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Google search is going to start looking different in the next few months, as Google has signed a deal with Twitter.com to start indexing tweets.
Similarly, Microsoft has signed deals with Facebook and Twitter to start indexing updates in the search engine Bing.com.
These changes mean your wisdom won’t be shared just with those in your immediate tweetstream or newsfeed, but could, perhaps, be listed in the search engines and archived for the world at large.
These moves are good for those of you focused on providing unique content and topic relevant tweets- you will have more ways to be found and noticed.
The downside of this process may be two-fold, though. First, your tweets may not remain indexed as long, so your ranking won’t stay constant. The reason I think this is because the rate of tweeting is so high, and newer tweets will always be considered fresher (and therefore potentially more relevant) than older ones. So any ranking you get may not last that long.
The second downside would be for content that is repeated or duplicate- likely only 1 tweeter will get credit, so this may drive down the number of retweets. Some would say this is a good thing, especially for content like quotes, or #follow friday, but we’ll have to see how this shakes out.
In order to benefit from this new search engine capability, focus on providing good strong content (I know I said this already, but it bears repeating), and try to phrase your tweets uniquely. In the beginning, at least while the algorithm is being worked out, I imagine that unique languaging will be initially counted as unique content. Later on, we may see a shift in this as content and context is also considered. (Kind of like latent semantic indexing for tweets.)
It will be interesting to see if adding tweets to the search engines will improve user experience, or will be seen as just that much more noise.
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One of the hallmarks of good social networking strategy is to overlap your social networks. This means that when you connect with someone through one social network, you want to try and connect with them also on the other social networks.
There are several reasons this is important. First, it enables you to leverage multiple platforms at once, so if your account on one platform (or the platform itself) goes down, you haven’t lost touch with your network. The second reason you want to overlap your social networks is psychological. The more familiar you are to people, the more they will like you. Seeing your name and profile again and again on multiple networks will automatically make you more familiar to those in your network. You can assist this process by offering good insight and relevant information.
The great thing about technology is that there are more and more services which can aid you in overlapping your social networks. If you use Facebook connect on Plaxo, for instance, your Plaxo network grows when you connect with someone on Facebook, if both you and the other person have this feature enabled.
A similar type of interconnectivity is promised by Twables.com, which is a service that connects your Facebook friends with your Twitter friends. You can access the service by going to http://www.twables.com/fb140
I didn’t find it extremely straightforward to set up, this probably could be slightly improved. However, once it was set up, I started getting @ messages on Twitter telling me which of my Facebook friends were on Twitter. I then have to login manually to my Twables account to accept or confirm the connection.
I think the idea of this service is very good, and it will be one to watch in the coming months. More and more, we will be seeing technology to help us connect in as many networks as possible, which will help us better navigate the flow of new social media connections and relationships.
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