Business marketers should choose Google over Twitter

If you’re a marketer for a small or mid-sized business and you’re not on Twitter yet, don’t fret. And don’t open an account now. Actions by Google in the past two weeks have decreased the importance of Twitter. And over time, Twitter’s importance will likely diminish. (Or, we could all wake up tomorrow, look at Twitter and ask WTF? But that’s just wishful thinking.)

In a nutshell:

Twitter used to be more important because Google included tweets in its search results through a special feed. And Google counted mentions and links in the Twitter stream as positive social signals to help it value a site’s importance and therefore ranking. For example, the number of retweets a link would get on Twitter affected how it would be indexed on Google.

No more. On July 2, the agreement expired.

Google still has access to tweets through publicly available means like Topsy – so Twitter will remain relevant – but there’s no more special handshake.

A few days after the Twitter-Google partnership ended, Google launched Google+, which has similar features to Twitter and some say is a Twitter killer.

Initial tests by Cyrus Shepard posted on SEOMoz’s Daily Blog demonstrated that Google+ does help web pages rank higher – sometimes within 2 hours.

Twitter did too, but its power and importance is likely diminished and will continue to be over time.

Conclusion: We all have only a finite amount of time and resources. If you’re on Twitter, keep going. It does help. But if you haven’t started yet, and you want to invest time in social media for SEO purposes (which is a different strategy than social media for referring traffic or generating leads), start with Google+. There’s quite a bit of social activity going on at Google right now, and it’s just getting started.

BTW, you’ll have a lot of SEO experts tell you you’re crazy because Twitter is still important. It has 100 times the traffic as Google+. Etc. The point is if you’re working with limited resources and you’re working for the long-run, work on Google.