According to UK-based PR, search and social media agency Punch Communications, “the addition of real time social media factors into results on search engines could serve to galvanize the quality of organic search”.
The influence of social media on search engine results is becoming more and more prominent every day, and is likely to get even more significant in near future.
News or current events are traveling across the world much quicker than ever before thanks to social media. More and more people are making use of social networks to share their views and opinions about different events, topics or current happenings and of course news gets spread fast as well.
These days, when a news story is posted on a major website, only a few seconds later it is tweeted, bookmarked, dugg, added to Facebook or Friendfeed, etc.
On top of that, if the news story is about an event that occurred in a public place, it’s only a matter of minutes before the first images and videos are posted on Twitter or platforms such as Flickr and YouTube, certainly if in that public place people have smart phones and Internet access…
Why social media optimization matters
Most search engines show results based on the real time social media factors. We are all used to find social network content in search engines now.
This inclusion of social media factors has every potential to make search engine results much more organic, Punch says. As a result, the company says (I quote) “the influence of algorithms and Google’s page rank system on non-paid search responses could be lessened.”
At the same time, marketers have found a better way of getting quality traffic to their sites, needless to explain why many SEO business become SMO (Social Media Optimization) specialists as well.
Marketers are on the way to use social media to give answers to users’ queries and are already trying to identify the influencers and most important channels in the “social sphere” to reach and influence end consumers.
Search engines, user queries and social media, it’s far from a finished story.
What’s your take on the topic?
Source: Punch Communications via PRWeb.
Stijn De Meyere is an expert on the convergence of social media and search. He also has a lot of experience in social bookmarking and content marketing. You can follow Stijn via Twitter here.
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Social Networks are having more of an impact on Organic Search results than ever before.
The most successful article I have ever written for my blog facebookflow.com (in terms of traffic) was successful due to the traction it gained on the social network StumbleUpon, and this led to an awesome search engine ranking for some highly competitive keywords.
Digg and delicious are just two other social portals that can lead to large traffic windfalls.
These days Google is giving prime search real estate to Tweets and has created their own social network (Buzz) in hopes of generating more real-time search data.
SEO specialists that ignore SMO and the real time web are ignoring the most important new factors in search.
Couldn’t agree more, Garin. Still waiting for that big one ourselves 😉
But fully agree with you.
Thanks for the great post.
As you say, it’s very much a work in progress – and one we’re certainly happy to participate in exploring…