Tweets Come Back To Google Search Results

This week (19/05) Google announced that Tweets are to return to Google search results via their blog. As with most initial Google rollouts this is only available in US on Google apps like Chrome and mobile networks using Google search. It will then eventually be rolled out to desktop and other countries.

Upon the announcement from Ardan Arac, Senior Product Manager at Google, it appears it was the real time capabilities of Tweets which Google felt was going to be the most valuable part of this integration:

“It’s a great way to get real-time info when something is happening. And it’s another way for organizations and people on Twitter to reach a global audience at the most relevant moments”.

There is considerable premium space given to these Tweets and it looks like the first position will drop down slightly in the SERPS. The example below was posted in Twitter’s blog on the new partnership and highlights how a search for the hashtag #madmen will appear on mobile:

Tweets come back to Google results; not for the first time

Of course this isn’t the first time Tweets have appeared in Google, but in 2011 Google decided to remove Tweets from their search results. Whilst there was never a specific reason given (other than a 2 year agreement had expired) many industry experts felt it was down to Google trying to promote and ultimately monopolise the real time results with their own new social platform “Google Plus”.

As we all know this hasn’t quite gone to plan for them, is this some form of admission of this? In all likeliness, yes.

Opportunities for marketers?
So how are marketers going to turn this new partnership into opportunities for themselves and their clients?

Well it’s still early days so this is still up for debate, however, with the ability to demonstrate Social ROI still a problem for many marketers the chance to place Tweets in front of users searching for their product or offering is an exciting one.

It’s possible to see the often-tiresome tactic of hash tag hijacking (mentioning a trending hashtag in your Tweet even if it’s completely irrelevant) could become a more popular tactic as users clamour to increase their visibility.

However taking marketing out of the equation for a while it’s a feature I think will prove to be a very popular and useful one.

Twitter has shown itself to be a truly ground breaking and an incredibly important tool at times; breaking news stories in real time and giving insight into many unreported issues such as civil unrest, natural disasters and political opinion. From this perspective the incorporation of real time news is an exciting one and one I’m looking forward to seeing the results of.