Twitter as a Real-Time Search Engine
It took me awhile to join the Twitterverse. I signed up about a year ago, tweeted that same day and then let my account sit for three months. Who wants to hear about me cutting my fingernails, I thought. No one. Cutting your fingernails is banal. Boring. Again, no tweet needed to inform the world of my clicking and snipping. Then, three months later, I sent out an email to my natural search team members asking if anyone knew of a program for such-and-such task. I received one reply. With the answer came a post script, “This is the sort of question Twitter is good for; you should check it out more.” Interesting. Twitter as a search engine.
Fast forward to last week. By now, I’ve fooled around 90 people into following me on Twitter. I follow approximately 80. I’ve mastered the art of including @ replies anywhere within a tweet. I use is.gd, BudURL and TinyURL simply because I can – why limit yourself? I follow hilariously pointless accounts and enjoy The Odyssey immensely. I ensure the number of characters I use in a tweet allows space for people to retweet my message. Basically, I’m in it. I understand the ecosystem. I have enough followers to ask Twitter a question I cannot ask Google, Yahoo! or MSN.
While reading a blog I came across the interesting picture at the top of this post. I didn’t know the name of the painting, nor did I know who painted it. In a situation like this, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Mahalo and every other search engine wouldn’t be able to tell me the name of the painting and who painted it. I even right clicked on the image, selected “Copy Image URL” and pasted it into my address bar hoping the person who posted it on the Internet named the file, the painting or painter’s name. No dice – “http://www.hegel-system.de/de/gif/Gruen.jpg” didn’t tell me what I needed to know (tip: tag everything on your site properly; it enhances usability, user experience, findability, etc). If you search for [Gruen] on Google you get to learn about the Gruen Watch Company or Sara Gruen, both interesting I’m sure (side note: if you do a Google image search for [Gruen] you can find the answer).
So, I head to Twitter. I tweet, “does anyone who know painted this?” and I included the url. Within 5 minutes, I receive two replies, “isn’t that hieronymous bosch?” and “looks like Bosch to me too.” The plot thickened when I received a reply that read, “Matthias Grünewald 1515 ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’…different from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych version a decade earlier.” The point, of course, is that I used Twitter as a search engine. I couldn’t upload the image to Google for the answer. I didn’t want to instant message each person on my AIM account because that’d be annoying.
This is what Twitter has become, a real-time search engine. The importance of this development is made unequivocally clear with news that Google is potentially looking at collaborating with Twitter on how to best mine its data. Sure, there are still people who tweet about the banal things in life, and that’s okay, but there are also people out there that use Twitter to provide information to followers - links about search marketing or the hunger issue in your town, for instance. From a business perspective, there are millions of people using Twitter and some are talking about your product or your company. If you’re participating and tracking your company name and product via the RSS feed of http://search.twitter.com or TweetDeck, you have an opportunity.
Taking a step back, Twitter is not the end-all-be-all social media platform and in my opinion, will never hold that crown – no platform will. The Internet is a rapidly changing environment and the crowd moves from one platform to the next. As a business, you need to follow the crowd. Will the crowd always move to a platform that is easily trackable and readily monetized? Probably not. But, in the age of the Internet, it’s about the crowd. It’s not about the business. My favorite Seth Godin line, and one I refer to perhaps too often, goes something like this:
The Internet was not created by business people and does not exist to make you money – it’s not how does it help me? It’s, “how are people using the Internet and how do I help them achieve their goals?”
If I had to sum up social media strategy in one sentence, it would be “follow the crowd.”
