Google and Twitter recently signed an agreement that rekindled a service that had stopped in 2012. For about a year, Google was offering real-time access to tweets as part of its search engine service. For example, if you decided to do a search on Kanye West, then one of Kanye’s always entertaining tweets would show up and it was usually his most recent one.
Google decided to allow the original agreement to lapse, but Twitter insisted and a new one was signed in late 2014. We are not exactly sure what Google was thinking, but this could pave the way for social media to level the playing field with search engines and become the Internet marketing vehicle of choice for website owners.
When we create a marketing campaign for your website, most of what we do is based on getting better search engine results through Google. We update your website coding, add keyword-enriched content, and put in organic links that are all designed to put your website as high as possible on the first page of search results for Google. But what if we could do all of that without even having to worry about Google’s increasingly constrictive guidelines?
Right now, Google is the gold standard when it comes to developing rules for online marketing. But if Google continues to open up the landscape for social media, then that may mean that Google’s rules are not as important as the social media rules. In other words, it could completely shift the marketing power from Google to social media.
For a few years, it looked like Facebook was going to overtake Google as the Internet marketing vehicle of choice. But when greed took over and Facebook suddenly forced business users to pay just to have their posts seen by any kind of audience, Facebook lost all of its marketing strength.
In lieu of Facebook, social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have become dominant to the point where millions of people a day access both platforms to give and receive real-time information. Neither Twitter or Instagram puts any constraints on the types of information that can be shared, which makes them both very powerful marketing options. But they both still needed that massive platform to take their marketing potential to the next level. Google just provided that platform and it could be at a huge cost to Google.
With Facebook no longer a viable marketing option for businesses, the emphasis shifted to Twitter and Instagram. Pinterest was holding its own for a while, but the fickle finger of fate chose Instagram and now that is the photo sharing platform that is taking off. Marketing companies like ours are finding new and creative ways to use Twitter and Instagram to reach larger audiences. This agreement with Google just made it much easier to use Twitter to promote your business.
When this new agreement finally goes into effect, real-time tweets will show up at the top of Google search results in much the same way ads show up now. Instead of paying for a Google ad, you would just need to figure out how to get your tweets to show up on Google instead. Considering how fast the Internet changes, it should not take long to figure out how to use Twitter to dominate Google.
Google still sets the standard for content and will always be the way in which websites get their information to large amounts of people. But if it is faster and easier to use Twitter to make a marketing impact for a business website, then you will start seeing more and more Internet marketing companies developing effective tweets to utilize an agreement that puts Twitter ahead of Google on Google’s own platform.
