When and why does Google index tweets, and does it matter to you?

A new study tries to shed some light on the grey area of  how Google indexes tweets.

The study checked 19,000 tweets of 963 Twitter accounts that range from accounts with fewer than 10,000 followers to accounts with more than 5 million followers.

To find the tweets that were indexed by Google, the site search operator (site:) was used in combination with the URL search operator (inurl:).

• New is always better
• Less than 1% of all tweets appeared in Google’s index.
• The older the tweet, the less likely it is that it appears in Google’s index.
• 1.82% of the tweets from June could be found on Google, only 0.10% of the tweets from January 2012.
• 3.12% of tweets were indexed within a week.
• The more followers, the better
• 30%-50% of the tweets from accounts with more than 1 million followers were indexed.
• About 10% of the tweets from accounts with 500,000-1,000,0000 followers were indexed.
• Only 0.22% of the tweets from accounts with less than 10,000 followers were indexed.

What does this mean for your website, that is, if you have like the vast majority of twitter accounts less than 10,000 followers? As far as your tweets being indexed, you may as well forget it. But do not despair. Twitter may not suitable if you want to spread news on Google. If you want to be listed in Google’s real-time results, Google News is a better option. And if you like to be able to skim quickly around the world for the latest news, this is my prefered site – have a look.

Facebook v Twitter

However, tweets are a good way to reach customers beyond Google. During the World Cup, Snickers (I still call them Marathon) sent exactly the same image at the same time to 11 million Facebook fans and 50,000 Twitter followers.

The Facebook post received 3,250 likes from the 11 million Facebook fans. The tweet was retweeted 34,994 times and favorited 14,754 times although only 50,000 people followed the account. The Twitter post delivered much better results.

Bottom Line

Although the above figures are something most of us can only dream about, the message is clear you need to spread your marketing mix around, and keep on testing.