Social Media Now Impacts Search

Google and Bing announced this week that links shared on Facebook and Twitter will impact search results. This is big news for marketers who want their website to appear in the top of search results and attain visibility. Marketers will have to jump into social, but it also means they need to be smarter about how consumers are motivated to share content amongst friends.

Prior to the announcement, marketers would focus on optimizing the keywords within their website content in order to get a good listing on the search engines. Even the Google Social Search product that was in place prior to this week’s announcement really didn’t change that. By the way, Google’s Social Search product delivered search results that are influenced by your friends and social graph, based on the links they are sharing. It was an additional search listing seperate from your organic search result. For example, if you and another person are both searching for tailgating, and your friend liked a tailgating article from a website, well then that website would show up in my search result when I search for tailgating.

However, this announcement changes all of that. The two search engines will use what they call social author authority to influence organic search results. Presumably, if you are a highly influential Twitter user who shares a variety of tweets (which are then commented on, re-tweeted, and shared across your large network), you’ll have a good cache of authority and the links you share will enjoy a boost in SEO.

As always, we want to hear your thoughts.