What the Twitter + Google partnership means to the digital marketer

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.