Twitter users clearly love the social alarm clock Sleep.fm, the Vaynerchukbrothers, Chris Knight, and ezinearticles. At least, according to search analytics firm Compete, which aggregated the top search terms since Twitter acquired Summize in July 2008, these are some of the top searches that users performed on the popular microblogging service.
Besides the terms mentioned above, the top ten is rounded out by searches for Barack Obama, the iPhone, AJ Vaynerchuk’s PleaseDressMe, music site TheSixtyOne, and FollowFriday.
Some of these search terms are no surprise – but it is definitely interesting that more people searched for the Vaynerchuk brothers than for ‘obama.’ Compete’s Becky Blitzenhofer argues that all of these brands and users used “Twitter aggressively as part of their marketing strategy” – and apparently, this popularity translates into search activity as well (but then, Obama also used Twitter quite aggressively during his election campaign).
It should be noted that this data spans over half a year, so it purposely ignores short-term trends and instead features those search terms that users have consistently searched for over a long period of time. Still, we are somewhat perplexed by some of the terms that appear on this top ten list.
Twitter is slowly integrating the search function deeper into the core of its service. Among other things, it is slowly rolling out a new version of its user profiles, which features a search box (some users already have access to this). These new homepages also feature a prominent link to the top ten trending topics on the service. According to Compete’s data, traffic on search.twitter.com kept lagging behind the growth curve of Twitter itself, but given that Twitter never really promoted search.twitter.com, this is really no surprise and we will probably see a major uptick in usage now that Twitter is integrating search into the user profiles.
