Google and Bing have both announced a partnership with social networking giant Twitter. Bing was the first to announce their partnership with Twitter and has already rolled out a Beta version of BingTweets.
This is great news for users as it means they will be shown real time content based on popular user tweets. As the competition in Search Engine Space becomes more intense, Google and Bing are trying everything to attract users. The big news, however, is this officially makes Twitter the most influential social networking site on the web.
Bing Tweets pulls in trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now”, “People”, “Places” and “Products”, supposedly providing easier navigation to changing trends. When you do a search, you’ll get tweets at the top of the page and shared links at the bottom. The result displayed removes duplicate tweets, and filters out any adult content for better usability. When you do a search, by default new tweets will flow automatically into the tweets section of results.
Google, on the other hand, displays the five most recent tweets for the query the user has searched, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page. So users can not only view the pages indexed by Google but also see relevant Twitter conversations happening for that particular search query.
This will result in companies marketing aggressively in the social media space. It also creates challenges for businesses to ensure that users are updated with latest offerings and ensure customers are satisfied with the products and services they provide, in order to maintain their brand image.
The inclusion of Twitter into the search results will change the internet marketing space, but only time will tell how users respond to those changes.