Social Media | Design Meme

Google unveiled their new Real Time Search feature this week and with it established their view that the most relevant content for someone searching for your company is not your company website, but rather the most recent post from anyone mentioning your company on Twitter.

This fall I was invited to speak to local business leaders about Social Media Strategy and how they could use it to help their companies. We looked at Facebook, Twitter and how these were helpful for communication and engagement with their clients and customers. With the recent changes to Google, businesses will need to reevaluate their social media strategies again.

Twitter content has been indexed by Google for some time now, but they generally included only a link to your Twitter profile on the first page of search results, and it was almost always lower down on the page than the link to your own website. That’s changed today and for many searches Twitter is now shown at the top of the page.

This means that if you are doing any sort of business online a potential client or customer’s first impression of your company could depend entirely on the most recent thing you’ve posted on Twitter – or even the most recent thing someone said about your company.

Jennifer Leggio at ZDNet provides a good example of why Google’s new preferential treatment for Twitter is a big change for brands:

Most people tend to Google a location to pop up a Google Map rather than going to the brand of choice and tediously searching for the “find a location” page… What if someone is ranting about Starbucks on Twitter? In the past a brand manager might respond with “Oh, that person only has 50 followers” and not be too concerned. Not so fast anymore, brand manager. That tweet will now be picked up on Google real-time search right above the location search.

Google is continuing to adjust their new system, with a focus on preventing search engine spam. Some companies had their Twitter feeds included in searches for their company name earlier today, but now they don’t. There also seems to be some variance depending on where you like and which Google data centers you’re accessing. This makes it a bit early for us to know exactly what the new Twitter/Google best practices should be, but we can start thinking about some important questions:

Is it still a good idea to have your Twitter username closely match your company name? Do you want your Twitter feed, and everyone chatting with that account to appear in search results before your own homepage?

If you’re doing any sort of business online, is it now a good idea to post a lot of @replies, and RTs of other people’s links with your business Twitter account?

Is having a large number of Twitter followers and people @replying to you still an asset, or has it become a potential liability?

Do you want a lot of people RTing your posts and @replying to you, or would you rather search results featured a higher ratio of your own posts?

Does posting “fun” links and participating in hashtag games like #FollowFriday show the personable, human-side of your business, or is it just an opportunity for bad first-impressions?

It will certainly be interesting to see how Google responds to the concerns people are raising about real-time search and it’s potential for abuse. In the absence of significant changes to Google’s new search system I think there will be a lot of people rethinking how (and perhaps if) they continue to use Twitter for business, or if it’s better to just use it for socializing and talking about celebrities.