How Twitter’s New Deal With Google Could Benefit Your Business

In case you haven’t heard already, Twitter and Google have renewed their pre-2011 deal, which will allow Google direct access to Twitter’s ‘firehose’ (i.e. the constant data stream of 140 character statuses).

Tweets will become available for indexing as soon as they are posted, and the new marketing move could well become an SEO boon for businesses on Twitter.

But why does Google want our tweets in the first place?

Twitter as a lucrative audience

Google once already had access to tweets four years ago, which it later scrapped along with its Google Search Realtime feature. However, this time Google will have access to all tweets (as opposed to just a select few), in order to help it provide more relevant results for users.

The search engine is already crawling Twitter on a regular basis, but cannot possibly crawl each and every tweet without overloading the site. Therefore, it needs Twitter to give it direct access, as Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land explains.

So what’s Twitter got to gain from all of this? Well, the social network obviously wants to improve its service for logged-out users, showing investors that such people are part of their audience (and that the voice of its users is valuable). A 2014 decision to allow Google to crawl its top 50,000 hashtags worked out very well indeed, bringing 10 times more logged-out users to the platform and creating a huge opportunity for businesses and advertisers.

What’s in it for Google?

Google wants to be able to index tweets for a number of reasons, including:

Tweets are often filled with useful and timely content that can be relevant to the users’ search queries
Data associated with tweets could help Google to spot and organise content outside Twitter.

And for Twitter?

The perks on offer for Twitter, once revealed, are fairly obvious. Allowing tweets to be indexed has the potential to:

Attract a bigger audience for Twitter to place ads in front of (its next goal)
Bring tons of free traffic from Google
Encourage more signups to the platform.

So that’s how Google and Twitter are benefitting. But what about us?

How to benefit from the Twitter-Google changes

A study carried out by Stone Temple attempted to find out just what sort of tweets Google might prioritise, when it begins to index them later this year. The team analysed thousands of tweets over several weeks, sent during Google and Twitter’s initial agreement, and looked for patterns to try and determine what increased a tweet’s chance of ranking.

Tweets most valuable to Google

The tweets that appeared to be the most valuable to Google included:

Those posted by users with a higher follower count
The age of the tweet (the highest percentage of indexed tweets were of those seven days old or more)
The authority of the user (more ‘high-end’ users on the Twittersphere had their tweets indexed).


Tweet content that Google prefers



Images and/or hashtags (these types of tweets had the highest indexation rate)
Mentions appear to be a negative (95% of these tweets were not indexed)
Tweets with inbound links to useful sites outside of Twitter had a 26% indexation rate (four times the overall average indexation rate). Note that these links had to be quality links, leading to something of genuine benefit to the follower.

Although the data gathered by Stone Temple could just be mere correlations (and not direct influences), it’s the closest thing marketers have yet to working out how tweet indexation works.

How the new deal can impact your business

This new shift might sound quite drastic, but it actually all makes perfect sense. And the best bit is that this could bring some major benefits to businesses. Bear in mind that:

Google may use the quality of your brand tweets to determine the authority of your content overall
Tweets that rank can help drive more traffic to your profile, and (if they contain inbound links), to your own site or content as well.

Remember though that the effects of your tweets being indexed could also be negative, were you to experience a PR disaster. For example, insensitive tweets could take a while to disappear from Google’s SERPs, even if they were later removed.

All in all, Google ranking tweets is something we should be grateful for – both as publishers of content, and as general users. To make sure you get the most out of this change, make sure you:

Create link-worthy content within your tweets (don’t worry – this won’t be every tweet you write)
Consider the use of high-impact images for your most important announcements/updates
Take advantage of hashtag use for more tweet exposure (but DON’T overdo it – make sure you’re aware of hashtag etiquette)
Don’t ditch mentions simply because they don’t (for the time being) appear to directly promote indexation. Interaction and engagement is still crucial to building trust with your followers, especially when it comes to customer service.




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