Twitter, Google & Bing – Oh My!

This just in: Twitter conversations will soon be searchable through both Google and Bing.

For those using Twitter as a business tool, this is exciting news. After all, you may now be able to forget the clever blog headlines and just drop a list of keywords into your tweet to drive traffic. Or, if nothing else, it means that non-Twitter users will begin to view your comments (and attached links to your website) on topics that are important to them.

The flip-side of this becomes an increased focus on making sure that your tweets reach this newly integrated abundance of Internet searchers. With that in mind, here are three things that will change in the Twitterverse:

1. Expanded use of scheduled tweets.

Once scoffed at and deplored by the hard-core Twitter user, scheduled tweets may re-gain popularity. After all, if search results will be determined by the number of retweets and they lump together tweets that are similar, then it follows that the more often you put a specific tweet out there, the more likely you are to have it retweeted.

Trouble spot for users = too many redundant tweets!

2. Tweets that are simply a pile of keywords with a link, excluding opinion, insight or comment.

Now, that’s not necessarily “wrong,” but it does switch the emphasis of Twitter from connecting and engaging to one where we’re simply dumping information into a database in real-time.

3. Dummy Twitter accounts or scripts that can be run to retweet a message, thereby increasing the message’s popularity.

No matter how “smart” technology and online interaction become, manipulating data is necessarily driven by algorithms and rules. True human interaction, on the other hand, is the act of feeling and giving.

Which slant will the Twitterverse take in the days to come? Itís too soon to tell, but I do feel certain that there will be a change in the group dynamics of Twitter as the search gurus begin to incorporate clever uses of Twitter’s data.

– Rachel