Google Search Adds Twitter

Google Search Adds Twitter – What It Means for Business

Twitter has become a social networking phenomenon. This stream of consciousness type media outlet is followed religiously by millions on a minute by minute basis, which makes it an exciting new source of real time information. Google saw the potential to provide searchers with another form of search information that is more up to date and can be better targeted to their keywords than traditional search links. Google announced that they would be adding Twitter to their regular search pages on October 21, 2009 at the Web 2.0 summit. The addition of Twitter “tweets” to search results is predicted to influence businesses in several different ways.

One direct impact on Twitter’s business is that it may have found a steady source of revenue from the deals inked with both Google and Bing. Up until now business analysts have been skeptical of how long Twitter could maintain its forward progress without using ads from vendors on its site to generate stable revenue. Now that it is receiving a steady stream of capital from the two giants in the search engine industry it looks like Twitter will be able to strengthen its market share and enhance its services. This should foster new innovation and competition in the social networking niche of the Internet that can be taken advantage of by businesses looking for new media outlets.

This new type of search provides attractive opportunities for businesses in that they will be able to convey real time information to a much broader audience than if they were using regular search engines alone. For example, vacationers at a beach resort can tweet about the current weather conditions and their experiences at the resort while they are actually there. If a user is searching for a vacation spot they can get that in-depth real time information by people who are actually there instead of just a flat marketing site or a room rate from a standard search. This gives them the ability to make more informed decisions by getting reviews from people that they already trust who are inside their social networking circle.

The type of information generated from Twitter could be extremely useful to report weather conditions, stock quotes, breaking sports news, and many other types of time sensitive information. It also can be a great way of broadcasting news and information directly from laptops and cell phones. Twitter represents the masses and gives everyone a voice instead of information influenced by the media, politicians, and personalities that can manipulate information to suit their purposes and agendas. It lets the user drill down to the micro level of news.

Businesses can take advantage of the type of information that Twitter provides in order to reach out to customers on a larger scale. Searchers can see information about businesses that standalone marketing pages can’t convey. Since the information is coming directly from other real people inside the searcher’s own networking circle the information is much more reliable. This would be great for reviews of services provided by businesses and give them a stronger outlet to represent themselves and give a more in depth explanation of what they offer. This is only the beginning and these types of technology partnerships could prove to provide many new opportunities for businesses to increase their exposure to markets and customers.