Get High at Work!

What the Twitter + Google partnership means to the digital marketer

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

Earlier today, my friend and fellow marketer Kevin Ekmark shared this story on Twitter about the renewal of the Twitter-Google partnership. From 2009-2011, Google had access to the Twitter “firehose” of data, but for reasons most of us won’t ever know, that partnership stopped. Then rumors of a rebuilding came about late last year. Now it’s confirmed that “Tweets are now going straight into Google.” What does this statement mean? It means that…

  • all your tweets are indexed in Google’s search engine results in (near) real time; no Google bots that take any time to search and index this content.
  • you can search on any hashtag in Google and see the twitter results
  • all your twitter content is now part of your SEO (or as CopyBlogger says, “OC/DC”) strategy
  • when you search on Google, you can directly access Twitter results, even when you’re not logged into Twitter

In case you’re wondering, this relationship is a really big deal. Comparing this setup to Facebook’s pretty much closed environment, it means that tweets are now web searchable content. For users and marketers, that means they are much easier to discover on the web. For Twitter, it means that non-twitter users can, and probably will, be exposed to all the content on Twitter and possibly be drawn in to start using the service.

I’m all for this type of relationship, and there are huge benefits to Twitter, Google, Twitter users, and especially for social and digital marketers. Twitter is now expressly a part of your content marketing strategy and tactics. This subject was a lengthy discussion in our recent Digital Marketing class at GA Atlanta. I have been preaching that social media marketing is content marketing. Yes, there are many one-to-one interactions on Twitter between a brand and its audience, but in every case, the brand’s user representatives should be, must be, and are representing that brand by producing and publishing content, now more than ever, since every brand-customer interaction will be fully searchable on Google.

And when a brand creates, schedules, and executes a twitter strategy, that is absolutely content marketing. Those who have been doing this already have an advantage over those who consider social networks to be only “social”, and not content marketing.

Social content is content, and must be an intentional reflection of the values of the brand.

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • “Does SEO make anyone feel warm & fuzzy?”

    Lindsay Trinkle Visits #DGM2 Class @_GAAtlanta As we begin the second half of our 10 week Digital Marketing class, we welcome another great guest speaker from the Atlanta digital world. Our first speaker blew the doors off of market & customer segmentation, setting the bar high for our remaining three guest speakers. Tonight, Lindsay Trinkle,…

  • Three ways to auto-promote your blog posts via email

    Cross posted from the General Assembly Blog. There are many ways to share the content that you’ve created on your blog; however, the most reliable method of promoting your blog to your intended audience is through email. Most people check their social networks regularly, but everyone reads – or at least checks – their email…

  • The Math of the Marketing Funnel

    We’ve been talking about the marketing funnel just about every session of Digital Marketing, but we hadn’t really brought it to life yet. So, in our mid-term (10th session) of the #DGM2 class, we focused completely on the math of the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel, because marketing is ALL about the numbers. #dgm2 A…

  • Google Analytics for Bloggers

    We’re halfway through the Digital Marketing class here at General Assembly. One of the biggest challenges in the class is tackling Google Analytics, which is a big, hairy, complex beast of a tool that can either overwhelm you or totally guide you. If you are or aspire to be a digital marketer, then you must…

  • 10rocket’s Blog Challenge

    I’ve known Chris Turner, the founder of 10Rocket since early last year, when he and I met at Tech Talent South. Shortly after that, Chris enrolled in The Iron Yard‘s Ruby on Rails software developer course, because he wanted to be able to build the software product that he had envisioned. A few months later,…

  • Marketing is all about the numbers

    Tonight we got a special treat at our #DGM2 class: Maria Joyner of Synapp.io laid down the growth hacking truth on the class, setting the bar very high for our next three guest speakers. Who knew that Synapp.io was her first salaried job? The key to Maria’s success? “Find a startup that’s killing it, and…

  • On smartphones and social media

    Our kids (both 13) do not have smartphones. Yes, I know I’m a freak-parent for this day and age, but I’ll wear that one like a badge of honor. In a recent discussion about my and my wife’s horrible behavior, I was told by a friend as we discussed how much my children have “suffered”…

  • 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Bloggers

    Cross-posted from the General Assembly blog Beyond the obvious (write), there are tactics that you should build into the DNA of your blogging strategy. These are things that should become habitual, so you don’t even have to think about doing each of them. These are blogging habits that you see in the most successful blogs,…

  • Learn Something New

    I read a lot of blogs every day. A lot of blogs. Today, one of John Saddington’s four blog posts today (he blogs for himself and for Desk) caught my eye and made me think. John wrote about Roost, a plugin for WordPress that enables Safari users to get push notifications of new posts. So what?…