Google’s Twitter Update Is About To Hit
Google’s Twitter Update Is About To Hit
Here's
what businesses should be thinking about
Long story short, what you say and what others say about you on Twitter may start mattering a lot more.
We learned in February that
Google and Twitter struck a new deal that will see Google indexing tweets
in real time. Initial reports indicated that tweets would become visible in
Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted, starting in the first half
of this year. Now, we’ve got a more specific timeframe.
In
a conference call to discuss Twitter’s earnings, CEO Dick Costolo revealed that
the integration will begin its roll-out next month. Given that April is just
about over, that could potentially be as early as this week.
“I don’t have a specific
date for you, but now I can at least give you a specific month,” said Costolo. “And
that Google deal is all about…that relationship is about driving our total
audience strategy. The goal is that people consume content and engage with that
content whether they log in or not.”
Twitter Needs More Eyeballs
Since going public in 2013,
Twitter has faced immense pressure to grow its user base, and that growth has
been quite slow. While the company did manage to add 14 million users over the
last quarter, it only just surpassed its 300 million
monthly active user milestone. For comparison, Facebook just
reported 1.44 billion. Twitter has been exploring different ways to grow its
MAUs, and much of that has been focused on improving the experience for logged
out users.
Earlier this month, Twitter launched a homepage redesign.
For logged in users, the homepage remains the user’s home timeline, but for
logged out users, it’s now a user-friendly directory of categorized content.
Twitter has for all intents and purposes turned its logged-out homepage into a
news site.
The
Google deal is another way (and likely a pretty significant one) to get people
to realize more value from the service even if they’ve not been frequent users
in the past. The narrative around Twitter’s stock every time the company
reports its earnings is always shareholder disappointment, so the importance of
the Google deal cannot be overstated from Twitter’s corporate perspective.
The
two companies, as you may know, used to have a similar relationship, but when
the original deal expired, the companies were unable to reach an agreement to
keep it going.
“I would say that the way
we think about the Google deal now without again — without going into any of
the details distinct from the kind of relationship we had in the past is that
we’ve got the opportunity now to drive a lot of attention to an aggregate eye
balls if you will to these logged out experiences, topics and events that we
plan on delivering on the front page of Twitter,” Costolo said on a previous earnings
call ahead of the new
homepage roll-out. “And that’s one of the reasons this makes a lot more sense
for us now.”
What’s in store?
Little
is known about why exactly that relationship fell apart, but the most logical
explanation is that the pre-public Twitter thought it was worth more than what
Google was willing to pay for access to Twitter’s firehose of realtime tweets.
Google had even built a feature for its search results pages -Realtime Search –
around the deal. It used to display a box of scrolling realtime results, which
included tweets as well as content from other sources, on search results pages
for newsy queries.
Once the Twitter deal went
away, so did the feature, making it clear that the tweets were the only real
valuable part of that. This also illustrated how valuable the deal was for
Google, as its absence highlighted a failure of Google’s stated
mission to organize
the world’s information and make it universally accessible. With so much of the
world’s information now flooding the internet in real time, Google could hardly
make good on that mission without the access it once had.
Google
isn’t expected to implement tweets the same way it used to when the new
integration goes into effect.
“I don’t think that this is
what Google is looking for,” search marketer Eric Enge recently told WebProNews. “I
suspect that the UI impact will be minimal, but that more tweets will get
indexed. However (and this is a big however), what will really be interesting
to see is if Google uses tweet data to help drive personalization in one
fashion or another. One simple way to do this? Simply favor content that people
link to from their tweets in future related search results.”
“This
type of prioritization is similar to what they do with Google+ already,” he
added. “This is just speculation on my part, but I think it could be a huge win
for Google if this deal gives them enough visibility to allow them to do that.”
We’ll
see if either company makes a big announcement about how Google will handle
tweets or if we’ll just start seeing the tweets surface more.
How Google has been using tweets
Earlier this year, Enge and
his firm Stone Temple Consulting released some findings about how Google indexes tweets
currently, which provides some insight into how things may change when the new
deal goes into effect. His team analyzed over 133,000 tweets to see how Google
indexed them, and found that about 7.4% of them were actually indexed, leaving
92.6% completely left out of the search engine.
