Twitter, founded in 2006 by veteran web startups team and since then have been a choice of every internet marketer, blogger and companies as outpost to their various target audience. It has garnered as much as 50 million users making it move closer to full mainstream adoption.
One of the main benefits of twitter is its real-time nature giving updates of information as they occur around the world. Top search engines (Bing & Google) are worried at the pace twitter is moving, it reads on their faces that they had liked to acquired the firm but twitter has continuously rebuff acquisition. Even though it still struggles to make money, it’s a toast of everyone!
The deals
At the recent Web 2.0 submit, Microsoft announced the deal signed with both Twitter and Facebook to make updates from the sites available in their search results, giving people access to real-time information from the sites. Well, while the companies (Facebook & Twitter) are still struggling on profitability, I sure believe this deal is money backed, which is good news for them.
Entered Google; as the news of Bing’s deal making the headline, Google’s Marissa Mayer announced deal with twitter, also to make the tweets available on its search result. This is a good deal for Google for now, as more attention will be garnered and in the process make more money from its sponsored link.
Effect on Google and Bing
As the quest to garner attention grows, the giants are scouting as much as they can to get it through every available means. While this will create a big buzz for now and drag more people to the search engines, the relevancy will now be of great importance. Twitter updates are free and open to the public, user’s post are not monitored or verified hence people can make pitch and get listed on Google and Bing search result ASAP.
One of the advantages of these search engines (Google in particular), is relevance and correctness of their contents, the results from twitter updates (for now) can not be validated, and this will question the results of the search engines unless a separate tab is created. Look at it this way, if top ten results on either Google or Bing are from Twitter and they don’t in anyway match your request (after linking to the websites), what will you do? Make a new search? I guess they need to make the tab separate and uncluttered with the main result.
The winners are still the giants, more ads inventory to sell, more attention to be capture and more money to make!
Effect on Twitter
Well twitter is in search of money for its empire, having got funding up to $155M making, money is its top priority. While making money could be daunting, since most twitter users don’t use it from their home page, strategic alliance is sure a step they are looking into. They recently had a deal with Federated Media. Since Twitter doesn’t have the attention on its main site (to which it can make money), then the site’s bye-product “Tweets” is the way to go!
Twitter’s deal with the giants is a non-exclusive type, hence they can have same deal with as many companies as they like. This is a good deal for them; since these sites have the attention any site could be dreaming of.
General Market impact
As the socialization of content continues, more and more content will be visible from every angle. So if you say something about someone online, believe me another person can get to know about it.
Also getting your site listed on search engines is now a matter of making an update on your twitter account.
Companies should also be ready to manage their reputation across the board, because their customers will be everywhere speaking about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction of their products.
On the good side, if posted updates are relevant, the general searchers will be the one to benefit from it. They don’t need to search Twitter, Google and others to get information; a search is enough on a single search engine!
The battle for our attention continues, remember these giants’ needs to be profitable year-on-year so they are still in search of what’s hot around the internet. Expect more!
Photo credit: Mashable.com
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) If only the energy was channeled into a productive cause for Nigeria.” That was a good point there! As Nigeria’s image continued to be battered abroad, we need to use every possible opportunity to showcase the good side of us. 
