Loading ...The SEO community has been all a-twitter this past year about social media site Twitter. The site’s sharp rise in popularity in 2009 caught everyone but die-hard fans by surprise. The shock generated a lot of wild speculation about what Twitter, with its new approach to handling online information, meant to the search industry.
The search engine optimization world is constantly rocked by this kind of speculation, and usually it pans out to nothing. SEO pros are a little bored with the continued supremacy of Google. Every new contender gains an inordinate number of fans as a consequence, but all of the cheering on from the commentators of the SEO world doesn’t usually assist newcomers. Google continues to reign supreme. So then, why should anyone involved in search engine optimization be worried about Twitter?
The main reason to take Twitter into consideration is because Google does. Since the social media site became so popular, the search engine giant has made major attempts to catch up with the real time search game, recently going into a deal with Twitter and other social media sites to produce real time social results. For a company that usually leads the way in all things search, the fact that Google’s trying to keep up in this instance is very interesting indeed.
How Twitter poses a threat
All social media present a threat to Google because people trust word of mouth more than anything else on the internet. Google has reacted to this with things like the review function on Local Search, but at the moment it just isn’t keeping up. When people can find the trustworthy information they want in a few seconds on a social media site, they begin to turn away from traditional search.
Twitter also answers another need that Google does not, by providing information that users don’t even know they want. Users are provided with constant streams of information that are specific to their habits. Furthermore, when they do actually look for information, there are real people around that they can ask for help. Instead of reformulating searches in the dark, Twitter users receive human assistance in real time.
Don’t change your SEO plan just yet
The day when Twitter seriously affects the way that internet users search is still pretty far off. At the moment, not every company will benefit from a Twitter campaign, although most do. Businesses participating on Twitter have noted that most outbound traffic heads toward informational sites, with very little traffic going to transactional sites. This doesn’t mean that Twitter won’t come in useful as you build a customer base, and if your site contains a blog or regular article posts, it might be worth considering tweeting. Talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about Twitter and SEO.
Twitter does present a different way for your business to communicate with customers, and if your competitors are tweeting, then you had better get organised. The important thing is not to rush. There’s still plenty of time for the average business to learn its way around Twitter before sites are seriously affected.
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