People are always asking how search relates to social. Bing announced that they are going to show actual tweets in search engine results. They are going to start off small, only showing tweets of about a few thousand Twitter users. They are considered the most prominent and prolific users of Twitter.
User profiles of several social media sites have been appearing in search engines for awhile...but they were/are not shown for keywords, just names. Bing does not say in the announcement whether or not the tweets will pulled by keyword, but give the example of searching for ' Kara Swisher' or '@karaswisher'.
Google shows tweets to a certain degree...by keyword/key phrase even. Here is an example:
I searched for 'jcurcio twitter' and Google pulled a fairly recent status update as well as my profile. My Zannel profile also shows up.
Below I searched for the phrase in the previous listing 'Eliana caught her first fish'. When searching for this phrase both my Zannel and Twitter status posts show in the search results. This is slightly different than bing, as they are almost creating a social media app right in the search engine.
It brings me to an article in the latest issue of SES magazine which talks about the future of search. Right now search is technically not real time because everything is not being indexed in real time. Sure, you can get some real time news stories and up to date Wimbledon scores, etc., but SERP's are generally not considered real time. At some point engines may be able to take these tweets and use them for some real time search results. Who knows...just a thought.
Note: I am a twitter user https://twitter.com/jcurcio and the company https://twitter.com/protocol80 tries to keep up on tweets, but I personally do not want my search engine results consumed by too many tweets. I am sure this is something the engines will ensure doesn't happen, hopefully.
I strongly believe social media and search are going to have some relationship for years to come. For now, people and businesses should take the time and explore the opportunities available. As long as you have a social media strategy in place, you can be successful.
