• by David Rodnitzky , Op-Ed Contributor, August 11, 2015

LeadTail recently analyzed 177,931 tweets from 482 leading US/Canadian search pros to determine what search marketers tweet about. The results — on first glance — struck me as rather banal, but upon closer examination, they may show a shift in the nature of search marketing itself.

Let’s start with the topics you’d expect search pros to tweet about. The hashtags #ppc, #seo, and #ppcchat (go @matt_umbro!) consistently ranked in the top five hashtags for each of the first six months of 2015. Other unsurprising hashtags ranking in at least the top 10 for the first six months included #sem, #AdWords, and #marketing. So, not much of a surprise here. We search nerds like to tweet about, well, search stuff, right?

But there were also some hashtags that you might not have expected. For example, #socialmedia also ranked in the top 10 for each of the first six months, and #mobile was top 10 in every month but one (where it came in at #11 . . .).  #Facebook ranked as high as #10 in January, disappeared entirely from the top 20 in May, and then floated between #14 and #18 in other months. #Digitalmarketing ranked every month (and was once as high as #6); #analytics showed up in five of six months; #contentmarketing was six for six; less popular hashtags ranking in two or more months included #cro (conversion rate optimization), #ecommerce, and #twitter.

My interpretation of this Twitter behavior is this: Search marketers are still primarily focused on the inner workings of AdWords and Bing/Yahoo, but this focus is slowly being diluted by many other emerging parts of digital marketing, This is consistent with a trend I’ve observed for a couple of years now: SEM and SEO cannot exist in a vacuum. Effective search marketers must understand the totality of online performance marketing, and, guess what: You can pretty much summarize this universe with the hashtags we’ve discussed above - #socialmedia, #facebook, #mobile, #digitalmarketing, #contentmarketing, #CRO, #ecommerce, #twitter. I might add #display and #nativeadvertising to the list (and perhaps we’ll see these pop up in the future), but the point remains: Search marketers no longer spend their entire working day inside an SEM or SEO account.

Note that the 2015 report is not yet available (I got exclusive access because I’m cool), but if you to want review last year’s trends, here’s the 2014 data.