Over the past few months, Google and Bing have started to allude that they are beginning to increase the impact of social media content and links on their search results, citing that social networking activity is a strong indicator of what might be most relevant to consumer searches. The impact of these developments is likely to spread far and wide, as the positives and negatives of this new factor begin to reveal themselves and take shape. From the perspective of a digital PR, social media or SEO agency, the changes have the potential to significantly influence key priorities; below are a few aspects of search and social media activity that we may see changes in over the coming months:
Increased importance of social media buzz around brands/businesses - there will be an increased requirement for brands to be talked about in social media in order to benefit from high search engine rankings. Social chatter is important already, but if this starts to have an impact on search results then the onus on brands to develop and be at the centre of online conversations will become even greater.
Increased importance of social media links - buzz is important, but it's the links back to branded assets (such as the website or other social media properties) which will both generate the most traffic and show search engine spiders that a brand is relevant in the social space for certain topics or terms. It's open to debate whether crawlers can analyse semantics, but perhaps it should be assumed that they do, which is hugely relevant to social media content.
More need to ensure that online audience sentiment is positive - there are myriad sentiment tools out there that analyse social media content (bar Facebook) to deduce how a brand is perceived in the social space, so it's perhaps safe to assume that Google has the means to measure this too. As such, any buzz that is generated around a brand needs to be postitive, if it's negative then there could be a risk that the search presence of a brand could be mirrored by its social media perception.
More brand benefit from search engines - brands could stand to achieve significant benefit from the impact of social media content in search engines, providing that they are conducting the appropriate activity that will have a positive impact on the quantity of conversations on social networks involving the brand.
Relevance to social media commerce in the future - the spread of ecommerce into social media has only just begun, with the vast majority of brands still planning their entry into the social media commerce sphere. However, as social media content begins to have an increased importance in search engine queries, businesses will need to ensure that any social media commerce platforms that they develop are well optimised and make the most of social media functionality to develop conversation around their products, with a few to achieving more traffic through search engines.
It remains to be seen how much of an effect the above will have on the online marketing world, but it's safe to say that this will change the way that brands use social media. Not to mention that there are undoubtedly more changes on the horizon, and brands and businesses need to be ready!