Twitter strikes deals with Microsoft and Google
Friday, October 23rd, 2009It is undoubtedly very exciting news that Twitter this week has struck deals with Microsoft and Google, which will see people’s tweets added to their respective search engines’ results. In certain respects they are landmark deals, the reason being that it is not a particular search engine trying to take market share off the other, but two search engines clearly recognising the importance and influence social networking now has within the search marketing space.
This is not something that has happened over night, and many industry gurus will surely be quietly thinking ‘I told you so’ and perhaps even a sigh of relief after years of trying to convince advertisers to take social networking seriously. It’s no longer ahead of the curve, it’s mainstream now and the fact that the search giants are now actively looking to add Twitter tweets to their search results is evidence of that.
In recent years we have seen ideas such as desktop search and search content ads fall by the wayside as search companies try and increase revenues and improve user experience. I think this latest Twitter deal will be different as it offers an aspect to search results that are incredibly useful to users, for example opinions, real stories and useful snippets of information. This could help inform people to navigate the web better, purchase products/services that are right for them, and warn them off anything that perhaps sounds too good to be true.
On the flip side, the integration of tweets into the search results needs to be done properly otherwise there could be negative implications. Quality of search results could be diluted. ‘Bing’ especially, has spent a lot of time improving relevancy with some success, Microsoft I’m sure will not let these improvements be impacted. Also, brands need to be careful as more and more users will be exposed to user opinion which may not always look favourably upon them.
At CheezeDMG we are excited to be running several integrated social networking campaigns for clients which include campaigns on Twitter. Please contact Mike Groves on 01473 236893 who will be happy to discuss any of these campaigns in more detail.
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