on 22 October 2009 
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Travel companies that dismissed micro-blogging service Twitter (”Why do I want to know if someone is eating a bagel or not?”) may well be rethinking their strategy this morning.
News initially from Microsoft’s Bing and a few hours later from Google confirmed that tweets from Twitter will be included in the search duo’s organic results.
Bing has a rudimentary service up and running already. Google’s integration is expected to begin over the coming weeks. Facebook status updates are likely, too. So what?
These series of announcements are more than fuel for the watercooler conversations for the Silicon Valleyites and wider digerati.
For travel and its relationship with search, indexing of live Twitter and Facebook updates will trigger a seismic shift – once again - in how travel companies think about SEO and social media.
Take the Google-Twitter deal as an example.
It is unclear as yet how Google will index and rank the stream from Twitter – but if it uses the same relevancy and linking protocols it applies at the moment to natural search, then this is a powerful change in engine’s capability.
In the past, results for a search for “Tnooz Hotel Paris” [it doesn't exist, obviously] would probably have returned the property’s website, a TripAdvisor review, a handful of aggregator sites, an OTA or two, and maybe a blog post or forum entry in the first few pages.
But now the results may include relevant tweets from Twitter. The relevancy may be determined by how many other Twitterists have re-tweeted the post, number of inbound links from respected and page ranked authorities, number of followers for the tweeter, etc.
In one quick stroke the search engines will be including the Zeitgeist of travel: the here and now of the travel conversation or what the web community is saying about destinations, airlines, hotels, tour operators, agencies and, most importantly, the reaction to it.
If this is the case, Twitter becomes a powerful channel for travel companies and can no longer be ignored.
Take any of the recent Twitter-induced social media outpourings of comment – #balloonboy, Jan Moir – and apply it to travel.
The sheer volume of content, cross-linking and re-tweeting would see conversations or products – in the new social world of Google or Bing – soar into search results by virtue of being active topics.
Think of Twitter’s trending topics being thrust into search results.
Some points to consider:
- For the searching-the-moment purists this is manna from heaven – finally search engines will have their finger on the pulse of the web.
- To those that despise Twitter for its lack of control and/or relevancy and/or quality, this is a dark moment. Search engine indexing mostly takes a fair degree of time to filter relevancy. By including tweets it potentially removes the current evaluation process of search?
- Reacting quickly to comments on Twitter will be more important than ever for travel brands, regardless of size and resources. There is also, for example, possibly no guarantee that a swift reaction to correct a flagrant inaccurate tweet would stop content from finding its way into search results.
- Travel companies may well possibly (if they aren’t doing so already) flood Twitter with hundreds or even thousands of messages in the hope that it ends up on an organic search result relevant to their brand.
- Good news for SEO agencies working with travel clients! Tweeting, similar to that of writing destination content, will become a fine/dark art.
- Twitter for travel brands may simply become a huge distribution network of offers and late deals, arguably destroying its “What Are You Doing?” mantra. If Travelzoo isn’t looking into this already, it should be.
Nevertheless, perhaps the most important element outcome to come from this hugely significant development for search is it appears that Twitter has finally got itself a major revenue stream, if rumours that the deals with Bing and Google were commercial arrangements.
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Nice analysis, Kevin. Your idea, though, that travel companies may “flood Twitter with hundreds or even thousands of messages in the hope that it ends up on an organic search result relevant to their brand” would surely be self-defeating.
If they do this, their followers will quickly dump them.
It’s fair to assume – as you do – that Google will apply some kind of algorithm to ranking Twitter users, and their individual Tweets. Google might, for instance, not return retweets of other people’s messages, or messages directed to other individuals, in its results.
Twitter users know that a high number of followers is no guarantee of quality. There are people on Twitter with thousands of followers whose updates are largely ignored (you can measure this by looking at the number of hits from shortened URLs, by installing the bit.ly plugin on Firefox).
If I was writing the Google Twitter algorithm, I would certainly be interested in how many people click on your shortened URLs, and in the number of people hitting the “unfollow” button. Users that repeatedly Tweet the same or similar material might also be penalised.
