Chapter 9
Social Media and Search
We’ve seen how valuable it can be to appear in search results when searchers are looking for what you have to offer, and we’ve seen the important role that links play in helping your site rank well. We’ve also seen how keyword research can provide insight into how your potential customers are thinking about your brand, your industry, and your competition.
Social media can help on all of these fronts, working as a brand amplifier and customer support extension to deepen engagement with your customers.
Search and social media became even more entwined in 2011 with the launch of Google+. In November 2011, Google made brand pages available for Google+, presenting a new opportunity for organizations to connect with audiences. Google has increasingly been incorporating social data and content into its Web search results, and Bing has been doing the same (particularly based on its partnership with Facebook).
Over the past year, I repeatedly heard the same question: Should an organization invest its resources in search or social? But that’s the wrong question. As discussed in Chapter 6, you have one set of customers (not separate customers who use e-mail versus ones who use search versus ones on social media). Learn where your customers are and meet them there.
As discussed more deeply in Chapter 10, it’s not the case that consumers are abandoning search engines for social networking sites (90 percent of us use search engines versus 47 percent of us who ...
