Debate About Twitter Search.

There’s an interesting article over on the Guardian’s digital content blog today. It’s reacting to the news that Twitter is serving more search queries monthly than Yahoo and Bing combined. Specifically, that’s around 800m search queries on Twitter a day.

As the Guardian blog is quick to point out, there are big differences between searching on Twitter and searching via Google or other search providers. Twitter indexes very differently from Google’s Caffeine or the indexing algorithms used by other search providers.

So, Twitter and Google will deliver very different results. The helpful example given in the Guardian blog explains further:

“If I want to find out what people are saying about the World Cup right now, I might search Twitter… But if I want to find fixture lists, stadia capacity and previous tournament winners, I’m going to Google.”

So, Google, for example, will offer a much more sophisticated field of search results, whereas Twitter allows up-to-the-minute monitoring of conversations occurring across the social web (turning up Tweets containing links to posts on Posterous, Facebook pages, photographs on Tumblr, etc.)

Twitter’s Biz Stone, quoted in the Guardian article, is aware of this difference:

“Searching the web – …is about I, me, I’m asking the search engine to give me something – and when you are on Twitter, you are open to information that’s coming to you.”

That’s an important point of the argument; what search services deliver defines how people use them. People are increasingly search savvy. With Google integrating real-time results on to SERPs, would it be worthwhile for Twitter to try and offer a more sophisticated search? Answers in the comments please…

July 13th, 2010 - No Comments »
Posted in Social Media | Tags: , , , ,

Social Is Overtaking Search.

New data collected from Hitwise is showing that social networking sites have overtaken visits to search engines. Anyone who has been following trends in UK web use – and if you haven’t, you should be – will recognise this as a continuation of recent developments. Social networks are obviously doing what they were designed to; attracting engaged visitors. And digital industries and the customer relations departments of other businesses have adopted them with vigour.

Implications? Well, the difference between visits to social and search sites isn’t exactly huge; social sites are currently 0.55% more popular than search engines when you compare percentage of total UK internet visits. Of course, every leading edge can be leveraged, and 0.55% of total UK internet visits is still a potentially significant amount of traffic. Search engines are still receiving 11.33% of total UK internet visits, a more than healthy amount.

While Facebook is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there’s still no Google-equivalent amongst the social networks. Facebook’s share of social network visits is 55%. Whilst that’s impressive, it’s nowhere near the market domination that Google has achieved. Facebook is making some big steps interconnecting with other social networks, and diversifying its functions into areas like ecommerce. This latter development could have massive implications, but it’s still early days; we’ll be looking into it in more detail in a forthcoming blog.

Social network users are there to interact with each other and with organisations and brands. Hence the opportunities for brand exposure and customer relations that make social networks an important arena for businesses.

As surfing habits change, it’s important to redeploy your strategy where potential customers spend their time, whether that’s users looking for engagement on a social network, or within search engine results. More than ever, ensuring that there’s cohesion between your social strategy and your search strategy is important. There’s a need for a coherent brand message and targeting across both.

June 9th, 2010 - No Comments »
Posted in Social Media | Tags: , , , ,

Sometimes It’s Cool To Be Proven Wrong.

Way back in 2007 we posted a very excited blog about Cisco’s annual report and its projections for the future of internet traffic. By 2012, we reported, internet traffic was set to reach half a zettabyte. That’s a huge amount. As we explained three years ago:

“What is a Zettabyte? Let’s start with the more commonly known gigabyte and work from there.

Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes

Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes

Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes

Exabyte = 1000 Petabytes

Zettabyte = 1000 Exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes”

Fastforward to now, 2010. According to the latest figures available, the “digital universe” is currently approx 0.8 zettabytes; around 300 exabytes larger than we estimated it would be by 2012. It’s forecast to exceed the zettabyte at some point this year.

While we may have got the figures wrong – and by quite a margin – we were right on the causes behind the increase in information on the internet. In our 2007 blog we pointed out the huge impact of “Web 2.0”. Web users have embraced social networking. The increasing prevalence of rich-media content being created and shared by both individual users and organisations has also had a massive impact. And that’s not to mention the mobile web explosion…

So, yes, we weren’t exactly spot-on with our estimates. But in this instance we’re more than happy to be proven wrong. We’re excited about the implications that the web expansion has for the creative and analytical aspects of our industry, and also excited on a purely geeky level; a zettabyte is an insane amount of data.

June 3rd, 2010 - No Comments »
Posted in General | Tags: , , ,

Brits Spend 65% Longer Online

New research from UKOM – UK Online Measurement – shows that there’s been a significant increase in the amount of time that British residents are spending online. According to UKOM, web use has grown by 65% in the last three years; web users are spending an average of just under a day a month on the internet.

There’s significant change in the way people are using the internet. Social networks and blogs are taking up the majority of time spent online. The growing focus on information sharing and interaction between users and the sites they visit is clearly reflected in UKOM’s report.

What does this information mean for the online marketing industry? An increase in web use means there’s more potential for engaging with visitors. Well, although UKOM’s figures might seem distressing at first, showing a relative 3% fall in the use of search engine websites, there’s a concurrent 10% increase in the use of portals, which increasingly incorporate their own search functions. Think Yahoo!, MSN’s integration of Bing on its homepages, the increasing ubiquity of iGoogle… People are using the web more, so they’re using search more, they’re just getting used to having search come as part of their portal.

It’s the increasingly social nature of web use that presents the biggest opportunities in our industry. Brands and businesses – i.e. our existing clients and our future clients – need to react to this change, and we need to be there to offer them the skill-sets and the tools that meet their needs.

It’s in the interests of the search platforms to facilitate effective advertising and marketing, hence Google’s quick response to changes in web use (Content network remarketing, for example). It’s in our interest, and the interests of our competitors, to do a number of things:

  • Continue to develop our analytics methodology so we can deliver actionable insights within a changing online environment.
  • Adapt our use of advertising platforms so we’re always exploiting the opportunities that will benefit our clients.
  • Ensure that we continue to deliver best-practice SEO which is always centred on the visitor.

We’re well up for it.

UK Time Spent Browsing The Internet

Does anyone have any other opinions on what UKOM’s report indicates for our industry? Leave a comment and share your insight.

May 21st, 2010 - No Comments »
Posted in General | Tags: , , , , ,

Twitter Business Centre Now In Beta.

Twitter have put the first of their dedicated business-user features – rumoured since last year and following the launch of paid ads last month – into beta testing. A few lucky souls have been invited to trial the Business centre; one of them has decided to share some screenshots with mashable.com.

The features that will be available to Twitter Business Centre users are intended to improve Twitter’s usability as a customer relations and PR platform; Business Centre users will be able to receive direct messages from Twitterers they don’t follow, and will also be able to add multiple users to one account.

These tweaks should make Business Centre Twitter profiles more flexible tools for dealing with customer enquiries, and increase the reaction-speed of damage-limitation public relations. Twitter is increasingly a tool for consumer campaigning; these Business Centre features indicate that Twitter fully understands the needs of their commercial users, and what they use their social media profiles for; speedy communication and flexible reaction.

There is, however, no word as yet on the access to “stats” that, according to statements made by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone last year, will eventually be made available to business users. Being a measurement-focussed agency, we’re more than a little bit interested in what these stats will include, especially seeing as Biz Stone has expressed the desire to provide users with “some of the analytics” related to their Twitter accounts.

We wonder what percentage of businesses will make the switch to Business Centre profiles once they’re launched globally. Feel free to comment with your thoughts…

May 11th, 2010 - No Comments »
Posted in Social Media | Tags: , , , , ,

   

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