The
findings suggested that Twitter accounts with larger follower counts are
getting more tweets indexed, though it may be only a correlation. Enge said he
doesn’t think Google is looking specifically at follower count, but that other
signals are affecting which profiles get indexed more (i.e. links to those
accounts’ profiles). Either way, he noted, more value is clearly being placed
on the authoritative accounts.
Out
of the accounts with over a million followers that the research looked at,
there were 13,435 tweets with 21% of them being indexed by Google. Out of
44,318 tweets in the 10K to 1M follower range, only 10% were indexed. For
80,842 tweets from accounts with less than 10,000 followers, just 4% were
indexed.
Stone
Temple said images and/or hashtags seem to increase a tweet’s chances of
getting indexed with percentages registering higher than average. Mentions, on
the other hand, register negatively. It also points to another of its studies,
which showed that links from third-party sites have a significant impact.
“Google
still loves links. 26% of the tweets with an inbound link from sites other than
Twitter got indexed. That is nearly 4 times as much as the overall average rate
of indexation,” Enge said in the report, adding that link quantity correlates
highly with a tweet getting indexed.
They
found that out of 21 accounts and 91 tweets with with over 100 inbound links,
46% were indexed. The number goes down the less inbound links there are. Those
with less than ten links only saw a 7% index rate.
“What
our study showed is that Google currently places minimal impact on freshness of
tweets today,” Enge told WebProNews in February. “Perhaps when crawling needs
to be done to discover them it’s just not worth it, and it might be that the
new deal will change that. However, I suspect that it’s not the tweets
themselves that Google really values the most, but the content they link to
that Google wants to discover more quickly. That said, if they see a tweet
getting major engagement, chances probably would go up that this tweet will
show up higher in the results.”
Your reputation on the line?
Businesses
may have reputation-related issues to be concerned about when the deal takes
effect.
“The biggest challenge and
opportunity for businesses using Twitter for customer service is that every
interaction is now amplified,” Conversocial CEO Joshua March told us last month. “Whether that’s a
complaint from a customer or the company’s response, the agreement between
Google and Twitter places a greater spotlight on each interaction.”
“When
a customer is searching on Google for a business, Tweets from customers about
issues or bad service experiences could be on the front page,” he said. “If
businesses have a social first approach to customer service then they can
tackle these quickly and head on, creating positive engagements that will show
up instead. This deal has the potential to accelerate the kind of
service-related Twitter crises many brands have already experienced.”
The
key word there is potential. Until we see Google’s approach to the integration,
any of this is only speculative. However, these are important points for
businesses to keep in mind as the integration approaches.
“For
companies with a social first approach who are committed to delivering
excellent, fast and authentic social customer service, the agreement between
Google and Twitter has the ability to spotlight them, and make it very obvious
to customers that they care,” said March. “Companies that have successfully
integrated various social media into their customer service DNA should be very
excited by the agreement. In addition, previously addressed concerns are now
searchable, allowing customers to potentially self-help.”
Businesses
are going to have to consider that any tweets related to their brands could
become more visible, as could tweets from employees. In fact, even beyond the
Google deal, Twitter is doing other things that could inflate visibility
through search.
This goes beyond Google
Google already has a firehose deal in place
with Bing.
Twitter
is also working with Apple. During Tuesday’s conference call, Costolo said,
“And finally, we are also working with Apple to surface great Twitter content
and accounts directly in Spotlight Search on iOS and OS X, that also makes it
easier and quicker to find great things on Twitter. So I would sum up by
saying, there is absolutely an opportunity to go and monetize that attention
and traffic. We want to make sure we iterate on the experiences to get them
right first.”
Twitter
clearly wants (and needs) to have its content surfaced as much as possible, so
look for it to find other partnerships to fuel this as well.
The
company is also experimenting with its own search interface, which could
emphasize the power of that to more people as it continues to court and retain
new users. We recently looked at a redesign it’s been testing, and while
Twitter would not confirm that it will roll out to all users, it’s clearly an
improvement from the existing interface, so I would be shocked if it doesn’t.
There’s not much change in
terms of functionality, but the way things are laid out and labeled are
significantly improved, and could draw some new attention to Twitter Search. For
a deeper dive into this interface, read this.
Twitter also recently started indexing every public tweet from the last 8
years, so there’s that too.
http://www.webpronews.com/googles-twitter-update-is-about-to-hit-2015-04
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