Chris Woods

For those of you who use Twitter as a research tool, you’ll be pleased to hear that older tweets will increasingly be found in search results [view Twitter’s announcement].

For the last few years, since Google removed its ‘realtime’ search tab, the only way of finding tweets older than a week or two was to either do an advanced Google search (chance of success: unlikely) or use a paid-for monitoring service (costing £hundreds or for a popular consumer brand, £thousands a month).

Twitter’s historical search results will not be comprehensive. Old tweets shown will be those that have had the most engagement (e.g. lots of retweets, marked as ‘favourite’, etc.).

How will monitoring companies such as Radian6 react to this. Will companies and consultants who already find it hard to justify the expense of such services now be even less likely to use them? If Twitter — which itself uses paid-for monitoring tools such as Crimson Hexagon — continues down this path, I certainly think so.