So the rate at which you gain or use followers – and your inclusion in other people’s Lists – might be ranking factors.
If anything, this should encourage smart users of Twitter to concentrate even more on quality than quantity. Exciting times.
Very useful analysis, Kevin. I agree with Mark Hodson, when he cautions about “flooding” Twitter with hundreds of messages. Google knows about algorithms…and since it does not allow SEO groups to “game” the system, I’m sure that the Twitterati will not be able to do so either. Marketers and SEO techies need to join together like never before, because the messaging is a company’s brand, and that is likely to be optimized in Search. How a company responds to tweets will also be more critical than ever, since they are likely to appear high in Google or Bing rankings. Therefore, Twitter requires careful planning, strategy and policy. Three items that are missing for many travel suppliers, when I read tweets like, ” Time to go to the hair dresser… it’s been too long and it shows…” posted from one prominent hotel brand!
If content and links in Twitter are now indexed in the major search engines, then it will become more important for persona brands and especially companies to increase their Twitter activity.
I think Google and Bing may just have added significantly to the value of Twitter.
This is just one in a series of steps by Google to address real-time information. Recently they quietly added a parameter which allows granular time search: for new results within the last 5 minutes, 30 seconds, 10 hours, etc.
Mark’s comment about MSFT being able to filter users by authority is interesting but a little bit of a stretch. If you check out http://bing.com/twitter I’d expect the search results to be a little smarter. There is a value gap between the few Twitter users you can count on to provide useful stuff and the critical mass you need to provide useful results for 98% of searches (four sigma).
The interesting thing is that Facebook is making status messages searchable via MSFT, who owns a piece of Facebook. I don’t know if MSFT’s equity investment played a role in Facebook’s decision last year to stop making status messages accessible via RSS, but that unpopular decision actually makes Facebook’s information more valuable in this emerging war to provide real-time search.
Brian:
Can you explain why you think Facebook status updates are more valuable?
Susan:
as I hinted at in the post, Twitter writing will become a new artform in itself, playing helpfully into the hands ofthe SEO experts.
Of course, some might say that the writing on Twitter is poor most of the time, so any improvement will be welcome.
Kevin -
There are two components of value when it comes to search. There is the corpus (the data sources that undergird the search) and there is the way that people use search, sometimes referred to as involvement.
First, the corpus. While the conventional wisdom today is that all data must be searchable in order to create value, if you look at search engines from an investment perspective, you discover something different. The profit drivers for search come from (1) having a proprietary corpus, (2) number of end-users that prefer/are exclusive users of the search, and (3) having some proprietary secret sauce that allows for even more value. Using Google as an example, Google is (1) using the guise of net neutrality to put its servers into ISPs in order to enlarge its corpus; (2) aggressively launching new end-points like Wave, Gmail, Chrome, etc.; and (3) building on AdSense by using its insights gleaned from (1) and (2) to enhance its capabilities in social search, as announced just this last week by Google VP Marissa Mayer. For more on this investment thesis, check out “The Economics of Information Vending” by Hambrecht and Quist analyst Joseph E. Laird.
Next, look at the way that people use Facebook. One of the interesting tightropes of social media is what makes something “cool” in one moment where it was “creepy” just six months prior. Whether you ascribe Facebook’s success to luck or planning, this insight is the reason that Facebook rules today and Friendster is an afterthought. I’d argue people on Facebook are more discerning about making suggestions simply because if the person has a bad experience as a result of that recommendation, it will come back to bite them in the butt. Twitter users, on the other hand, are more impulsive and less likely to screen their recommendations.
Or, to put it in a travel context: Facebook suggestions are like suggestions from a hotel concierge and Twitter suggestions are like reviews you read in a magazine. If the Wynn hotel concierge sends you to a place that is closed, the resort will compensate you to the tune of about US$50. You’re not going to get that response with a magazine — or with a Twittered comment. That is why Facebook status comments have greater utility than Twitter.
@susantravels noted Google has launched the social search I mentioned:
http://bit.ly/3lglgD
While these results show you what Twitter integration can add, I am hopeful Bing’s Facebook integration will demonstrate the qualitative difference of Facebook relationships when applied to search.