The Twitter story just keeps going from strength to strength, its popularity and industry influence gaining all the time. Until recently the big question was how the company would monetise. How would it turn profile, popularity and adoption into cash?

The numbers, both terms of users (Twitter just hit 58 million users worldwide) and in venture capital pumped into the company have been growing rapidly. After Twitter’s recent $1 billion valuation and having raised a total of $55 million so far in private venture capital, with a further $50 lined up, the company has gone a long way to justifying the optimism – it has got into bed with Microsoft AND Google. In the process, as well as securing its future – a future now predicted to be long term, highly influential and highly profitable – Twitter has shaken up the search industry by introducing the concept of real time search to the masses.

For most companies online the introduction of real time search is big news. For any organisation that works with time critical information – travel, news, weather, etail, market data, plus anyone who focuses on local search – this is beyond big. This is potentially monstrous. It’s a deal that offers powerful new ways to share dynamic information with your potential audience and a strong competitive differentiation and powerful SEO tool if applied well.

The problem facing the search engines as ever is how to evaluate the worth and the relevance of any information that they are assessing. How do they aggregate the vast amounts of data (in this case Tweets) in ways that are useful to their users?

Yusuf Mehdi, senior VP of the Online Audience Business Group at Microsoft, has drawn attention to a number of criteria that Bing looks to. Bing creates a “social relevance” score based on the quality tweets as well as the popularity of the tweeter. ‘Cornflakes for breakfast’ tweeted by the Barry Jones from Trowbridge carrying far less weight that ‘Go watch The Cove it’s great’ by Mark Kermode. Mehdi says that Bing then run the tweet through spam and obscenity filtration to determine a final result. Doubtless there will be many other criteria drawn upon – trends, memes or the authority of tweeted links.

There’s a long, long way to go and much to be revealed real time search wise – the SEO jury is well and truly out at the moment. Even SEO primemovers such as Rand Fishkin of seoMOZ Peter De Vanzo of SEOBook and Adam Bunn of Greenlight are not completely clear as to how the new deals will play out.

As Twitter might say ‘Twatch this space’.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 5:16 pm and is filed under SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Search Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.