You may remember last year Google and Twitter inked a deal that would see tweets being indexed by Google. Bloomberg, being the first to report this deal announced that Twitter content would be easily found and indexed on Google almost immediately after it was shared in the social space. Sounds great right? Wrong. We quickly realised that Google was in actual fact only indexing about 3.4% of Tweets forcing businesses to closely look at their content and to seriously ‘up their game’ if they wanted increased SEO exposure. Of course there were things to help such as:
1.Having a high following
2. Using Hashtags & Images
3. Having a High Social Authority
4. Being fully SEO optimised (consistent handles and web links in bio etc)
Last week has seen something very interesting happen. Firstly we had the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone announce the relaunch of the, as he calls it, ‘on-demand’ search engine Jelly. Much like jelly, the search engine flopped on first release back in 2013 and definitely draws similarities from Quora, Chacha, Yahoo Answers and of course Ask.fm. However Stone is optimistic this will be an alternative to Google offering users fast human responses to questions rather than having to sift through results predetermined by Google indexing and Adwords. I wonder will Google see it in the same light.
At the same time it’s been announced that Google has launched a test to let media post directly in a search. It’s known that Google has been toying with the idea of allowing certain marketers and media companies to post directly into the search engine displaying their content instantly in the results. As well as text the post can have hyperlinks, images and video. Kinda sounds like…Twitter? And of course you can be sure Google will prioritise it’s own content pushing any indexed Tweets further down the list. ‘Google Posts’ is slightly different to Twitter however. A dedicated web-based interface allows the user to enter over 14k characters and 10 images, videos and links. There will also be the option to share the post via Facebook, Twitter and email. The posts will stay live for 7 days and will then only be accessed through the corresponding link. Last Thursday morning if you entered the words ‘Jimmy Kimmel’ into Google you would have seen a carousel featuring multiple posts by the show’s producers. Example: http://bit.ly/26Ld0Mi
Google Posts is still being tested at the moment and is by invitation only. You can sign up here to be one of the first to use it: https://posts.withgoogle.com/
So with Google pretending to be Twitter, and Twitter attempting to be a search engine surely this marriage of convenience can not end amicably.
Will you turn your back on the primitive Google Search and be seduced by ‘Jelly’? Will you jump head first into Google Posts leaving behind the Twitterati?
Tell me what you think.
