Twitter Search Deal

What Bing’s new twitter search will allow is much faster, more reactive brand marketing.

Travel
The biggest sector to be impacted will probably be travel with last minute deals being much more reactive via Bing’s twitter search and without having to constantly update PPC ads.

Retail
As we are coming up to the Christmas and New Year sales, retail brands will also start to see the benefit of this new integrated search as they can market short-term price discounts quicker without having to rely on search engine spiders crawling their site immediately.

Voucher code marketing will also benefit from this development, which given the current economic climate interest will only continue to grow.

Twitter
Robin Goad from Hitwise recently spoke at ad:tech London about how 55.9% of traffic from twitter goes to online media sites as opposed to 9.5% that go to transactional sites. The recent development should increase the amount of downstream traffic from twitter to transactional site which would further increase the profitability of the twitter business model – no need to cover the social network with advertisements just market it as a qualified traffic driving service to transactional website.

With Google’s announcement to also include twitter results within its search results this can only mean further growth in twitter is inevitable and marketers focus on incorporating social networks into their marketing is becoming more paramount.

Customer Service
There is another angle that needs to be considered following the launch of Bing’s twitter search which is brand monitoring and customer service.

Brands will need to be very careful because they will need to provide amazing customer service otherwise with tweets being integrated in to the SERPS brand searches could serve many tweets of disgruntled customers saying how they “are never going to shop with that brand again”.

This “binging” (see what we did there) the case, twitter is great for brand monitoring, but can be open to a lot of spam. A black hat tactic could be to set up thousand of twitter accounts and bombard brands on twitter with lots of auto generated bad customer experiences and these will be served against related brand searches. I’m sure Bing have thought about combating this, but spammers will always be one step ahead of the engineers in white coats.

And finally lets not forget mobile marketing and the impact this will have on the growing need for real-time conversation.

Whilst Bing is first to market with integrated twitter search it does appear that Google is not far behind – the question is will this be enough competitive advantage to gain significant market share for Bing?