Search Engine Land is your source for Twitter news and content. You’ll find a variety of up-to-date and authoritative resources, including the latest news, tactic-rich tutorials, and the latest data to help you work smarter and make better decisions.
What you read here is written by our experienced in-house team, and subject matter experts from leading brands and agencies.
Don’t miss out! Get the Search Engine Land newsletter delivered daily to your inbox. Subscribe for free!
In a bid to increase its presence across the Web, Twitter today announced the “follow button,” a snippet of code that can be placed on any Web site that allows readers logged into Twitter to click and follow instantly. Previously, a Twitter user would have to click-through to the Web site’s Twitter.com page and click […]
When rumors circulated in recent days that Twitter was about to buy Tweetdeck, there were red flags flying everywhere from people assuming that Twitter would buy the popular client software and then shut it down. Not so, says Twitter. In a blog post confirming the acquisition, Twitter promises that “we will continue to invest in […]
As you might expect, I monitor a number of search-related topics being discussed on Twitter. Over the past few days, there’s been spike in funny bit of advice that Google is giving Yahoo — that no one says, “Let’s Yahoo It.” But how did that get started? Let’s start with the joke first: Dear Yahoo, […]
Twitter has launched a new home page design that the company says should be visible to all users now. Sure enough, I logged out and there it was. As you can see from the screenshot above, the new home page is less cluttered and instead focuses on a single statement: “Follow your interests.” Gone are […]
Twitter announced that it has improved its “Who To Follow” feature with better people search results and added a new advanced search page, making it easier to do such searches at Twitter.com. People Search Gets Subject-Specific Now when you search for a topic in Twitter’s search box, Twitter will suggest people to follow based on […]
More changes today atop the perch at Twitter: Jack Dorsey, the company co-founder who famously sent the first tweet five years ago, is back in a day-to-day role as Executive Chairman and will be in charge of the Twitter product. Evan Williams, meanwhile, is “less involved day-to-day” at Twitter, the company tells us. Appropriately, Twitter […]
Twitter’s 5th birthday celebration is underway — the company is sharing a new video, new website, blog posts, and has a national TV appearance on tap, too. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is scheduled to appear on tonight’s Conan show on cable network TBS. That’ll be the cap on what’s already been a celebrity-filled birthday. Twitter […]
Looking for images that are being shared and posted in realtime? That image search space has gotten more competitive, as Nachofoto reenters the field. Below, what it offers, along with general realtime image searching tips using other services like Topsy, Google Realtime Search and Twitter itself. I’ve used realtime search tools often, in order to […]
Search activity spiked late last week in response to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the two sites benefitting the most in terms of web traffic were MSNBC and YouTube. That’s according to a series of tweets from Experian Hitwise this afternoon. As the image above shows, Hitwise says that the phrase “japan earthquake” […]
With the five-year anniversary of the first tweet approaching, Twitter says user activity is soaring. In a blog post that details tweet and account activity, Twitter says it’s “growing at a record pace.” Here are some of the details: Users are now sending one billion tweets per week. Over the last month, users posted an […]
New research suggests that most Americans are well aware of Twitter … they’re just not using it. According to an Edison Research/Arbitron study, Twitter awareness in the U.S. among people 12 years old and older is at 92% — that’s up from 87% a year ago.
Like Google before it Twitter hopes to tap the massive base of small and medium advertisers for ad-revenue growth. According to data in the Wall Street Journal, there are currently about 100 small advertisers using Twitter’s “promoted” ad products. By contrast there are “125 big brands” using the site to market their products or services. […]
Sunday night’s Academy Awards came close to matching the Super Bowl’s overall activity level on Twitter. But, like the Pittsburgh Steelers or The Social Network, it came up just a bit short in the end. Twitter says its users sent a total of 36.4 million tweets in a five-hour span Sunday beginning with the Oscars […]
Why was he there? Who wasn’t invited and why? What did they talk about? Why was he really there?
One should be able to access Twitter anywhere, on any platform, and the interface should be instantly usable. So said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in outlining the company’s vision for its future at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, going as far as to compare the service to running water. “It needs to be water. […]
There are three companies that we know are interested in or “hungry” for Twitter: Microsoft, Google and Facebook. In an article on bubbly valuations, the Wall Street Journal says that Twitter is again in “low-level” acquisition talks: Executives at both Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., among other companies, have held low-level talks with those at […]
Fans watching the final few moments of the Super Bowl last weekend set a new record for Tweets-per-second (TPS) for a sporting event: 4,064 Tweets were sent at 10:07:16 p.m. EST, according to Twitter. The previous TPS record, of 3,283, was set during Japan’s 3-1 win over Denmark during the World Cup soccer tournament last […]
What do I mean by that headline? A study from Stanford University, summarized by the NY Times, found “that bloggers, over time, had more influence than mainstream publications in areas like technology or entertainment.” In other words a mention or write up in a top publication will generate a “sugar rush” of interest and activity […]
Back in October 2010, Twitter announced that then-CEO and co-founder Evan (@ev) Williams would step down to focus on product. According to a report in the Business Insider, that hasn’t really materialized. Says the Business Insider report by Nicholas Carlson: The truth is, right now, a few months after Williams wrote a blog post saying […]
There are plenty of social analytics tools, but the most full-featured ones are often too expensive (i.e., geared towards enterprise-level users) and the inexpensive ones usually offer limited functionality. And then there’s Topsy Social Analytics, which was just launched this morning and immediately becomes one of the best free Twitter analytics tools I’ve seen. There […]
