What a difference a year makes!
This time last year, Microsoft’s Bing enjoyed the title of fastest growing search engine, experiencing 22% growth in its first year of existence.
But now, Bing can no longer claim that mantle as Twitter CEO Biz Stone proclaimed at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, a gathering of the nation’s leading intelligentsia. Stone says Twitter is exceeding 800 million searches per day, which translates to 24 billion per month – almost twice as much as Bing and Yahoo combined!
(Last month, Bing had 4.1 billion searches and Yahoo had 9.4 billion)
Of course, this is nowhere near Google with over 88 billion searches a month but it’s quite respectable.
Lately, it’s been said you can jumpstart indexing of new content by posting it on Twitter in addition to your site since Google is constantly refreshing feeds from Twitter. With this newest data, you can safely assume many people are turning to Twitter to search for answers to their questions, news on current events and information on products and services.
Stone says Twitter has intentionally been trying to play this kind of angle – serving as not only a social network but a search engine as well. He argues there are many misconceptions regarding Twitter, saying that it’s “not a social network” but “…more like an information network or a source of news.”
Either way, Twitter is quickly becoming a relevant way to search for information online…we’ll see what some of the reports from comScore and others say when they come out. But if there’s any validity to Stone’s claims, you best consider how, when and if it’s wise for your business to jump in.
Evaluate the demand and presence of your industry on Twitter to get a better idea of when and how much effort you should put into it.