Search and Social Media: Your Guide to Bing and Google on The Road to Social Media
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 29, 2009 | Share This
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This week’s article by yours truly in the Huffington Post asks if Google is turning it’s back on its core values by limiting social search to folks with both Google profiles and social media profiles. Earlier in the week, my colleague Mark Pilatowski wondered whether the engines would be able to deal with the spam factor inherent in real-time search.
Before diving into the implications of real time and social search integration to the biggest search engines (excluding YouTube), it’s important to know the basics and the background to what these new deals mean to marketers and the brands who love them. Presented below is everything marketers need to know about the Bing and Google social search deals.
The worlds of search and social media are colliding. During the Web 2.0 Conference on October 20, Bing and Google announced separate partnerships which will bring real-time updates from social networks to their search results pages.
These announcements reinforce a major shift in the way marketers must approach content on social networks. Now, more than ever, the visibility and perception of brands will be filtered through search results pages.
Bing Twitter
Bing announced a partnership in which users will be able to search Twitter status updates directly from Bing.com, at http://www.bing.com/twitter. The homepage of the new service allows users to either search twitter updates, or navigate the most popular topics currently being discussed on Twitter via a tag cloud.
Fig1. – Screenshot of Bing Twitter homepage
Bing Twitter search results updates span the last seven days, and are organized into two categories: Full Twitter updates (otherwise known as Tweets) and frequently shared links:
Fig 2. – Screenshot of Bing Twitter results for “Windows 7”
These updates are visible on search results pages as soon as they are published on Twitter. While Twitter updates are currently only featured on Bing’s designated Twitter page, we expect that these real-time results will eventually be integrated directly into the main Bing reply page.
Bing also revealed plans to integrate Facebook data in a similar way, although Microsoft officials stated that data from Facebook would “come at a later date.”
Google Social Search
Shortly after Bing’s announcement, Google unveiled a similar partnership with Twitter. This agreement is a core component of the launch of a larger system called Google Social Search. Google Social Search presents users with a personalized set of search results based on updates from their network of friends and followers.
Once logged in to their Google account, users can access social search as part of Google’s “options side bar.” (see Fig. 3)
Fig. 3 –Google’s Social Search tool is currently accessed via their “More Options” sidebar
In many ways, this announcement pits Google directly against Facebook in the battle for a user’s “official” online identity. The service will be managed through a user’s Google Profile, and will allow them to plug directly into several different services, including Twitter. At this time, Google has only revealed Twitter’s involvement and claims that additional social services will be included over the next few months.
Fig. 4 - Google Social Search allows you to search for information posted by your
network of contacts via their blogs, Twitter profiles and other social networks
While these results are currently delivered via a specific page on Google, the company has stated plans to show relevant social search results at the bottom of its general search results page.
The one drawback to Google’s service seems to be its total reliance on a user’s existing social network connections to return results. Users must both log into a Google account and link their social accounts via their Google Profile page in order to see any results from the Social Search tab. This could potentially slow the growth of what would otherwise be an interesting addition to Google results pages, as users may not fully understand the mechanics and benefits of linking their accounts in this way.
Fig. 5 - Google Social Search results for the same query as Fig. 4, with user logged out of their profile
Who Benefits, and Why?
Consumers: Perhaps the most obvious benefit of these partnerships is the ability for consumers to access a rich, personalized data stream of real-time updates about the world around them. This information stream has the potential to significantly change the way people perceive search engines and the information that can be pulled from them.
The Search Engines: For Microsoft and Google, these deals are ultimately about defending market share and building user loyalty by presenting users with a broader scope of content that is more personally relevant to them – an important part of the escalating war between the two search giants. While the engines will essentially have access to the same stream of data, the differentiation will be in the way they parse and present that data within the rest of their site experience, a trend that we will see play out over time.
Twitter: The real winner of these deals is Twitter – their strategy is reminiscent of one used by Wikipedia. By focusing on search engine optimization, Wikipedia was able to make itself ubiquitous within the search engines, and introduce millions of people to their service. It’s expected that Twitter will find itself in a similar situation, and the additional visibility should help them break out of the recent flattening of their user growth trends.
What Do These Announcements Mean For Marketers?
While search has proven invaluable to consumers, it has traditionally had limitations when dealing with current events. In order for information to show up in a search engine, it needed to have been published to a website that the engine was aware of, and then crawled.
In comparison, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook allow users to publish brief status updates which become immediately available and searchable. This real-time access played out famously through recent events like the plane crash in the Hudson River and terrorist attacks in Mumbai, where individuals living near the events were able to quickly share news, photos and information about the incidents much faster than the traditional news media. This same platform gives marketers the ability to engage directly with their customers and fan and get broader exposure for those conversations through search engines.
These partnerships dramatically increase the average consumer’s exposure to social media, making it essential for marketers to engage with consumers and consider how the interaction will play out on search results pages. Any sentiment - positive or negative - about a product or service that is shared on Twitter or Facebook now has the opportunity to appear side-by-side with general search results, influencing public perception and giving companies vital information in areas ranging from corporate reputation management to customer service and product development.
For companies with corporate Twitter accounts, this added exposure could also mean a dramatic increase in followers, as more people are introduced to the service as part of their every day search experience.
Recommended Reading:
Google’s New Social Search Is a Big Chess Move Against Facebook
ReadWriteWeb
Google Social Search is Coming & More on Google-Twitter
SearchEngineLand
Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands
Altimeter Group
Topics: Bing, Google, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Twitter |
Graet post - thanks.
The big question is will this create backlinks?
Noah, I love your overview on social search; so helpful and well explained. It will be powerful indeed to see live conversations appearing next to general search results. This further raises the bar for brands to ensure they are listening and responding to important conversations. We may just quote you on that!
[…] to search expert, Noah Mallin, at Reprise Media, social search will play a part in “influencing public perception and giving […]