In a recent interview Amit Singhal of Google disclosed how Google apportions rankings to these real-time search results.

In short, you need lots of followers.  And similar to rankings for webpages, high value followers will offer more value to the Tweet being followed.

Amit stated:

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

Google will need to determine the value of each user. However, this is unlikely to be too difficult for the likes of Google.

Reporting on big success and even bigger business, Kerry Bridge (Digital media comms, Dell) gave an overview of Dell’s infamous Twitter feeds which have earned the company more than $3 million.  Dell’s feeds range from customer support for small businesses, sales of used Dell computers and general assistance for individuals.

Kerry strongly advocated the need for personalisation of Twitter accounts and how it was necessary to be an actual person as well as a representative of the business.

While Dell does very with its Twitter sales channels, Joe White — MD at Moonfruit — gave an insight into his companies “controversial” Twitter promo campaign.  The idea was simple, use the #moonfruit tag in any tweet and everyday one lucky tweeter will receive a MacBook Pro, for a 10-day period.

Inevitably users starting dropping the #moonfruit tag all over Twitter and this quickly pushed Moonfruit to the top of the Twitter trending topics.  Some saw this as a great marketing campaign, others saw it as spam (as did Twitter by the looks of things) but either way it certainly demonstrated the impact a creative Twitter campaign can have, with Moonfruit increasing traffic to its site by more than 600%, doubling its users and gaining tens of thousands of new followers.

Lastly, there was a little on the possibilities of future advertiser regulation, as well as an informative presentation from Ciaran Norris (Director, Mindshare Worldwide) covering a mind-boggling array of just some of the Twitter Apps out there.  Anything from trending apps such as Trendistic and Twitterfall, to music tweets on Blip.fm and a Michael Jackson tribute with Billie Tweets.