing and Yahoo!, wherein the search engine offers tweets in its search results. So, what’s really in it for the two web giants with this reunion? For Twitter, the motivation is obvious – to drive more users to its website and improve visibility of its content. On the other hand, for Google, it offers them valuable real-time content to better serve their search audience and (did we say?) put ads against. That’s not just welcome news for these two companies, the deal also offers many positives to you, the marketer! Here’s how…
Your every tweet will now reach a much larger audience. Even if your target users are not following you on Twitter, you can now extend the reach of your branded content beyond the confines of the microblogging network since they will be automatically displayed in Google’s search results. And we all know that search is still the biggest driver of traffic to most websites. In other words, you now have more content engagement opportunities by sharing your offers and latest blogs on Twitter.
If you are a real-time marketer, then this deal is a great boon for your business! We are well-aware of the significance of smartphones in today’s marketing space. So, if yours is a retail store trying to reach more and more local customers, your tweets will now appear in their mobile search results almost as soon as you post them. Similarly, if your agency relies heavily on real-time advertising such as event or sports related promotions, then your tweets will be visible to the search users at the very moment they typed the name of the event into a Google search box. Conversely, this also means that brands will now have to be super-careful about what they tweet in order to avoid embarrassing situations and not to fall prey to negative viral publicity.
Your tweets will now have a longer shelf life. Your brand messages will stay relevant whenever people decide to search for what you do or offer in the future. So, from the digital marketer’s point of view, it’s time to merge the social and search efforts. This deal increases the significance of social signals into search results by leaps and bounds. Now might be a good time to bring Twitter from the back seat of your social media strategy right to the front, even ahead of Facebook, should you like. If you’re a minute observer, you would see the search giant leaving a hint to the marketers at large, a confession rather, that Google+ didn’t really work out as it was expected to.
Whether or how good this deal is for your brand, is for you to decide. Have something to add to this story? Share your comments below.
