We’ve discussed before the importance of Twitter for search and for the search engine optimization industry. Bing is ranking tweets and is in discussions with Facebook to incorporate its social media content in search results. No doubt that Google will follow this act. But the interesting thing about how Bing is ranking tweets is that your Twitter followers can be a ranking factor. This from WebProNews:
The answer is: Bing weighs tweets by follower counts. “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher,” says Bing. “If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”
Can you say Twitter follower spam?
This really does look like a search gaming haven for some people and it provides a great user experience for people searching within Bing. Choose a keyword and tweet it, but first make sure you’ve got 500,000 followers so you can rank the highest for that tweet. There will definitely need to be some tweaks to that Bing Twitter search algorithm and my bet is that Google will approach the whole Twitter search ranking question with a lot more better in the very near future.
Are you prepared for the next iteration of search wars?