Back in June, we reported that Google and Twitter had reached an agreement that would allow Google to show relevant tweets within mobile search results. This week, Google rolled out the integration to desktop results as well. Tweets that Google deems relevant to a search query will now appear in a “tweet snippet” (as pictured below) or in place of the meta description.
The partnership between Google and Twitter is not the first of its kind, as the two companies had an agreement back in 2009 to show tweets (a program dubbed Google Real Time), but the agreement expired in 2011 and had not been renewed until recently.
How Will This Affect Your SEO?
This integration is especially important to SEOs and content marketers since Google-indexed tweets are able to include images and links. This means that digital marketers now have the opportunity to share content in real time within searches.In the experiment below, I tweeted a link to an article on the Geek Powered Blog. When my name is searched, my Twitter feed is pulled and the most recent tweet is shown (with a link to the article I tweeted about.) When a searcher clicks on the link, it takes them to the article, not to Twitter. This means that marketers (and in theory, brands) can inject a new link into the SERPS, simply by using Twitter.
It is unclear at this point how effective click-throughs in SERP tweets will be but we will continue to experiment with the integration. Google has said that the feature is currently only available in English language searches, but will be rolled out to other languages in the future.
