Twitter And Google Reach Agreement To Index Tweets

According to a report by Bloomberg Business, Twitter and Google have made a deal to make it easier to find Tweets online. The agreement will provide Google with access to Twitter’s firehose, which is the service’s data stream, thereby making Tweets available for indexing by Google as soon as they’re posted. The report indicates the project is currently being worked on and will be switched on at some point in the first half of this year.

This agreement marks the rekindling of a relationship between the two companies that ended in 2011, when Google killed Real Time Search and Twitter cut off access to its firehose. Since that time, Google has had to crawl Twitter to index Tweets, thereby making it difficult to locate specific Twitter updates via the search engine.

Now, with Twitter’s recent efforts to improve the experience for logged-out users and to illustrate to advertisers and investors that the off-Twitter audience is a viable one, this agreement makes a great deal of sense. Instead of the need for Google to crawl Twitter’s site for information, it will now be visible on the search engine automatically.

The deal is a logical extension of the progress that Twitter Chief Executive Officer, Dick Costolo, has been making toward getting Tweets seen by more non-users and generating additional advertising revenue from a larger audience. Twitter is clearly attempting to bring more people to its site as its user growth slows down.

Many digital marketing experts feel this deal will benefit both companies. For Twitter, it will provide additional opportunities to convert, and possibly monetize, logged-out users. It will likely also increase the frequency that Twitter users log into the site. For Google, its search results will be enhanced by access to real-time Tweets, thereby providing a broader scope of content.

According to the Bloomberg Business report, there is no advertising revenue involved in the deal between Twitter and Google. This suggests that Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue, which was $41 million in the third quarter, up from $16 million one year earlier.

What effect will this deal have on marketers and businesses?

Further the increased reach potential of having Tweets displayed on third-party websites and apps, marketers and businesses will be able to benefit from this deal by having their Tweets easily accessible in Google’s search results. Now, when consumers search Google for information related to a product or service, businesses will have another pool of their advertising initiatives that can be found. This can increase the reach of a marketer’s Twitter advertising campaign to both Twitter users and non-Twitter users who will be able to see the information in Google search results in real-time, thereby providing the ability for businesses to distribute Tweets to a larger audience.