Search Joins the Social Club

RT @LFI: HOW SOCIAL CONTENT FUELS SEARCH ENGINES Expand Reply

LEAPFrog Interactive @LFI

The age of the empowered consumer has arrived. Armed with a slew of social media outlets, consumers are constantly ready to review, comment, post, Tweet and blog about your brand. However, as inclined as they are to voice their thoughts to the online masses, consumers are equally interested in finding out what friends, acquaintances and celebrities have to say about it. That’s because consumers trust people they know, which makes their opinions more powerful. While consumers may not actually know a given celebrity personally, many of them may feel like they do. Those consumers often trust the opinions of the famous as much or more than those of the familiar. Expand 

LEAPFrog Interactive @LFI

All of this social back-and-forth generates a wealth of relevant content about your brand. And this content isn’t stored in some far off social media silo. Thanks to recent collaboration between search engines and social media networks, anyone with web access can find it in seconds. That means to successfully market online, your search marketing and social media have to work together. So, if your Search and Social Strategists are still sitting on opposite sides of the office, it’s time for a little meet and greet. Expand 

LEAPFrog Interactive @LFI

They will soon find that while their respective strategies differ, both have the same goal: to generate targeted web traffic. Search Marketing Professionals do this through keywords, while Social Media Specialists focus their efforts on increasing engagement and interaction with a brand. It only makes sense that they work together. Expand 

LEAPFrog Interactive @LFI

Today’s consumers are no longer satisfied with simple branded messages from a corporate website. They are motivated to search deeper—to pull out reviews, opinions and expert advice. The resulting social media conversations create an enormous amount of content, and search engines (always careful observers of online consumer behavior) have taken advantage of it. Expand 

LEAPFrog Interactive @LFI

All the big players in search continue to add code to their algorithms designed to capture social content. Search engines have also taken steps to stay ahead of the social media curve by partnering or buying successful outlets. (Bing has partnered with Facebook and bought Yammer. Google built Google+.) By partnering with these social networks, search engines have been able to add social context to search results, which in turn makes the results more relevant to consumers’ lives and improves search accuracy. Expand 

LEAPFrog Interactive @LFI

Online consumers are just as likely to turn to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest for information as they are to an actual search engine. And if they do turn to a search engine, the results are likely to include results posted on one of the popular social networks. This represents a dramatic shift in the search habits over the last five years, and for online marketers, it requires an equally dramatic shift in strategy toward an approach in which search and social are tightly integrated. Expand

LEAPFrog Interactive @LFI

Creating a symbiotic relationship between your organization’s search and social activities is essential if you want to compete in the digital marketing space. Social networks supply rich, relevant content and conversations, which search engines are programmed to crawl, index and filter. When your search and social teams collaborate, they can identify new word associations, speech patterns and cultural trends, information that can help you zero in on effective digital marketing solutions for your brand. Integrating search and social isn’t the future of digital marketing, it’s the present. And companies who don’t do it, may not have a future at all. Expand