Ever wonder why you rarely see tweets in Google search results, even during globally publicized events like the World Cup or the Oscars?

Well, that wasn’t the case back in the late 2000s when Twitter was first starting to gain digital glory. From 2009 to 2011, the two giants had an agreement that granted Google access to Twitter’s data stream in return for disgoogle and twitterplaying tweets in search results – until it expired and wasn’t really addressed again. Until now.

Four years (and hundreds of billions of tweets) later, they have announced a new agreement in order to make tweets more searchable online. It’s going to take some time for this to go into effect, of course, but check out the brief breakdown below.

What This Means for Google 

Google does currently show some tweets in their search results, but it’s such a small amount that it is a barely noticeable effort. To put a number to it, in a study by Stone Temple Consulting, their results showed that Google indexes less than 8% of all tweets. You’d have to have a well above average number of followers to have a chance at being indexed.

One of the benefits that Google will see from this agreement is access to a much broader amount of content – which will enhance their search results and give users a more complete experience.

However, Google is going to be quite selective about which tweets they index. They want to know that the tweets are not spam and that they would be of great value to their users (via links from third-party sites, retweets, favorites, etc.).

Another added benefit is that they no longer have to crawl Twitter’s site for information, as it will be readily and automatically available to them.

What This Means for Twitter

With Google having access to their Firehose, the stream of data generated by Twitters’ millions of users, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted. This gives users the opportunity to use Twitter to increase their presence in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Because of this and Google’s selection process, users may begin to invest more time on Twitter and tweet more valuable content about their areas of interest. This is a great benefit for Twitter, as they are aiming to draw in more people as user growth slows.

The agreement also means more opportunities for Twitter to possibly convert and monetize logged-out users. As previously mentioned though, it will take a while for Twitter to figure out how to prep their data for Google.

What This Means for Marketers

Basically, when this does take effect, marketers could see benefits from stepping up their Twitter engagement. This could be done by:

  • Creating awesome, valuable content that people will want to acknowledge through favorites and retweets
  • Spending more time crafting tweets (to make them more searchable)
  • Develop relationships with key influencers in our industries
  • Incorporating more multimedia elements into our tweets, such as images and videos

Though this is not something that will affect your day-to-day Twitter strategy at the moment, it is something to be aware of as we move through 2015. If marketing, social media and SEO are your areas of business, look out for the shift sometime in the next few months!

Newsletter-CTA (1)