It’s official. Bing and Google have each announced a partnership with social media marketing platform Twitter. Bing was the first to announce their partnership with Twitter and has already rolled out a beta feature for users to try out, here. In terms of deciding which tweets are worthy enough to show up on SERPs (search engine results pages), Bing will analyze follower number of the Tweeter and ReTweet quantity.
As for Google, it emphasized the value they saw in real-time search from their blog regarding their partnership with Twitter. Google’s Vice-President of Search Marissa Mayer states that “the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation… you’ll find tweets from other users who are sharing the latest and greatest information.” In conjunction with the Twitter partnership, Google has announced a “Social Search” tool will be introduced to Google Labs in a few weeks. As far as we know, it’s an improvement upon blended search integration, where search results are enhanced by news and image results. Now, content from social media networking sites that are connected to your Google Profile, like Flickr, will be integrated at the bottom of search results.
All this news comes out as a Pew Internet & American Life Project study notes that a fifth of the US population publishes and reads status updates—a rise from 8% to 19% of the population. In stride with the goals of social media marketing, the rise has been attributed to the desire to be a part of the conversation and to monitor what is going on with the world–for businesses, their brands. An interesting find in the study is that internet users who use social media marketing sites are more likely to use Twitter for status updates.
As for Twitter, it has cemented its importance in social media marketing. They’ve managed to partner up with two search engine giants and expanded the scale and reach of a single tweet more than tenfold. As we stated earlier, Twitter aims on dominating the social media marketing business and has finally cashed in on its success.