In 2012/13 brands will increasingly require strong & frequent social media signals in order to gain & maintain high organic ranking.
Social Media is disintermediating search engines in some areas, forcing search engines to focus on enhancing the use of social media generated signals into their ranking algorithms in order to ensure optimal search results freshness & organic results relevancy, or have older, less relevant results than a social media platform.
Also, simply, isn’t a tinyurl link sent to 1000 people maybe worth similar or more than an obscure link on a barely maintained blog? Of course this depends on relative ease of spamming and trust factor of the publishers.
Social media platforms are disintermediating search engines for fast-moving viral content, where minutes can be the difference between new and cool or “what….you haven’t you seen Fenton yet”?
Search is an intrinsically pull medium, where social media is both pull and push.
You cannot effortlessly get a stream of data from a search engine and stay entertained, it needs query after query, click after click. Social media platforms can push endless streams of bite sized consciousness, like a frivolous Bloomberg ticker (unless you’re organising an armed uprising which is no laughing matter). Yet Social Media platforms are still responsive to a query, and whilst search on Twitter and Facebook is very basic, that will only grow in capability.
Why not merge the top 5 search engine results into the social media platform search results.
Ta da…no real need to leave Facebook during The Walking Dead, one search gets your mates ironic comments, a tweeted URL of Zombie Survival techniques and the top 5 search engine results for Zombie.
Twitter & Facebook, G+ allow you to run at the pace of the pack when watching live broadcast programmes & events on TV. A large % of the dual screen population who simultaneously watch TV whilst using a laptop and/or smart phone are using these social platforms much more heavily at TV time than they are using search engines.
And don’t forget that TV viewing is the no.1 way we spend our spare (online revenue generating) time….so if your online property gets disintermediated in this prime time, you have big problems.
Social platforms allow both the ability to communicate, a very human need, whilst simultaneously digesting data. Add to that, TV and print adverts are increasingly directing users to their Facebook page and bang….you’ve skipped the search engine. In this scenario the only online ad opportunity occurs on Facebook or Twitter (or Google+), as you’re no longer navigating as heavily via the search engine.
Imagine watching I’m A Celebrity Get me Out of Here.
Simultaneously researching the contestants via a search engine may yield some results for weeks, months or years old articles on the washed up celebrity du jour yet the same search on Facebook or Twitter, G+ etc will yield comment on what they did 30 seconds ago…and the ability to directly interact with that comment, plus graze on various links hand selected by friends.
Staff at certain search engines are very concerned about Social Media full stop and this TV & Second and Third Screen phenomena is a risk to monitor as it is yet another phenomena that is training people to search on social platforms.
Search Engines cannot be left behind, so maybe they’ve developed their own social platform!
But that’s not enough…search engines will need to have their SERP results as up to date as possible as well. This FORCES search engines to pay greater focus on social signals, fast-moving signals regardless of if they even wanted to. It’s that or be the slow kid, wearing last season’s trainers.
No search engine committed to organising the worlds organisation wants to have search session abandonment to Twitter, Facebook etc because the user couldn’t find the freshest content on their engine.
Therefore as search engines must ensure premium FRESHNESS of their results to protect & evolve their own business, it makes sense that certain aspects of social media are no longer complimentary to SEO, but simply are part of SEO. Also, as social media mentions etc become increasingly a mirror of society, it may be strange to so heavily weight organic search results on web links alone. Should a site with 1000 links but no word of mouth dicussion be in a high organic position?
Social Media doesn’t require SEO to thrive, though the skills that make a good SEO often make a good Social Media person.
In the medium term it’s arguable that the same level of effort spent on optimising social signals will yield greater benefits in SEO than traditional SEO methods alone.
I’m certainly not suggesting the phenomena discussed above will kill search engines, but simply force them to boost the ranking weights of social signals, signals we as marketers need to leverage in their own right as well as for SEO.
Essentially since Social Media signals will become an increasing weighted set of influence factors for organic ranking, every SEO manager will need to factor in how they are going to ensure they have constant strong and frequent social media signal supporting their SEO objectives.
Bill Staples ---/--- Bill on Business 