On Friday, Twitter took to its official blog to announce the rollout of a new feature that will provide suggestions and autocomplete capability to users searching the microblogging website. Aside from Tweets shared on the social network, users will also see suggested profiles of relevant people they follow as they start searching a term.
For marketers, this development might mean creating and sharing content around trending topics could help drive even more traffic as users search for certain terms more frequently.
According to Twitter, they’ve found that search queries on the site are often associated with topics generating a lot of activity. Providing the autocomplete capability will make it easier for users to find the content they’re looking for.
Twitter has made the feature even more interactive by providing users with multiple options in terms of organizing their search results. They will see related suggestions, so they can explore other popular content on the site. Additionally, searching for a name will generate results in the form of usernames and the names accounts are registered under to help users find the exact what they want.
Making its social network more interactive and easier to navigate has been a major focus of the company in 2012. Both users and marketers have received new capability that makes it easier to interact with Twitter.
Catering to its mobile users is critical for Twitter, as Brafton recently highlighted comments from CEO Dick Costolo that detailed the company’s massive appeal to smartphone users. According to Costolo, 60 percent of Twitter’s active users access the site from a mobile device. While developing a presence on most popular social networks can help marketers improve their overall mobile outreach, Twitter has performed far better in mobile than its competitors.While Twitter typically rolls out new features for desktop users before moving to its mobile apps, all Twitter users received access to the new search capability with the launch.
Based solely on ad revenue, for example, Twitter has successfully leveraged smartphone and tablet use to connect marketing partners with on-the-go social audiences.. The Wall Street Journal reported that a recent social media marketing campaign from P.F. Chang’s saw massive engagement, 70 percent of which came from mobile device users. With the new search capability, marketers could see an even greater lift in Twitter engagement from smartphone owners, since they’ll be able to navigate to brand profiles more quickly.
