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Hat tip: Kosso’s Google Plusbar

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.

The Shadow script for Twitter is an experiment in seeing how being able to quietly follow other users updates will effect people’s perception of the value of following to follower ratios.

There are a few steps to using this script.

1. Download and install the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox
2. Save the Shadow script to your desktop
3. Edit the file in a text-editor to add the names of the users you would like to follow quietly
4. Save the file without the .txt extension: shadow.user.js
5. Select File>Open and choose the shadow.user.js file on your desktop

Now, when you visit Twitter.com you will now see updates from users you aren’t publicly following.

I can think of a number of reasons for using this script.  If you’re a business there might be users you find interesting or amusing that you don’t want to publicly display that you follow. If you’re Coke you may not want to follow Pepsi’s updates.

I’m also interested in seeing what affect this new feature might have on the social media community more generally.

There are a number of services that offer to calculate your “grade”, “score” or overall “value” on Twitter based on the number of people who are following your updates and the number of people you follow in turn.  The basic premise of these services is that it’s a good thing to have many more people follow your updates than the number that you follow in turn.  I think that’s a strange perspective to take.

In the real world businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to make their customers feel like they are being listened to.  Even though a business or celebrity can’t possibly return the interest and attention that millions of people focus on it/them, they want to maintain the perception that they’re still interested… just busy. No company would take the step of publicly displaying a short-list of their customers that are being listened to, leaving the rest to conclude that they weren’t as important.  On Twitter people know right away whether connections are one-sided or reciprocal, so choosing not to co-follow someone sends a very clear message:  I don’t consider your updates as important as you consider mine.

Whether you are in business, marketing, or just use Twitter to socialize, you should think about the value of a “good” score / grade / value as generated by one of these services, compared to the decreased value of building better connections with others.

For this reason I’ve decided that I’d rather co-follow other users on Twitter. If my goal is to network, share ideas, and learn from others – that’s not served by hoping to have more people follow my updates than I’m willing to listen to in return.

So while I’m happy with how I’m using the system, I’ve noticed a troubling pattern with a smaller number of users.  They will initially follow your updates on Twitter, and if you decide to follow their updates in return they will unfollow you again within 24 hours.  Viewing their profiles gives a simple reason for this:  they’re hoping you won’t notice their unfollowing so that they can continue to build a “better” ratio.

It’s entirely possible that this is in part because Google seems to be ranking Twitter profile pages very highly.  Do a search for “designmeme” and my Twitter profile is the 3rd link.  I have no doubt that people will see this as reason enough to try and optimize their Twitter ratios as part of a broader SEO strategy.

With users being able to quietly follow one another, will the over-emphasis on ratios decrease?  Since the script only accepts a limited number of users to silently follow (the entire search query must be under 140 characters), will it affect the users with 1,000s of followers more than those with only a few dozen?  Will the Shadow script become like a sort of no-follow attribute for Twitter?  Will people find other uses for this tool?

I’m excited to find out!

Ultimately this is another experiment in using the excellent Twitter API to create a new way of viewing this popular social media site. I’m sure there will be more to follow.