Twitter Archive

Does your mum “Tweet”?

By
Tom
Published: November 3, 2009Posted in: MediaTags: , , , ,

Social Media is still growing at a healthy rate, with more ways to integrate your social networks into your daily and real time life, it’s becoming an increasingly important part of our lives to broadcast our real time activities.

So what about when it comes to our parents? Or older generations? The average age of the facebook user is now 33, facebookwhich has inceased year on year and showing that even older generations are finding the desire to embrace, use and share within social networks.

With over half of Facebook’s total userbase being made up of users between the ages of 25 – 44, Facebook has increased this figure from 32% in just over a year.

Twitter, however, seems to have a much younger demographic, or it did when surveys were taken a few months ago. But a few months is a long time when it comes to ‘real time’ social networks and I know that my mum is now on Twitter, tweeting her merry way through her day with curses, affirmations and chirps – but i’d like to know more.

Do your parents use social networks? Why do they use them? Are you a parent who are socially networked? Are you over 40 and tweet? If you’ve just started, why?

Google and Bing sign deal with Twitter

By
Tom
Published: October 23, 2009Posted in: TwitterTags: , , , , , ,

We all knew it was going to happen – we just didnt know when or how, but Google and Bing have finally signed deals with Twitter in order to include real time updates in their search engine results.twitter-bird-google

This is massive news within the online marketing industry, for a long time people have speculated the effect of social media such as Twitter and real time conversation for SEO and search engine utilization, but had no proof as to the precise benefits.

Some extra information is provided at the Google Blog:

‘“Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine in direct competition with Google was the first to announce their deal with Twitter, to list their live updates in their search results, however, Bing have also stated that they will be including Facebooks public updates, something that Google have not announced yet.

We shall see how this unfolds for companies online marketing – for me, it’s a great opportunity to see how I can further enhance the social media and SEO for Gaming Alerts.

What do you think? How will this will affect your marketing? Do you think this is the push that all companies need to get on board the social media train for their companies?

Twitter – The Discovery Engine?

By
Tom
Published: October 12, 2009Posted in: TwitterTags: , , , ,

Having attended the recent Chinwag Live event in Soho, London – one thing that was raised was that people are looking at real time search in the wrong way. Real time search Is not something that is replacing traditional search, but instead it is something that is raising reason to engage in traditional search.

Let me elaborate.Twitter vs Google

At the moment, the one place in which you can log in and find out what the most current events occuring across the globe is Twitter. Through providing the top 10 trending topics, you can see exactly what is on everyones lips – currently a feature which is not possible through traditional search engines, except at Bingtweets, who give you the option to see what everyone is tweeting about with regards to your search keywords.

The implications of this are important. People turn to Twitter as a means of discovery, i know i certainly do. When i log into twitter, the first thing i do is check the trending topics for trends which i would find interesting – things that could be potentially breaking news – and it doesnt take long for breaking news to be at the top of the trending topics either.

For people like me, what this does is turns Twitter into a means to find news without a specific idea of what news you want to find. It drives traffic right back to the search engines, as people take the trending topics, and immediately ‘Google’ them to find out what is so important about that keyword.

However, this doesn’t necessarily ring true for everything. For example, as i type this, Mike Tyson and Oprah have become two of the trending topics on Twitter, and now I want to find out why.

I click the trending phrases and i can see in one tweet that Mike Tyson was on the Oprah show and broke down in an emotional interview. Done. I don’t need to take this any further than that if i only cared about that information, however there will be people out there who will want to read a transcript of the interview or watch the video, and will subsequently go and Google ‘Miket tyson Oprah interview’.

Bam – instant traffic to Google.

So what are the implications of this? Well – I think the ability to provide its users up to the second trends of what people are talking about is what makes Twitter a threat to search engines services however, it is not a replacement. The two actually work very well together. Twitter discovers and makes prominent the current trends and gives people reason to go and find it.

Perhaps Google will integrate some form of ‘trending searches’ feature to their homepage, displaying what people are currently searching for the most, live, and up to second. Not sure though. It’d probably consist of Porn and drugs.

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