Today Google is starting to roll out some new features in it’s Social Search rankings. The use of social search isn’t a new feature, it has been around for a while and has been a part of your searches. If you had not noticed them in the past, they were usually showing up in your searches towards the bottom of the first page. You would notice that the results were of those you had connected to on social media networks like YouTube, Twitter, etc.
According to Search Engine Land, Google’s new roll out will take your connections via social networks and make them even more important starting today. From what I read in their post, you will now see your social connections showing up in the results just like an organic result would. This means that using services like Twitter are even more important now to your business as they too can start to be ranked in the search engines.
The one thing I found interesting in their post was that Facebook Likes were not going to be indexed yet into the search results. In Fact, they referred to Twitter as “The new Facebook Like.” By this I believe what they mean is that you will see more and more using Twitter to help share content. As we all know, Facebook has special connections with Bing, so I think this might be a way for Google to snub Facebook some.
The other point I wanted to bring a little bit of emphasis to is that the size of your sphere is going to play a little great role in how people find you. Each consumers social search results are going to be based on who they are connected to. So if I have only 70 connections that I interact with and you have 700 that you interact with on a regular basis, then you are going to have a much larger net to connect to.
The other part I see with social search is that the more interactions and things you share with your sphere, the more likely you are to show up in their search engine results when one of your connections search for something. The beauty of this type of ranking is that you do not need to have a vast knowledge of SEO, or pay someone a bunch of money to get ranked. You simply need to share links and talk about topics that are of interest to you. Also, talking about topics related to your brand/business will help you to show up within your connections search results when they are needing assistance with things that your business handles. The one caution I would add though, is make sure you still continue to connect and engage consumers regularly and not just turn into a serial spammer. You know you don’t want to become hated on Twitter.
So if you aren’t using social networks like Twitter, you may want to start today!
Social search was exactly what we built in my previous internet company, Searchles (2006-2009). Regretfully, we failed to raise funding 🙁 http://www.crunchbase.com/company/searchles
One other strategy is to write solid material so that you get retweeted. If you are retweeted by “influencial” people you have just opened up page 1 of google to a BUNCH of people!