Twitter is one of the most well-known social networking services in the world, and is continuing to gain popularity despite the dominance on Facebook and the very similar ‘status’ updates being an integral part of both services. In particular, the move away from a single identity on Twitter and separation from business and personal life have meant many companies that have never really seen Facebook as a social media option are moving to Twitter to provide a bridge between their internet presence and their customers.
But what most people don’t know is that Twitter is actually competing not just with services like Facebook, but also with search engine Google. In fact, after Google, Twitter is the most used search engine in the world – far beyond what we’ve seen from Bing and Yahoo!
Co-Founder of Twitter Biz Stone talked about Twitter’s success in search at the Aspen Ideas Festival, mentioning that the company performs 800 million daily searches which total about 24 billion a month. Only five months ago Twitter were releasing figures of about 600 million daily searches, so if these figures are reliable that’s a huge jump in people using Twitter to search out different topics and trends.
It also means that Twitter sees more search action than even heavily promoted search engines like Bing and Yahoo!, which only manage about 13.5 billion searches a month combined. Google is still way in the lead with around 88 billion, but if Twitter can continue to close the gap as quickly as it’s doing it could become a much bigger player for business owners and SEO companies in the future.
Google has been fighting back by offering real time search updates like those that users will get from a Twitter search, but the feature hasn’t been as popular as the Redmond giant has hoped and Twitter has had a good 4 year head start over Google when it comes to refining the real time search technology.
Given the nature of a Twitter search there’s plenty of reasons why you would want to use Google instead, as Twitter offers a different ‘kind’ of result. However, companies should be thinking about figures like these and taking notice, while SEO companies should be making sure that their clients don’t miss out on the popularity of Twitter search.
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