As the good content theme continues unabated at BlogWorld, in one of today’s sessions, Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Bing, urges the attendees to keep the search industry in mind when you’re out there promoting via Facebook and Twitter.Your audience may forget what you posted yesterday, but search engines don’t.
While Forrester also discusses ways to be an authority with social media and what to consider when optimizing for search, the relationship between search and social media was his main thrust. Because of the immediacy of today’s communication methods, as well as the speed at which these social media posts are indexed into search engines, timeliness in your work matters.
Trying to catch the tail of something that was popular/trending two days ago means your late and the impact of your quality content could be missed. Beyond that, however, Forrester provides some information on how social media influences the search industry. He mentions the fact that Facebook content is showing up in search engines, well, Bing, thanks to the Facebook/Bing partnership. To further his point, Forrester mentions people delay making purchasing decisions until someone from their social media circle friends, family offers their opinion.
Thanks to the search industry’s embrace of social media, instead of waiting on a Twitter/Facebook update, if a potential customer finds a social media review when conducting a search for the product of interest, leverage has occurred. Granted, if the person searching doesn’t trust the review they find, then your product will probably miss out. That being said, it’s important to get that social content out, and keep the search engines in mind when doing so.
From Forrester’s perspective, social media in search engine results help the trust quotient because of the personal nature of social media. Essentially, if you have people bragging about your product or the content surrounding it on Facebook and these posts show up in Bing’s results, there’s a good chance people will be more apt to trust your brand/product/content.
Another point Forrester mentions is also important, although, you might think it’s common knowledge. But then again, if he’s talking about it to conference attendees, maybe it’s not: Make sure you add a link to when you tweet, and/or, post something useful. If people can’t navigate to the item/content they are enjoying, you have failed to convert. Miserably.
From here, Forrester discussed the sheer amount of content available from the social industry, and seeing it on “paper” is truly staggering. According to his research:
- 25 billion tweets sent on Twitter in 2010
- 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
- 3,000 photos uploaded to Flickr every hour
- 30 billion posts/month Facebook
Yeah, that’s a lot of content, which plays into the previous session’s discussion of how hard it is for cream to rise. The problem is, there’s a lot of cream out there. With such an obscene amount of content from the social industry, leveraging it through search is an important feature, otherwise, many of these gems would be lost forever.
As you can see, search is still a very important aspect of the overall marketing approach, even when social media is your target. Don’t forget about the people actively looking for products related to your focus.
Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. Through Internet Marketing he places his name on great search engine like-GOOGLE who is also called as Innovator, Investor, Internet Marketing Guru and Entrepreneur. For more updates don’t go away, please stay with us.
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