Twitter set to replace Google for content search

Thursday, 25 June 2009 |

Twitter could replace Google as a place to go to find useful content. New analysis from Hitwise Intelligence shows a remarkable difference in how people use these two services. It seems that around one in three searches on Google are for transactional sites - we are frequently looking to buy something.

Twitter traffic growth has fueled other web sites

However, over at Twitter, the clicks are all about content and information; less than 10% of the clicks on Twitter go to transactional sites, like shops. It looks like Twitter is beginning to be used as a reference source for useful information, whereas Google is increasingly being used as a means of finding a specific product or a kind of shop.

Of course, it is very early days in the development of Twitter. As the graph from Hitwise shows, most of the traffic has arrived only in the past six months. And besides, Google gets millions more clicks, so the actual amount of content-based searches it delivers still dwarfs Twitter.

Even so, this new analysis points the way to the fact that people are starting to use different tools for specific purposes. They are tending to get content via Twitter and shopping via Google. It is only the start of such a trend - Google remains important for your business. However, it does show a basic psychological principle at work here. Our brain loves to categorise things; it makes it easy for us to remember and it makes it easy for us to engage with the world around us.

Our brain is likely to categorise different kinds of searches - such as searches for products or things we want to buy, searches for material we want to read and searches for people we would like to talk to. True enough, Google can do all those things within fractions of a second. But, if we had separate tools for each category of thinking, we would tend to prefer them as they would fit in more easily with our natural way of behaving.

It looks like Twitter is starting to show us that it is a significant provider of content and information, in preference to transactional material. As the growth in Twitter accelerates, this too will become increasingly the pattern and the proportion of clicks to transaction sites at Google will grow.

So, what does this mean for your business? It suggests that you should work hard at using Google to rank your transactional pages, such as product sales and concentrate your use of Twitter on helping to distribute links to your informational content.

6 Comments

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SeoWebTechinfo makes this comment

Friday 10 July, 2009

Google still rules as no 1 search engine. When it comes to search, mostly you hear...Hey "google it" you will find the answer. So i think it wont be be easy to replace "Google it" with "twitter it".
Graham Jones makes this comment

Friday 10 July, 2009

Whilst that is true, it kind of misses the point I was trying to make. People are using the two kinds of searches in different ways. What you are suggesting is still likely to happen. But there is a whole new way of searching emerging that relies on social factors, not indexing factors used by Google.
SeoWebTechinfo makes this comment

Sunday 12 July, 2009

Sir, i got your point. You mentioned in last para..............It suggests that you should work hard at using Google to rank your transactional pages, such as product sales and concentrate your use of Twitter on helping to distribute links to your informational content..... I agree to this. One query is that how to know the shorten url which we are clicking on twitter is safe and and how to be sure that it will not not land to the page which may contain harmful program. Do twitter technology follow the link and scan the page or not. Thanks
Graham Jones makes this comment

Monday 13 July, 2009

The shorten url services offered in Twitter and in applications like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop are safe to use. I can't vouch for those services independently set up though.
Twitter sets up the shortened URLs as "nofollow" links, meaning that search engines will not go through to them anyway.
Ryan Gensel makes this comment

Monday 13 July, 2009

It's great to see this line of reasoning in print. Combing twitter statistics using all the newly available tools can provide valuable insight, but knowing the right questions to ask and finding the corresponding causation are different beasts. Thanks for commenting on the cutting-edge Graham! -Ryan
SeoWebTechinfo makes this comment

Monday 13 July, 2009

@Graham...thanks for the reply sir. You mentioned about search engine.... i.e...Twitter sets up the shortened URLs as "nofollow" links, meaning that search engines will not go through to them anyway............... I am trying to know from user point of view, how will user know that shorten url is safe for them to click..., is there any guidelines, which user can follow so that they don't end up landing the page which contains harmful programs... Thanks