On December 7th Google shared a few incites into their new real time search functionality. It’s apparently all in an attempt to
“strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.”
What does this mean for search marketers?
Twasn’t all a waste of time
You know that Twitter account you’ve been updating with deals and news? Remember how your manager said it was a waste of time? Now you can hold your head up high, for the moment at least. Currently Twitter makes up the majority of results in the RTS meaning your Tweets now have a much greater chance of reaching a wider audience. Crucially an audience that is ripe for converting, quite a difference from the majority users on Twitter.
How large this new audience is remains to be seen. At the moment you’re only as good as your last tweet and for a limited period. I haven’t seen any evidence of historical tweets coming though. Twitter is real time, but that doesn’t mean that a tweet from yesterday is no longer relevant.
Twitter Spam
So your last tweet is only going to last as long as it takes to have it pushed out of visibility by other relevant tweets. If Twitter spam wasn’t a problem before, it sure is going to be soon. The various ‘auto tweet’ programs out there seem to offer an easy way for anyone with an account to flood Twitter. The frequency and variety of your tweets is undeniably going to matter when trying to avoid the spam traps and filters that Google will have in place. The IP address your automated tweets are sent from is also going to be under scrutiny. I haven’t yet tried any of these programs so I don’t know how they deal with these issues. You have been warned.
Optimising your Tweets
You should already be doing this for #hashtag searches in Twitter, if you’re not then you need to start now. You should already have a system for keyword research, so use that. I’ve already suggested you’ll need several versions of your tweets to avoid spam filters but you also should also use the variations to maximise search relevance.
Reputation Management
One of the great things about Twitter is the ability to communicate directly with your customers. Sometimes customers aren’t too polite about you, especially if they’re pissed off. It’s not going to be much fun trying to manage real time complaints in the SERP’s. It’ll be even less fun when a spammer floods Twitter with negative press along side your brand.
In summary
Twitter is one of the easiest social media platforms to get to grips with and one that requires the least amount of time. The old argument that your customer don’t use Twitter is defunct. Get yourself and account, get tweeting and start leveraging the most exciting and controversial development in search this year.
Tags: Google, Organic Search, Reputation Management, spam, Twitter