It's starting to get noticeable. Slowly but surely, in a click of a link in a blink of an eye, we're suddenly seeing Twitter n' Facebook URLS where only website names used to once reside. Especially highlighted are key social contexts such as cinema, restaurant, fashion and increasingly, major brand advertising. Is Google a gonner and websites a wipeout?
A little premature to start speculation - rumours of the imminent demise of email persist even as it's continued high usage indicates the channel is in the rudest of health! But the rise of a powerful new internet empire of search and social media networking is in the process of a global reorganisation of the web. The explosion in socially determined search behaviour is compelling eCommerce to migrate beyond the borderlines of fortress business to set up a friendly encampment on a Facebook page and Twitter account.
The key to all marketing strategies across the web is to be seen to be humanly engaging and serving your audience segments, staying credible, relevant, valuable and useful - and showing you are intune and listening to their present product or service search needs.
Interacting in the social space, provides rich opportunities to build a community resource away from your business site pages, strictly optimised to draw inbound link traffic via PPC paid ad or SEO keywords to site conversion. Engagement via social networking or Facebook advertising of exclusive offers, discounts and competition prizes creates connections in unexpected ways.
Increasingly, customer service processes are being dealt with across both static and mobile platforms via social messaging. The suggestion is that personalised B2C exchanges are relinquished to the control of the customer on public visibility channels and a potential positive word-of-mouth, online marketing by proxy.
Human link building is now closely tied to indexing social signals for relevant content by Google's newly polished algorithm. Social trust, authority and engagement have become vitally important boosters for enhanced elevation to a higher Google PageRank.
As more online businesses start to see the predominance of the social space altering relationship prospects with search and social follower traffic, the perception of brand identity presence becomes charged with an additional dimension of possibility across the online/offline continuum.