11 March 2016

Web Design

Tweeting for success

How Google’s indexing of Tweets can impact your business

In 2011 a major deal between Google and Twitter had come to an end. It was only again in 2015 that Google announced they would once again have direct and real time access to all tweets on Twitter. This means that Google now indexes tweets as soon as they are posted through Twitter’s firehose.

So what does this mean for you?

This means that content that you create on Twitter through tweets is indexed into search results alongside posts that appear on your blog or white papers on your website.

If you have a large following on Twitter, this increases the chances of your tweets ranking higher in search results.

Even though Google is not indexing all of Twitters tweets and still has a long way to go before they do so, there is evidence to prove that Google has significantly picked up their level of indexation, with an increase of 466%. This is a big deal, and most probably brings incremental value to Twitter even though it is merely 4% of the whole Twitter data stream.

What is crawling?

Crawling is the process where search engines discover updated content on the web, such as new websites or pages, changes to existing sites and dead links.

This is performed through a program that can be referred to as a ‘crawler,’ ‘bot’ or ‘spider’ (each search engine has its own type) which follows an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl and how often.

It also detects and records any links it finds on these pages and adds them to a list that will be crawled at a later time. This is how new content is discovered.

What is indexing?

Once a search engine processes each of the pages it crawls, it compiles a huge index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. It is therefore a database of billions of web pages.

Once the content has been extracted, it is then stored and later organised and interpreted by the search engines algorithm, to measure its importance compared to similar pages.

How does Google choose which tweets to Index?

It is evident that accounts with more followers’ counts are getting more of their tweets indexed. It has also become apparent that it is not largely based on the follower counts but other signals such as links to those account profiles which can have a direct impact. There are several factors which may influence Google’s tweet selection process.

How does it benefit Google?

- Tweets are often filled with useful and timely content that can be relevant to what the user is searching for in the search engines.

- Data associated with tweets could help Google to spot and organise content outside Twitter.

How does it benefit Twitter?

Allowing tweets to be indexed has the potential to attract a bigger audience for Twitter to place ads, it brings tons of free traffic from Google and it also encourages more people to sign up to the buzzing Social Media site.

What does this mean for your business?

It is important to understand how these changes will affect your brand and its digital landscape so you can adapt and increase exposure.

It has also been suggested that there is likely to be an increased benefit of Google exposure for brands that have a good standing and those that feature prominently in related discussions of their products and keywords on Twitter.

The tweets that have proven to be the most valuable to Google include tweets that are posted by users with a higher follower count, the age of the tweet (the highest percentage of indexed tweets were of those seven days old or more) and the authority of the user (more ‘high-end’ users had their tweets indexed).

If you want to make sure that your business gets the most out of this change, there are several important steps that are required to take place.

Give us a call now to discuss how our Social Media experts at FDC Leicester can help increase your Social Media presence and help create link-worthy content within your tweets whilst increasing the usage of high-impact images for your most important updates and announcements, and taking advantage of #hashtag features for vast exposure.

Here at FDC we understand the importance of Social Media and we will guarantee you results every step of the way. Give us a call now on 01164 244 244 or complete our contact form.