New Twitter Home Page: Any Importance? by Foster Web Marketing
Twitter launched a new version of their web page today, and the new design is eerily similar to that of a search engine. They announced the new design on their blog this morning, and the reason that they gave for the redesign:
Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved.
We’ve envisioned Twitter as a major player in the search engine world for a while now, and it looks like this may be the first step.
Twitter has one thing that Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines don’t: Real-time search capabilities.
How long does it take traditional search engines to index a page of a website? Days, weeks, and sometimes months. Sure, you could use Google Blog Search, Google Trends, or Google News search for certain up-to-date information, but how about a Twitter search for what everyone thinks about the newest Harry Potter movie as opposed to going through 20 different review sites and blogs?
Just today I was looking for the score to a pre-season soccer game that was overseas, but no major news site had the score until an hour after it ended. How did I find the score before them? A Twitter search.
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Tweeting is easier than blogging (logging in to your Twitter account and typing 140 words or less vs. logging into Wordpress or blogger, typing content, adding pictures, links, and tags, spellchecking, etc…. ), and the fact that you can Tweet on most smart phones means that Twitter will continue to grow in contributors and content that a Twitter search can “crawl”.
Yes, Twitter is also good for promoting blog and website content if you have enough followers, but for those who don’t have the time or resources to manage a blog full-time, Twitter is a great alternative (hence why it’s called a “Microblogging” service).
When you’re Tweeting, be sure to include keywords that people may be searching for from time to time, similar to how you optimize your website and content for SEO purposes. Include generic keywords relative to your practice areas, as well as location-based keywords, and utilize the “hashtags” (#) for any keywords that are commonly used in the Twitterverse.
Twitter is at an all-time high in popularity, with every celebrity and news outlet signing up as each day passes. Whether or not it will stick around and continue to rise in popularity will remain to be seen, but seeing as creating a Twitter profile is free and it doesn’t take much time to manage, what do you have to lose?
Twitter currently serves as a social networking tool, a content marketing tool, and an rss reader to some extent. Twitter as a major search engine? It might be sooner than we think.
Posted Under: Social Media for Attorneys Tags: attorney, law, lawyer, legal, Twitter
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