Comment Central

Tim Cook

It’s undoubtedly very exciting that Twitter has struck deals with Microsoft and Google which will see people’s tweets added to their respective search engine results.

In certain respects these are landmark deals – rather than a particular search engine trying to take market share off the other, what we’re seeing is two search engines clearly recognising the importance and influence social networking now has within the search marketing space.
 

The fact is social networking is now mainstream – that the search giants are now actively adding tweets to their search results underlines that.
 

This isn’t something that has happened over night, and many industry gurus will be quietly thinking ‘I told you so’ and breathing a sigh of relief after years of trying to convince advertisers to take social networking seriously.
 

In recent years we’ve seen ideas such as desktop search and search content ads fall by the wayside as search companies try to increase revenues and improve user experience.
 

This latest Twitter deal will be different as it offers something in search results that is incredibly useful to users - opinions, real stories and snippets of information that  will help them to navigate the web better, purchase products/services that are right for them, and warn them off anything that perhaps sounds too good to be true.
 

The integration of tweets into search results needs to be done properly to avoid diluting the quality of search results. ‘Bing’ especially, has spent a lot of time improving relevance.
 

But for brands, the development means they'll have an even bigger job on their hands as user opinion spreads even further.

 

Author: Tim Cook, Group Account Director, CheezeDMG - www.cheezedmg.com, twitter.com/Cheezedmg