The age of social media is formally inaugurated. In the aftermath of the Google 'Panda' spam farms shakedown, a new manifesto declares future PageRank will also be indexed by web user site-blocking and social signal recognition. With advocacy marketing set to explode, it's the savvy site owners who are lighting the touchpaper of shareable quality content.
With nearly half of businesses without a social media policy, and the likelihood of lower sales volumes in the current economic gloom, not being socially active online reduces brand visibility and credible niche market engagement. Focused yet non-intrusive targeting of prospects within social networks is where the big guns of online marketing are firing on all cylinders, using relevant content as the driver to final website conversion.
The search engines recognise that the more an item of content is shared, the more genuine 'social' relevance, value and quality it delivers to a website, reinforcing brand identity. Key quality content provides transparency to build trust with human followers, drawn to investigate further and click to website.
With an average of 177 million daily tweets, and an 182 per cent increase to 145 million users tweeting via mobile, recorded March 2011, it's not surprising that Google and Bing are noting frequency of retweeted link traffic and link user authority!
Search and social is the dual gear shift attached to mobile internet transmission. While smartphones sales have just overtaken those of PCs, and currently account for around 13 per cent of the mobile market, they now have marketshare of three-quarters of all handset traffic, worldwide. Integrating mCommerce with company eCommerce and goal-oriented marketing strategies is the task facing businesses who need to keep in touch with their audiences.
Developing company mobile apps to extend lead-generation is a powerful attractor for direct and personalised customer engagement and response. While geo location assumes greater importance in local and mobile search, it's also perfectly compatible and absolutely de rigeur for cutting search engine middle-men out when going straight to market!
Similarly, Facebook is evolving its' social networking reach to the business sphere, creating a space for serious content journalists, a developer friendly presence in HTML, JavaScript and CSS and offering Facebook Ads at a potentially more cost effective rate and within a less saturated environment than the established Google PPC paid search model.
Company MDs and site owners must now realise the advocacy marketing potential of the new age of social media ushered in by Google. Then the task of quality content and trusted link building can begin in earnest as outsourcing to external web marketing agencies for their specialist skills becomes the only real option to ethical PageRank survival.