Are social media updates search-worthy?
There are two kinds of value to be found in social media status updates, beyond their initial communication. Sometimes the content of a tweet or Facebook comment will be newsworthy in itself, such as the resignation Haiku posted by Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Other posts have aggregate value, as tools are employed to elicit information from the "body of evidence" they represent as to the moods, opinions and priorities of the populous.
Major search engines now have social search functions
The increase in perceived importance of social media status updates is reflected by their inclusion in major search engine results. Google now has an "updates" search tool that returns only status updates, while Bing.com has a social search function. Twitter itself has changed how it returns results in its own search facility from listing most recent tweets first, to favoring the most popular. This can be seen as a step toward making Twitter a more relevant search tool.
Trending topics on Twitter may predict Google search spikes
Another way Twitter is useful is for predicting search trends. According to SEOMoz.org (2010), Google has indicated that Twitter trends correlate strongly with spikes in Google search and can have a predictive nature. Thus, Twitter can tell you when to write about trending topics. There are many sites like monitter.com and trendistic.com that allow users to enter search terms and see either lists of recent tweets including those terms or a graphical representation of search term data from Twitter. Although no such data manipulation is available yet for Facebook status updates, Openbook.org does enable users to search for updates including certain search terms.
Tools like this could be useful for detecting wider trends, for example, by entering search terms such as “anyone know how” and observing the questions that users on Twitter and Facebook are asking each other. A recent observation revealed users asking for anything from legal advice “anyone know any laws regarding cyber bullying in #Australia ?” to requests to buy or sell iPods, furniture, tickets to events and other items.
People trust their friends’ recommendations on these sites more than they trust impersonal search results, which might explain why Twitter trends foreshadow Google trends. First, users reach out for help and advice from known sources and if it is not forthcoming, they turn to search engines.
Twitter search results are “a salesperson’s dream”
Tweets are certainly search-worthy for marketing and sales companies. Being active on social media platforms helps open lines of communication with users "where they hang out" and makes companies accessible to them. By maintaining a social media presence, companies can keep their brands top of mind with potential customers so that when they need a service, they think first of the companies they are engaged in conversation with.
However, as Ian Hendry of WeCanDo.biz says in a comment on the econsultancy blog Is social media a threat to paid search, tracking users asking for recommendations or displaying other buying signals enables sales staff to make those recommendations to willing, ready-to-buy customers by, “scanning the 38 million tweets each day to see who is requesting help around what their company does. It could be an 'I need a...' or a request for a recommendation, but it's someone with a need who is requesting contact. It's a salesperson's dream!”
