In my previous two posts here on this blog, you have seen that Google may not be using Facebook and Twitter at the moment for real time social signals, but they do have plans to grow their ability to monitor these social signals in real time.
In January 2015, Google struck a deal with Twitter to have direct access to its feeds. This is real time access like they used to have, only this time, Google will have made it clear to Twitter the score, especially as Twitter approached Google with the deal. Very soon, Google will have total access to all Twitter action in real time, so Google will be able to effectively monitor social signals from this social giant. That’s not all either. Let me explain:
In June 2011, Google introduced Google+. This was to be their own social platform. Everyone talked about it as if it were some lame attempt to compete with Facebook, but everyone was soooooooo wrong.
Google+ is Google’s visionary platform to take their search engine to the next level. Google+ is not only owned by Google, so that they have 100% control of it, but G+ is growing at a massive rate, and the internet community thinks it is still a ghost town. G+ is massive, and is currently the 2nd most active social site (1st being Facebook). Now Google could simply factor the data from G+ to discover real time social signals, and actually, although Google have skirted the issue, they have not ever said that G+ is not used to monitor social signals as a ranking factor.
It would be crazy to think that they wouldn’t use the real time data from their own social platform for their own social purposes. They get enough interaction to make the platform accurate and effective to determine their needs and requirements for G+ to be an actual ranking factor.
Now if you combine G+ with Twitter, then you have a ton of social activity, and we have a new landscape to work with.
Google, Facebook & Twitter
This video was uploaded by Google to YouTube on 22nd January 2014. This makes interesting information. It confirms what we have already discussed regarding Twitter and Facebook.
Now Matt Cutts explains why they don’t use these sites from a “real time” social signal monitoring perspective, and it is for the reasons I have explained, that at the making of that video, Google had no access to either Twitter or Facebook other than to crawl the sites, which is not good enough for the collection of real time signals.
In my next post, we’ll talk about how we can be sure that Google does use social signals as a ranking factor, and we’ll look at the role Google Authorship plays (this has changed a lot recently).
All the best,
John and Chris