Twitter Timeline search feature from Google
16th April, 2010
Google recently announced their new Twitter timeline search feature. It is quite an exciting feature, as it helps to track hot topics being searched for, what was being discussed relating to those topics at specific times and so, provide better insight into user behaviour and interests.
Google’s initial release allows you to explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006.
To access this feature:
- Search off the topic of interest
- Click “Show options” on the Google search results page, then
- Select “Updates.”
The first page will show you the familiar latest and (what Google considers) best updates from a comprehensive set of sources, with the new timeline chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period.
So how will this benefit you? Where there is a hot topic in your industry, it gives you the opportunity to leverage off that topic, and apply it to your own business. This will be extremely valuable if you have your own Blog, Twitter or Facebook account, and start discussing that topic. By doing so it gives you more opportunity of having one of your web marketing mediums picked up by a potential customer as they are searching off that topic.
Other ways this can be utilised is to change your Pay-Per-Click or Organic SEO campaign(s) to use these words. For example, if you are a dietician, and the hot topic is on a new diet fad sweeping Hollywood, you could use these topical keywords for your campaigns, and write your opinions on whether that diet is effective, or dangerous (if using Pay-Per-Click, don’t forget to make sure your Ad Campaign landing page is the page where you have discussed this topic). Not only are you more likely to have your website found this way, you are also building credibility, and have the opportunity to increase sales for your business or services.
The only thing I found when searching various hot topics is that these results are not very ‘localised’, and so if you are looking for topics that are within say Australia, or even your city, you may be disappointed. In the example screenshot below, I have search off ‘interest rates australia’ for April 2010, then narrowed down to the spike shown on the 6th April 2010. The top 10 results displayed did not include any Australian websites, only international ones.
In saying that, this is a newly released feature, and as Google is ever evolving, we may see localised results in the near future.
search: ‘interest rates australia’ for April 2010
search: ‘interest rates australia’ for 6th April 2010
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