I just experienced a small earthquake in Pleasanton, CA. My first instinct was to search “Pleasanton earthquake” on Twitter. Here were the results I got:
I then did the same search on Google and found these results:
Not sure exactly how I would leverage this into a smart local marketing campaign, but if I were trying to be an information resource for a city, I would make sure that I was tweeting about these types of events. As more people start to search Twitter for this kind of stuff, it could become a great way to connect with potential customers and help them get to know your brand.
A little test: Austin Veterinarians & Chicago Hardwood
12 Response Comments
I think this will all end when Google Wave integrates Friendfeed 😉
I think – I hope
David formerly of US
Now back in native Plymouth, England 🙂
If your a local pet shelter you could monitor people talking about buying a dog, or cat. Then urge them to adopt one instead.
I truly believe that Twitter (when tweets are formatted correctly) is far more informational and detailed then Google’s local information SERPS.
When Twitter and its users define best practices on formatting deals, real time information and so on… we’ll see the true power of Twitter.
Cheers,
Benjamin Burns
Program Manager of Emerge (an in house SEO agency) for Marriott International and CEO of Soka Interactive
Twitter has its work cut out if it wants to retain this competitive advantage. Facebook revised it’s update stream to feel more Twitterish while Google Wave looms on the horizon. Biz and the crew better get busy on nailing things like local instant search if they want to retain their niche.
Twitter is currently beating Google in the real time, SEO stakes however I agree with David Google Wave will probably do just that create waves. It looks like an impressive technology that will certainly shake things up.
Both of the platforms are almost new,I think they till have a time to get different of each other.But ,I guess google will win,you aske me :why?
I think answer is so clear!
Yes, I’ve used twitter for similar purposes. It’s fantastic for local news. Btw, in the ‘advanced search’ options of twitter, you can set it to find tweets from users within a certain distance of a location. So you could search for tweets with the word ‘earthquake’ within 25 miles of Pleasanton. (and probably find lots of “OMG OMG” tweets!)
A few weeks back, there were two helicopters hovering over my apt in brooklyn at 1am in the morning. After looking around on the local blogs and searching google news (and finding nothing), i turned to twitter and found a community of 100 other tired and confused brooklynites talking about the helicopters, a few posting pictures, and a few that had gone to check out the action and were live-tweeting the local news. It was fantastic.
Twitter is becoming a defacto standard in transmitting news. Even in areas that ban certain news, Twitter seems to have become the news pipe line.
Twitter and google : It’s fantastic for local news and you need both
For real time tweets I can see it happening but Twitter has a long way to go to come close with Google.
Twitter is currently beating Google in the real time
Twitter will be more powerful in coming time than google.