We recently told you about the Bing and Yahoo! search engine deal, which means that Yahoo! search will be powered by Bing. Since then, Microsoft has been making deals with more companies to bring users more search services.
The term “real time search” can have different interpretations. To most, it means searching through content which is literally published in real time. Twitter is an example of a real time publishing platform. It takes seconds to post a Tweet on Twitter. You can then search for phrases via Twitter’s inbuilt search engine and receive results which were published moments or seconds earlier. Search engines, including Google, admit that real time search isn’t their strongest point. With the popularity rise of websites like Twitter, search engines recognize that they need to create real time search features in order to be able to keep up with the freshest, newest content which is published on the web.
Twitter is known to be a potentially great marketing tool for businesses of virtually any industry. Businesses can use Twitter to drive traffic and leads to their websites, as well as to connect with their customers and target audience. Now, Microsoft has made a deal with Twitter which may mean that investing in a Twitter marketing campaign is even more beneficial to businesses.Bing Twitter is a service which Microsoft launched on October 21 in the U.S. This feature allows users to search Twitter’s index for certain queries, much like you would normally search an index of the web for certain queries. Bing Twitter search results are divided into two “sections”.If we do a search for “air conditioning” on Bing Twitter, at the top we’ll see the most recent Tweets about air conditioning. This will display the most recent tweets which have the phrase “air conditioning” in them.
Below these results, top links shared in Tweets about air conditioning will be displayed. Here, Bing will look at pages related to air conditioning which people on Twitter are linking to and display these pages with several tweets linking to them underneath.
So Bing Twitter not only searches for tweets relating to certain topics, but also links about certain topics.Bing Twitter is certainly not polished yet and several problems have been found with the service already. Issues such as delayed Tweets and even a potential security issue when clicking on links via Bing Twitter have been noticed. Bing Twitter is still very much in Beta and Microsoft continues to work on polishing and perfecting the product.So what does the launch of Bing Twitter mean for businesses? The service has not yet been launched in Australia, so this gives Australian businesses time to prepare and start thinking about how Bing Twitter can be used to their advantage when it is launched. Businesses have been using Twitter for online marketing purposes for quite a while, but the launch of Bing Twitter will mean that using Twitter for the purposes of promotion and engaging with customers can provide even more exposure for the business.Now that Bing got the ball rolling on real time social networking search, other major search engines are sure to follow. In fact, Google recently announced the upcoming launch of a new feature called “Social Search”, which “is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network”. Not much information has been given about Social Search and launch is at least another few weeks off, but if there was ever a good time to look at social marketing for businesses this would be it.It’s unclear how quickly people will adopt Bing’s Twitter search, Google’s upcoming Social Search, or other types of real time search. The impact it will have on businesses is largely uncertain. It’s safe to say, however, that if you’re not sending any new messages out to your target audience via various channels including Twitter, you’re potentially missing out on this additional level of exposure. If you’re interested in tapping into the benefits of social media, now’s a better time than ever to find a reputable online marketing company and start looking into a social media marketing campaign.
