{"id":57,"date":"2013-05-05T17:26:03","date_gmt":"2013-05-05T17:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/?p=57"},"modified":"2013-05-05T17:26:03","modified_gmt":"2013-05-05T17:26:03","slug":"the-convergence-of-social-and-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/2013\/05\/05\/the-convergence-of-social-and-search\/","title":{"rendered":"The Convergence of Social and Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GraphSerach\"<\/a>If you dismiss social media as the pointless nattering of teens and adults with too much time on their hands, maybe you dismissed Google search 8 or 10 years ago, too.\u00a0 \u201cHow can a free search engine help my business?\u201d you might have asked.\u00a0 Since that question is settled, we need to consider how social fits into the picture for business.<\/p>\n

By now every business should be on Facebook.\u00a0 Your customers expect it regardless of how socially active you are.\u00a0 Facebook is ideal for restaurants and not as helpful for funeral parlors.\u00a0 Nonetheless being there is important, just as having a website is important.\u00a0 Slowly businesses are discovering the power of engagement and how to apply \u201cPull\u201d marketing in the new environment.\u00a0 (I\u2019ll have more on that in future posts.) \u00a0But now it is even more important to have a strong social presence for other reasons.<\/p>\n

How your business ranks in Google, Bing, and Yahoo is important for obvious reasons.\u00a0 Logically you use keywords and use the traditional techniques to optimize your site.\u00a0 Those techniques will get you only part way to where you need to be.\u00a0\u00a0 Google now factors in your social credibility.\u00a0 If your business is on Google+ and you have more followers than a competitor, your business will rank higher in keyword search results, all other things being equal. \u00a0\u00a0But it doesn\u2019t end there.\u00a0 If you have a YouTube channel, that will boost your ranking, too.\u00a0 Don\u2019t forget that Google owns YouTube.\u00a0 Google will even add a clickable thumbnail to your videos in search results.\u00a0 Studies show that searchers will bypass text results in favor of ones containing videos.\u00a0 The number of views and viewer rankings also factor in to where you show up.\u00a0 Google even gives more weight if viewers watch the video all the way to the end rather than cut out early.\u00a0 Google casts a wide net beyond its own properties to accumulate even more information about your social presence.\u00a0 Google doesn\u2019t have access to everything inside the Facebook empire but it certainly knows if your business has a page there.\n<\/p>\n

\nIf that is not enough of a motivation to pay attention to social, consider what Facebook is doing with its billions of dollars spent on R&D.\u00a0 Currently for most users when you use the Facebook search you will find results within Facebook followed by a generic keyword search in Bing.\u00a0 This year Facebook will be rolling out what it calls Graph Search.\u00a0 With a huge captive audience it is making a move to compete against Google and other conventional search engines.\u00a0 You can try Graph Search here.\u00a0 Essentially they are leveraging that huge database of likes to better help people find precisely what they really want.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say you are searching for a restaurant.\u00a0 You can fine tune the search by cuisine and city, just as you can using Google.\u00a0 But, with Facebook you can also factor in \u201cliked by my friends\u201d and even \u201cvisited by my friends\u201d all from a single search screen.\u00a0 There is obviously much more depth available with Facebook\u2019s vast data.\u00a0 If Graph Search catches on, why would anyone use Google?\n<\/p>\n

\nIt\u2019s a new environment and proper online execution requires a willingness to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of social and search.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you dismiss social media as the pointless nattering of teens and adults with too much time on their hands, maybe you dismissed Google search 8 or 10 years ago, too.\u00a0 \u201cHow can a free search engine help my business?\u201d you might have asked.\u00a0 Since that question is settled, we need to consider how social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,3,5],"tags":[10,11,12,9,13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actgo360.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}