Google Partnership with Twitter Expected to Grow in 2016

 Posted on January 21,2016 in Social Media

In the ongoing battle between social media outlets, Facebook has long dominated the competition, with about 1.1 billion estimated unique monthly users. The site in the number two spot may depend one’s definition of social media. While YouTube claims the next-highest market share when included, when it is not, Twitter sits in second place with more 300 million unique visitors each month. Setting YouTube aside for now, this means that the behemoth frontrunner is nearly four times more popular than its closer competitor.

As you might expect, Twitter has not remained complacent in recent years, as it tries to reclaim a portion of the social media landscape. Early in 2015, the company announced that “tweets”—or posts on the site—would be indexed by Google, making them searchable and increasing site traffic. According to various reports, the partnership began very slowly, with less than 1 percent of all tweets actually being indexed in February 2015, the effort’s first month. The good news is that by summer 2015, the indexing rate had grown more than four and half times; the bad news is that more than 95 percent of tweets were still not being indexed.

More Growth Planned

When the Google-Twitter cooperative first started, the indexed tweets were only being displayed in Google searches made on mobile devices. While mobile searches certainly comprise a significant percentage of all Google queries, millions per day are still performed on desktops and laptops. In August, Google announced that the indexed tweets would display in desktop search results as well, creating additional exposure for individuals and businesses using Twitter. The search engine giant also indicated that the process would be ongoing and that relevancy and rankings were expected to improve in the months ahead.

Cyclical Concerns

Of course, the biggest struggle with starting a cooperative effort such as this is how behind-the-scenes, automated decisions are made regarding which tweets and accounts to index. Experts suggest that, in the early stages, Google was primarily indexing tweets from the most active, most influential accounts. On the other hand, those with less influence and visibility were the ones most in need of the Google boost. As less influential users and companies struggle to reach that level, the indexing of more popular accounts has created an ongoing cycle of the “rich getting richer.”

As we move forward into 2016, Google and Twitter will continue to make adjustments to their partnership, hopefully expanding the social media outlet’s potential. In the meantime, if you or your company is on Twitter, you can improve your visibility by connecting with other users, contributing to relevant conversations, and remaining active without incessant advertising.

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Sources:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/265773/market-share-of-the-most-popular-social-media-websites-in-the-us/

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-indexing-466-more-tweets-still-favoring-higher-authority-users-study-224826

http://www.webpronews.com/google-should-now-send-more-traffic-to-twitter-2016-01/

http://searchengineland.com/google-officially-expands-twitter-into-desktop-search-results-228723