That self-serve advertising platform that MediaPost got a look at? Well, Twitter is denying that it’s the self-service platform it plans to roll out this year for long-tail advertisers, according to a report in ReadWrite Web. “Reports that Twitter is testing a self-serve ad platform are inaccurate,” the company’s PR folks tweeted this afternoon. “We […]
A new report from Experian Simmons says US-based Twitter users are spending more time on the Twitter.com website than ever before. But the report also cautions that overall visits to Twitter are down. Experian says the number of US adults that visited Twitter.com at least once a month fell 14% between November 2009 and November […]
Google has acquired fflick, according to TechCrunch. The price is reportedly $10 million. Is it a talent acquisition, a tool acquisition or both? It’s both. Using Twitter, the fflick service analyzes and organizes comments about movies: overall, most recent, positive, what your friends have said and so on. This is a very interesting service and […]
Will celebrity “influencers” like Kim Kardashian or Chelsea Handler soon have to disclose when they’re being paid to promote a product or service on Twitter? This past weekend The Guardian reported that the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) “has begun a crackdown on Twitter users and bloggers using their online presence to endorse products […]
Twitter started 2011 with a new record: 6,939 tweets were sent at four seconds after midnight in Japan. Twitter says that TPS rate (tweets per second) is more than double the previous high of 3,283 TPS during Japan’s World Cup soccer/football win over Denmark last summer. In a blog post detailing the new record, Twitter […]
Twitter has just launched an expanded version of its online guide for business users, which opens up its previously limited/closed advertising products and lets anyone put in a request to buy ads on the service. At the same time, it also represents a significant step for the company in terms of offering a formal and […]
Twitter released their top Twitter trends of 2010. They have a nice reviews page of trends at yearinreview.twitter.com/trends/. Here is the break down: OVERALL TOP TRENDS Gulf Oil Spill FIFA World Cup Inception Haiti Earthquake Vuvuzela Apple iPad Google Android Justin Bieber Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Pulpo Paul NEWS EVENTS Gulf Oil Spill […]
Eight percent of Internet users in the US are Twitter users, and the service is more popular among African-Americans and Latinos than white Internet users. Those are some of the findings from a new Pew Research Center report. Pew surveyed more than 2,200 US adult web users during November and asked, “Do you use Twitter?” […]
Twitter is rolling out a directory to share suggestions for new users to follow, but it’s not a traditional A-to-Z directory of user listings. There is, however, a prominent search box atop the who-to-follow directory, and … just our luck … it accepts single-character searches. An alphabetical user directory wouldn’t really tell us anything, would […]
If you’re a Twitter user, you have a TweepRank. Or perhaps a TwitRank. Or maybe an AtRank. Whatever it’s called, it’s a personal reputation score that Twitter has given you based on your Twitter activity. And Twitter isn’t about to reveal it in the form of a little blue bar on your home page. Twitter […]
Twitter is working on an analytics tool, but the company tells Search Engine Land that there’s no estimate when it’ll be widely available. Earlier today, Mashable shared a couple screenshots of the tool. A Twitter spokesperson tells us that there’s “a strong corporate demand for better monitoring and analytics tools,” and explained the analytics tool’s […]
Twitter’s business plan has taken another step today: Twitter and Gnip, a social data provider, have partnered to offer up to half of the Twitter “firehose” of tweets for sale with a couple conditions: Companies buying the tweets can’t display them, nor can they resell them; they’re for analysis only. According to Gnip’s announcement, the […]
It looks like one of the early adopters of Twitter’s “Promoted Accounts” advertising program is … Google. I took the screenshot at left just moments ago when I visited my Twitter home page. Right at the top, under the “Who to follow” heading, is an ad encouraging me to follow Google Mobile’s Twitter account, @GoogleMobile. […]
About five months ago Twitter launched Twitter Places to provide tweets with more “context.” Matt covered it with enthusiasm and imagined its potential: the marriage of location and real-time communication. But nothing much has really happened since that time. There have been lots of geotagged tweets but Twitter still isn’t all that useful as a […]
In a first ever move, Google is now carrying ads from someone else’s ad network — Twitter’s, as Google integrates Twitter’s new Promoted Tweets into Google Realtime Search. It’s quite a coup for Twitter. Not only did the company get Google to pay it for its data last year ($15 million, it’s rumored), something relatively […]
Watching Twitter roll out its ad-related products is almost like watching paint dry; it’s a very slooooow process. That’s to Twitter’s credit, perhaps, as the company is obviously being painstakingly delicate about introducing advertising into the service’s ecosystem. Today, another small step: Twitter says it’s testing Promoted Tweets in the main Twitter timeline. But, of […]
Missing some of your tweets? Yeah, you’re not going crazy. Others appear to be missing them, as well, and Twitter confirms there’s a temporary problem. Earlier today, Jill Whalen — one of the moderators at our sister-site Sphinn — noticed that our Sphinn account only had three tweets when she looked at it, all from […]
Google is testing a new feature that lets you connect your Twitter account to Google News. Some people are seeing a “Friends” box on the right hand side of Google News inviting them to do this. The friends box asks you to enter your Twitter username and click “Save.” When you click save, Google News […]
If Twitter were like an old-style McDonald’s, the sign outside would have changed to “1 Billion Queries Served” today. And to keep serving up those queries to humans and machines alike, Twitter is now using a new underlying search technology. The news was announced in a post on Twitter’s Engineering blog today. Let’s take the […]
As was rumored last week, Twitter has formally introduced its latest advertising option: Promoted Accounts. Promoted Accounts will show up in the “Who to follow” section of a Twitter home page, and is fully algorithmic in deciding when and which promoted accounts to display. According to the company’s announcement, what and when you might see […]