Social media marketing and search engine marketing are becoming more and more similar as we speak. The fact of the matter is you can’t have good search engine results without a great social strategy and you can’t have great social results without a strong search engine strategy. What used to be thought of as individual strategies are moving closer and closer together and they play a role together to help you get found online.
Here’s what you need to know about social search.
1. Social Networks
With more content being posted on social networks than ever before, search is becoming an important tool to find that content. Social networks are becoming mini search engines. You’ll use social networks to search for different things than you would use Google, Bing, or Yahoo for but nonetheless they are still being searched on and their results matter.
Twitter is becoming a search engine for news and real-time events. Pinterest is becoming a search engine for DIY crafts, recipes and even fashion. Instagram is becoming a search engine for photos and real-time events. LinkedIn is becoming a search engine for people and companies. As you can see each social network is serving a niche.
2. Facebook Search
Facebook just recently dropped Bing as it’s search provider. In fact, they dropped web search completely from the Facebook search tool. Facebook will only show their own content on the network when searching. This is a shift towards making Facebook it’s own search engine. The new search that Facebook will launch will search comments and other information from friends and acquaintances. That’s a lot of content to sift through. There are over a trillion posts on Facebook.
This is very interesting from a business standpoint because you’ll be able to dig deeper into what people are saying about you and who your fans are. Facebook is pretty sneaky about this type of content currently, but this could bring more power to the business. We’ll have to wait and see.
3. Social Signals
Social signals are the activity signals pointing back at your website. When you link to your site from Facebook or Twitter, for an example, that’s a signal. The theory behind it all is that the more links back to your site shows the search engines and Google in particular that your website is popular, real and not spammy. It’s social proofing and it’s the new link building.
It’s important to share and have others share your content for your search engine results but also for others to find you by searching on social networks themselves.
As you can see it’s becoming a tighter world. Social and search and BFF. Treat them as a pair and you’ll do better.
