SubscribeIf you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you probably have been using a third party program to manage all of your contacts and conversations. I like to use Tweetdeck; it is by far the most popular, and it’s very simple to use. If you’re like me, and you’ve been usingTweetdeck or another program for a while, you probably missed Twitter’s recently revamped home page. The new homepage is much smaller and more streamlined than the old home page.
Twitter's new home page has a more search-oriented design
Twitter’s new homepage is set up now as a search engine. This is very powerful stuff. Internet marketers and bloggers have been expounding Twitter’s search abilities for months now. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, in an August 5th post stated that “It’s time to think of Twitter as a search engine.”
Twitter can be thought of as the anti-Google. Google builds links based on authority, trends, and statistics. Twitter, on the other hands, builds trends that it displays based solely off of the participation of its users. Twitter is a collection of emotional search terms. It’s a search engine that tells you how people are feeling about keywords or subjects, rather than how old that keyword or subject is, how it’s been trending for the past 5 years (Google Trends), or which site is more authoritative on the subject.
With Twitter, you search not for the price of items, but rather what people’s experiences with the products and services have been. Was the product of good quality or poor? How were you treated by the company’s customer service? These are the kinds of questions that are typically harder for Google to address, but are perfectly suited for Twitter’s social environment.
As more people are beginning to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time, companies are starting to take notice. Large companies, such as Delta Airlines, maintain a dedicated Twitter team, whose job it is to scour Twitter in real time and address customer complaints or re-tweet good reviews. I was even surprised earlier this year when Palm messaged me directly, thanking me for talking about the Palm Pre. After I tweeted about it some more (I love the Pre-it’s awesome), Palm even re-tweeted a tweet of mine. Very cool.
As a business, this provides you invaluable data and opportunity for growth. Growth is fueled by making a positive impact on customers, and truly engaging them. The data you gather from Twitter will tell you whether or not your product is a success, what its highs and lows are, and what you can do to improve it and your marketing efforts.
As a strategic move, Twitter is positioning itself to be a rival to Google and Yahoo, but in a very different way. Perhaps this new search will one day gain the volume and credibility of traditional search, while not stepping on their traditional search brethren’s toes. I can’t wait to see it.
