Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

From traditional media to blogs big and small, there are countless stories in circulation about how businesses are using Twitter to find customers and serve existing ones.

Some businesses have figured out how to use Twitter Search and other similar tools to hear what customers are saying and make connections with local prospects. But Twitter itself has been relatively quiet about all this, letting business owners and marketers find their own way when positioning Twitter as a business platform.

Until now.
Twitter has launched its first major outreach to business users: Twitter 101 for Business: A Special Guide.

Twitter 101 is tremendously well-done. There’s a Getting Started guide with step-by-step instructions to create an account; Best Practices; case studies of 10 companies, ranging from local coffee and pizza shops to huge brands like Dell and Pepsi; and even an invite for business owners to share their own tips and case studies.

It introduces important terms like retweets and hashtags, and very interestingly it makes several pushes for businesses to use Twitter search and saved searches to follow conversations about companies, products, and so forth. The guide not only explains how businesses can use Twitter, but also makes the case for why they should.

“You don’t have to run a bike shop or a relatively small company to get good stuff out of Twitter. Businesses of all kinds, including major brands, increasingly find that listening and engaging on the service lead to happier customers, passionate advocates, key product improvements and, in many cases, more sales.”

The bigger picture here, of course, is that Twitter is still looking for revenue streams. Business outreach, particularly in terms of explaining what Twitter is and can become, is part of that process. Twitter is very simple … but deceptively so.

When Danny Sullivan interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone earlier this year, Stone shared his experiences in showing Twitter to business owners:

“Then you show them search. ‘What do you want to know is going on? What’s your business? What do you do?’ We show them that, and they say, ‘Whoa, this is crazy. Wait, I disagree with this guy. How do I talk to him?’,” he explained. “We need to reposition the product in a way that’s more relevant to people.”

This Twitter 101 guide, as Stone says on the Twitter blog, is a first step in that direction.

The second step may come as soon as next week. Stone said that Twitter will launch a new home page with a search box, Twitter trends, and information about how to use Twitter.

It’s amazing what a several months and a new search engine launch can do for bargaining power in the search game.

The ongoing saga that is the Microsoft and Yahoo! deal is back on again. And apparently this time it’s a more realistic proposition than ever.

If you cast your mind back to late last year, rumors about a Microhoo (Microsoft and Yahoo!) deal were filling our feeds daily (almost). The last roll of dice saw Yahoo! desperately seeking a Microsoft buyout after Google walked away from an advertising deal.

Even with extensive public discussions about being “ready to sell” by Jerry Yang (Yahoo!’s CEO at the time), Microsoft and Yahoo! never got any closer to the closing the deal.

Since then Microsoft has been busy working it’s Bing angle. With a massive amount of fanfare, Microsoft relaunched its search offering under the Bing brand, and whilst only new, has made some inroads into the search share that has eluded it for years.

Now that Bing is live and eating into Yahoo!’s share of the search engine market, discussions have reignited over search and advertising between the two companies, and industry insiders suggest they’re very close to signing the deal.

From a report in the 24/7 Wall Street blog:

Sources at a major client of investment house ThinkEquity say that the firm considers a Microsoft (MSFT) link-up with Yahoo! (YHOO) in the search business to be “imminent”.

And in the same post, speculation about the details of deal included:

Yahoo! will be paid $3 billion upfront and will get 11o% of the revenue that its searches provide after traffic acquisition costs in each of the first two years. In the third year, that figure would go to 90%.

While both companies continue to trail Google by such a significant amount, a union of forces like this will boost the appeal of their advertising offering, but it will take more than an advertising deal to change user search habits and that’s where the sustainable advantage lies.