It’s not easy to find someone on Twitter. This includes handles of individual tweeples as well as brands. This creates an identity crisis of sorts on Twitter.
In a 2013 blog post entitled The Severe Identity Crisis On Twitter For Digital Marketers, I’d suggested the following tools to overcome the Twitter identity crisis:
- Twitter Search
- Brand website
- LinkedIn profile
- Twellow and other third party Twitter directories
- Promoted Tweets
None of these was guaranteed to work on all occasions.
Six years later, you might think the problem would’ve gone away.
Sadly, no. People still complain that it’s time-consuming to find a particular account on Twitter.
It's bizarre that the fastest way to find a Twitter account for a person or a brand even now is Google and not Twitter itself.
— Vikas SN (@tsuvik) June 19, 2019
But, good news is, in the meanwhile, I have found two more hacks to solve the problem that work better than the five tools I covered in 2013.
#6. HOOTSUITE
Ever since I started using HootSuite a few years ago to schedule and cross-post updates to multiple social networks, I’ve been a fan of the platform’s Quick Search feature to find Twitter accounts of individuals and brands (among other things).
Let me illustrate this feature by taking the example of Bajaj Finance, India’s leading NBFC (Non Banking Financial Corporation).
You type the keyword into the search box, click the user icon to drop down the menu, then click the Find Twitter Users item. The very second result is @Bajaj_Finserv, the brand’s Twitter Handle.
Hootsuite is quite powerful and I inevitably find the correct Twitter Handles in its top three search results – if not the very first one.
I can’t say the same about Twitter Search or any of the other four tools covered earlier. (I encourage you to try them out with Bajaj Finance as the example). As a result, I’ve completely stopped using those five tools nowadays.
But, then, not everyone uses Hootsuite.
Which brings us to the next tool.
#7. GOOGLE
Virtually all the content on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and every other social network resides inside walled gardens. Ditto Internet Banking portals and ecommerce websites, which require the user to be logged in to make transactions.
By default, Google does not (cannot?) index content inside walled gardens. That’s why you can’t use Google to find out your last rent payment or latest Amazon order.
That said, Google can surface content inside social networks if they permit it to crawl their walled gardens. Some of them do, some of them don’t. And the list seems to keep changing with time.
At one time, LinkedIn permitted Google to index its Public posts but not Group posts and Messages whereas Twitter permitted nothing (I don’t know their latest stance in this regard because their policies tend to be ambivalent.)
This means you’d be able to use Google Search to discover some of the content inside a social network but not the others. The can-versus-can’t pendulum keeps oscilatting all the time.
@tsuvik’s tweet mentioned at the start of this post suggested that Google is now able to discover Twitter accounts.
I tested this with Bajaj Finance, the same brand used to illustrate Hootsuite Quick Search feature at # 6 above.
Lo and behold, @Bajaj_Finserv, the brand’s Twitter Handle, was the very first result on the Google SERP.
Based on this datapoint of one, I can confirm that you can now use Google Search to identify Twitter accounts.
When you search for Bajaj Finance, the correct handle, @Bajaj_Finserv, shows up as the first entry on Google SERP as against the second entry on Hootsuite results.
Furthermore, Google exposes @Bajaj_Finserv even when you search by the company name, Bajaj Finance Limited. When you do this on Hootsuite, there are no results.
Based on this single datapoint, we could jump to the conclusion that Google Search works even better than Hootsuite Quick Search in overcoming the Twitter identity crisis. However, this conclusion should be caveated by the possibility that Twitter can stop Google from indexing its content anytime, in which case you won’t be able to Google for Twitter accounts on its search page any longer. (Twitter could equally well cut off its API access to Hootsuite but, if that happens, not being to find Twitter accounts would be the least of problems with Hootsuite!)
On a side note, this is yet another Google Backdoor that merits addition to Four Google Backdoors You Probably Didn’t Know to take the tally up to Five Google Backdoors!