Marketers, prepare to get even more mileage out of your social media content. Google announced it’s extending its use of Tweets to all English searches and mobile results pages. This provides greater incentive for brands to cover trending events in their industries, because they’ll now have the opportunity to rank more than once on a results page and grab their target audience’s attention.
Here’s an example of what it will look like on mobile:
And here’s an example of what people are seeing in desktop results:
This development is the result of a deal the two digital power-houses struck earlier this year. Twitter agreed to give Google access to the streaming social content users publish on its platform, offering searchers (including those who don’t have a Twitter account) access to first-hand breaking news coverage as well as opinions straight from the horse’s mouth. Check out this post for more of the backstory and why this was an important reconciliation: Twitter turns ‘firehose’ back on, Google to show Tweets in SERPs
Businesses that already have strong Twitter presences and post regularly about news in their industries should start to see traffic gains from their Tweets – or at least benefit from greater brand awareness as more people see their ongoing coverage.
On the other hand, companies that have only dabbled in social media up until this point will remain stagnant. This is a stark reminder that social media marketing is an important part of a healthy web marketing presence. If you’re part of the school of thought that “our customers don’t use social media – why do we need to do social media marketing?” Check out pt. #4 in this blog post from one of our content marketing strategists.
Businesses that don’t have an active Twitter account (or started one but don’t keep up with it) are missing opportunities to get in front of their prospects and customers – not just once, but now twice. Conversely, businesses that create original content about the topics they know their customers care about could see this search feature help them get even more value out of their investment in social media marketing.
Want to learn more about building a strong social presence to improve your chances of getting into search results? See these related resources for more information:
