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April 3, 2015

Google + Twitter: The Internet’s Newest Power Couple

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(Photo: ‘Tweet Button” by flickr user Acid Pix, via Attribution 2.0 license)

After learning of the latest partnership between Internet giants Twitter & Google, Kanye West retracted his former emphatic statement to wife Kim Kardashian that they’re destined to become the next power couple on the planet. He said, “sorry honey, there might be a bigger and fresher clique forming, and attention must be paid.” We’re still waiting on his confirmation via Twitter, but have other sources to cite in the meantime.

We all know that Google’s moral code revolves around the user (why we love it!), so it’s natural that it would make a move that allows quintessential real-time marketing to spread its wings and soar. However, this new partnership is symbiotic (at least for now) at it’s core — it will allow Google to display the most timely news and information in real-time through Twitters’ firehose and Twitter to increase market share, gain a protective partnership with a giant and increased discoverability in search. Win-win!

Steve Carbone, managing director and head of digital and analytics at media agency Mediacom told Digiday “…the real-time dimension of the partnership means that brands, specifically retailers, will see a greater benefit from real-time marketing on Twitter.” In other words, consumers will be able to discover a tweet about a limited-time offer or new product even if they are not already following a particular retailer on Twitter.

While this is a nod to business-to-consumer entities, agencies would be missing out if they didn’t take note too. We need to be thinking about how we can evolve our search and social strategies to accommodate this shift in the ever-changing digital landscape.

Yesterday, our content team met to discuss the aforementioned and got an interesting dialogue going. One thing we’re all dying to know: What will the tweets look like within search? Google does not have an aesthetic method of featuring tweets in search yet, so there is a possibility that this will lend itself to an entirely unique kind of design. Experts speculate that it will work similarly to Knowledge Graph where tweets will be featured in a section within the SERP. In the meantime though, this is just speculation.

Additionally, how will privacy be affected if users’ intellectual property is entered into a publicly searchable domain.

According to Bloomberg, we can expect to begin seeing real-time tweets show up in search sometime during the first half of this year. We will report back with details as they unfold!