Google is beginning to roll out real-time search results, which will include Twitter updates, along with updates from Friendfeed, blogs, and other social media sites. This could mean Twitter’s floundering traffic over the past few months is in for a rebound. Why?
First, breaking news stories generate a lot of searches, and Twitter stands to gain at least a small share of clicks resulting from those searches. Google Zeitgeist 2009 showed some of the newsworthy events of 2009 and included Twitter in its list of fastest rising searches. The Google Trends chart below shows that the volume of searches for breaking news events can be up to 10 times greater than the volume of searches for “twitter.”
Second, Bing has been showing Twitter updates in search results, and it’s driving more traffic to Twitter. The Google partnership might have the same effect. Data from Experian Hitwise shows that the amount of traffic Twitter received from Bing more than doubled since early June when Bing launched. Bing accounted for 1.13% of U.S. incoming clicks to Twitter as of the week ending December 5, 2009. Google accounted for 12.6% of Twitter’s incoming clicks that same week. If a small percentage of searchers click on Twitter results on the Google SERP, it could expose Twitter to a whole new set of users — the vast majority of Americans who don’t use Twitter.
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The big variable is whether users will find the Twitter results useful, if they click on them at all. After clicking on a random user’s Twitter page and seeing newsworthy comments mixed amid personal status updates, will a user be compelled to sign up or re-engage? In the results I checked, by clicking on “Hot Topics” on Google Trends, the real-time results are shown mid-page, below the fold. Eye-tracking studies show that most users don’t scroll below the fold. Despite this, I think it’s likely that the additional links will have enough volume to cause at least a small bump in traffic to Twitter.
Twitter needs a new surge of traffic to keep growing. Google, whether it likes it or not, may be about to give it a big push.
