The popular live-streaming mobile video app Meerkat is now leveraging Google search to provide publishers with real-time indexation and discovery of content. Like YouTube, Meerkat has a relatively high domain authority, which can help push your content to the top of search results.
A little background on Meerkat
- Meerkat was released in February of 2015
- The app was originally limited exclusively to iPhone devices, but in May was made available to Android users
- Up to 5,000 people can view each livestream
- In March, Twitter revoked Meerkat’s access to their social graph and announced their acquisition of competing app Periscope
- In July, Meerkat partnered up with Facebook and now has access to their social graph
How Meerkat improves SEO
According to a recent post by Marty Weintraub, “Meerkat is dabbling with live ‘Meerkat native SEO.’” In order to access Meerkat content in real-time, users can add site: search operators feature (site:meerkatapp.co) to refine their search query. Users can then use the ‘Search Tools’ feature to list the most recent results first.
How can Meerkat help brands and marketers?
Real-time data gives marketers a whole new approach to connecting with consumers online. A couple months ago, Twitter announced that they renewed their partnership with Google, which means that tweets are now directly injected into Google search results in real-time.
Although the Meerkat method requires some extra steps for the user, it still presents some unique marketing opportunities, especially for brands that use streaming media to connect with their target audience.
I’m excited to see what comes of Meerkat’s alliance with Facebook. According to the New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook Founder and CEO) said that Facebook Graph Search is a “five year thing”. Now that we’re inching closer to that five-year mark, we’re beginning to see some of the pieces fall into place. This is one of the reasons I see streaming platforms like Meerkat playing a huge role in real-time content discovery in the near future.
Image by Flickr user: Ronnie Macdonald
