Google has carnal knowledge of social

Twitter and Google have made amends. In the past, this was not the case. Before then, Google built its real-time-web on the immediacy of Twitter, drinking deeply from the nowness of its river of news. It indexed at the speed of light, real time, and delivered news at it happened thanks to its direct access to Twitter’s source.
Then Twitter cut Google completely off, blocking direct access to the pulse of the Internet.

Thus, Google Plus was born, in an attempt to fill the void that Twitter left, to provide the sustaining breaking news-oxygenated blood that Twitter produced globally effortlessly. G+ has never been able to deliver and Google had been seriously hobbled, only able to access Twitter’s view of the world, through hashtags and @replies, with attached images and 140-character insights, and across the accelerating and braking social signals of shares, reshares, and retweets, once-removed using third-party services that were akin to having access to the stock market via Yahoo! on a ten-minute delay rather than immediately — now now now — across the screen of a Bloomberg Terminal.

This is no longer the case. Though I do wish I was a fly on the wall of that particular meeting in which executives from Twitter and Google finally agreed to work together, they have come to enough of an agreement that Google now has direct access to what’s going on on Twitter ever nanosecond of every nanoday, both in content and momentum. And not only Twitter, either. Google has deep access to a large handful of social networking and bookmarking platforms, including reddit, Facebook, and others.

While this surely has benefits for you when it comes to your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and your company’s search engine marketing campaigns, it really comes to its own depth in Google Analytics. The true alchemy of Google’s ability to negotiate completely back-end access of all the data associated with all the top social media playgrounds, through cash-money or strategic partnerships, is where the data are spun into gold.

And if you’re willing to give up all of your base (belong to Google) through complete integration and total sharing of your site’s data with my favorite majordomo of search, the big kahuna of big data, then you, too, can benefit from none dare call it hegemony. If you have not already, join Google Analytics, verify ownership of your sites, be sure you add both your www and non-www variant of your site, and then go through and make sure you turn on all the demographic and social tools and wait.

Soon, you’ll start seeing, in daily, weekly, monthly, and annual relief, everything about the people who visit your site except their names and from exactly which social media and social networking platforms they came. While you had this data before, it was once-removed, from referrers, hand-offs, and logs.

But now, Google has the same all-access keys to back-end data on all your favorite social sites as they do now to your site. No longer is anything up for interpretation. What this means is that your social media team can no longer bullshit you when it comes to how effective their social media campaigns are and how effective they are in channeling your followers, friends, and all those Likes into your sales and conversion funnel.

You’ll not only be able to start BS-checking but you’ll now know that, against your intuition, LinkedIn is not your top inbound channel, Facebook is. You can safely assume that the data you see in your Facebook Insights and when you’re in your Twitter ads dashboard is also being collected by Google now, allowing you now to quickly, easily, and effectively create Goals through Google Analytics that will allow you to track sales and goal conversions from social media as you would from Google Adwords in the past.

Because of Google’s access, they will also let you know how much of your traffic from social media are from your paid ads and content and how much is from earned media and the blood, sweat, and tears coming from your indefatigable crack social media team — or not.

Here’s a gorgeous example of a very well-engaged and social media-savvy organization that can now track down to a granular level the social media platforms that feed into the their sessions, visitors, and traffic (the little network icon refers to a social data hub partner. Google+, reddit, and Disqus, for example).