How Twitter’s search trial could see new revenues, too

Twitter has this week made a few tweaks to its homepage and search function that will make it easier to find news on the social networking site.

Over the past few years Twitter has proved itself as not just a real-time information network that connects users to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news.

To solidify its position as a breaking news platform, Twitter has added a ‘Top News’ section at the top of search results to showcase relevant recent news articles about a certain topic.

The site has also added a ‘Top People’ window that will showcase Twitter users that correspond with search queries.

Both the Top News and Top People windows appear when a user has conducted a search within Twitter.

This is good news for brands, especially for those who are news and Twitter savvy.

Today, I typed in ‘McDonald’s’ and straight away, Twitter threw up two ‘people’ to follow called ‘McDonald’s’. These were McDonald’s USA and McDonald’s New York.

The term ‘Jubilee’ brought up an abundance of global news articles about the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the British Monarchy’s Twitter profile.

The changes aren’t huge, however they are a step in the right direction for Twitter who has longed tried to establish itself as a one-stop-shop – search and social media.

It will also be an incredibly valuable marketing tool for publishers.

Publishers will expect to see a lot more traffic from Twitter if they manage to get their content appearing in that top slot. A good knowledge and use of SEO will be more essential than ever when posting those 140 character headlines.

And this could also be an area that Twitter could look to make revenue out of, perhaps going down a similar route to Google and selling search terms (although this would surely have to be reset on a daily basis).

For now though, this is an experiment only a small percentage of users can see.

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