social search

As a marketer, your social profile must be thriving on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But the important question is, ‘Is it thriving over Google+?’ I can assure you that most of you will answer in the negative. However, it is not too late. Grab a business page over at Google+ as soon as you finish reading this.
Google is smart and knows how to beat down its competitors. When Google+ was launched, none had the slightest idea that it will be used as a cutting edge in the market by Google. Yes, Google has merged the search engine and the social network as one. This attempt by Google can be described as ‘Social Searching’.

Search + Your World

It is the new Search plus Your World (Search plus Your World) I am talking about. When you do a Google search, being logged into your Google+ account, you will find that results are being personalized to match your taste. Let us consider that you are searching for ‘body building tips’ and if one of your friends within your circle has written about it then it will be shown to you in the search results. Seems good eh? Here comes the truth.
Google, in the name of personalizing your searches, is forcing the results of Google+ under your throat. How? Let me explain in a more elaborate manner. Suppose you wish to know about a certain brand or celebrity and you would like to give a search over Google. In the search results you will notice that the brand’ or celebrity’s Google+ profile is given preference. Now, do you understand what Google is up to? Yes, it is competing with other social networks taking advantage of its search engine.
Google gives less importance to other social network’s posts and therefore the more urgency in getting your business page over Google+ as soon as possible. A business page over Google+ will help people find your business over search results. However, just a page is not sufficient to boost your business to the required level. Here is one of my social marketing ideas that you can incorporate in your business page over Google+.

Ways to Win at Google +

It is more likely that Google+ posts are to be shown in the search results. Include the keyword in the title as well as the body of the post so that it will help the Google bots to index it and show over the search results. Here comes an added advantage to you as a marketer by including the keyword in posts. Instead of explaining it let me show you with a theoretical example.
Let us consider that you have a blog/website dealing with ‘Diet’ and you wish to optimize a certain article or page for a keyword. When doing a keyword search over any keyword tool you find the keyword ‘diet foods’ has high volume of search and with lesser competition. On the other hand the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ has the same value as ‘diet foods’ to a certain extent. Confused, you optimize your content for the keyword ‘diet foods’ and therefore leave the keyword ‘safe weight loss’.
After posting the article (optimized for ‘diet foods’) over your site, you generally share it to social networks by just pasting the link and allowing the social network to grab the first five lines of the content. In case of Google+ you can try the other way around. The article which was written around ‘Diet Foods’ can also be written around ‘Safe weight loss’, though the latter keyword cannot compensate wholly but it can at least be used as introducer to the content. Yes, write a title and a short description around the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ and manually paste it to the Google+. Later you can include the link of your content and let the social network have its way with it.

What are the Pros?

What is the advantage of doing this extra work? Let me remind you again that Google is going to crawl every post in Google+ and therefore your post which has a short description given by you manually as well as the short description which Google + has indexed for you over its network are both going to be shown over search result. Irrespective of whether a user searches for ‘diet foods’ or ‘safe weight loss’, the chances of your post appearing in the search result will increase.
The odd of the post being shown to the users increases if the user is within your circle. Therefore, it is better that you start focusing on Google+. At the same time do not abandon your audience over other network, because who knows what the future of social marketing will be.

Before I can wrap up, some of you might know that Google provides the ability of depersonalizing your search results. Yes, it’s true. But how many of you will depersonalize your search results and opt for a more global search? Maybe some of us would depersonalize the searches and would like a pure Google search. Will the common user care to do it? I do not think so. When most users find what they are searching for, none will care to depersonalize their search results.
Author:
Richie Richardson is a Social Marketing Expert and SEO Analyst. You can reach him over his blog www.zarrylyms.com where he discusses on current issues regarding Social Marketing, Branding, Affiliate Marketing, SEO and B2B.
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A few days ago Google changed the way the company is dealing with social media.

Since the launch of its Social Search in 2009, Google’s social media was kept a little hidden from the general public. You had to know about it and opt-in through Google Labs. Once you did, Google’s search results page would display the results to your query as it is vetted by machines (logarithms) and by people – what did your personal contacts on the social search wrote about it. The results of people’s recommendations were displayed at the bottom of the page. All that would appear only to those who signed up for the service.

On Feb 17, 2011 Google unveiled its changes to the Social Search, publishing it in beta and turning it on for all who are signed in, in English (so far).

With this new integration, which includes Google images as well, Google is introducing a tie to social search outside its own circle, from Twitter, Flickr and Quara. It uses social profile connected to your profile on Google to deliver items such as photos or blogs and tweets that come from you friends.

The search results will not appear, as they did until now at the bottom of the page, but will be integrated in the search itself, blended throughout the page. This is done through a system that lets you know when a friend shared a specific link or search result in the subject of your query. It appears in the search result page under the site’s url.

In other words, now you can see what your friends have recommended, not only what the logarithms have found out, making the search more personal and specific.

The other change is in its appearance in the search results. Any comment done by your friends on Twitter for example will appear as an annotation saying that your friend “shared this”. The more recommendations, the higher this site will go in the ranking.

Users have control over what gets displayed in social searches. The user page gives the ability to connect their profiles publicly or privately, to their other Google accounts, Twitter etc.

One thing this update does not include is a connection to Facebook. Not at the moment anyway. While still in beta, the rollout will occur in the next few days.

What does it mean?

Even though this announcement went through pretty quietly, it might create a shock wave as far as SEO goes. Search Engine Optimizations means making your site as visible as possible. To be visible, your site should appear on the first page of Google. The ranking on the page is determined by rules Google has put in place years ago: the size of the site, the activity on the site, the backlinks and the keywords that relate to the specific query, among other things.

Now, with the new Google social search – what was written about the subject using social media will have an impact on the placement on the page. The more people wrote and commented about the subject, the higher on the page the article or site will go. Social media, especially those sites connected to Google social search, have become more important in the placement of the search results.

What’s more; the search results may appear differently to different people depending on their circle of friends! If many of your friends talked about a ski resort in Alaska – this resort will move up in your page, but not in mine. Those who didn’t sign up for the social search will get different search placements without the comments, since only the user of the service will be able to see those elements.

With this swipe, Social Media has become more important in Search Engine Optimization. That is, if this service will grow in popularity.

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