One of my predictions for 2011 was that this would be a breakout year for social search (#15).
Today Techcrunch posted an article that gives us some clues as to how Google will be staking their claim in this highly lucrative arena. Not surprisingly, they are placing emphasis on sharing, which of course is the basis for building value for your social community, and influence for yourself.
Links and Sharing
What I find interesting is that Google will be focusing on links that are shared among your friends – your social community. This means creating content that is worthy of sharing will enhance your visibility as far as Google's social search engine is concerned.
This will heavily favor bloggers who are creating valuable content, especially if that content is well placed on Twitter. Given that Facebook isn't sharing much with Google these days, Google has elected to go all out with indexing of tweets and retweets.
This is something that I have noticed – that my tweets are readily indexed by Google – and why I have been increasingly diligent about checking in with Twitter more frequently. It's also why I am using services such as Twilert to monitor and follow-up on mentions of my name to engage with friends that value the content I am creating.
Understanding that not all small businesses have the time or willingness to blog, I have encouraged my clients and audiences to consider Quora as an alternative. Why? I happened to notice that my comments on Quora are also readily indexed by Google. The commentary on Techncrunch today supports this observation.
If you are not familiar with Quora, it is a question and answer site that has a professional atmosphere, and as a result tends to attract users that are mindful of doing their best to share valuable information. The more valuable your comments are, the more likely they will be shared – which is what Google needs to ascertain your influence for their social search engine.
Relationships and Context
Google is clearly the search leader when it come to content – and links are how content is shared. However, social search is about context, and it seems to me that quite a few assumptions are being made with the approach Google is taking.
One assumption is that those thousands of relationships you have on Twitter are actually friends. While some of them are, Facebook is more likely to be the community where you interact with your closest friends. This is why I still believe Facebook's social search is going to be the monster that will give Google a run for its money.
If you read the Techcrunch article, you know that Google is only interested in content on sites that are easily accessible – so they can easily crawl those sites and index that social content. Clearly, Facebook is not one of these sites, and probably never will be.
Your personal data on Facebook is invisible to Google, but your data on your professional page is fully available to them. Nevertheless, have you noticed that very little of your professional page content gets indexed by Google? To see what I mean, do a search with Google and then search for the identical terms on Bing.
There's a very significant reason for this – Bing has a partnership with Facebook, which is Google's adversary.
Bing is the search engine that powers Facebook, so if you really want to know what's happening on Facebook pages, that is where you want to go. Though, soon enough the partnership between Bing and Facebook will do what many of us have been anxiously waiting for.
They will unleash the powerful search capabilities that can only be derived from the personal, contextual, and relational data that we share every day via our personal Facebook profiles.
That's when we're going to see some seriously exciting things in the way of social search.
Until then, you'll definitely want to get busy with your blog, Twitter, and Quora to enhance your presence for Google's social search. Remember, our job as small businesses is just to understand the game so that we can play it to our best advantage.
Respecting both Google and Bing and Facebook is vital to winning at the game of social search.
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Enjoy your weekend, Jeff
Really interesting post Jeff, thanks! It’s great to get the big picture view of what the main social media players are doing. Thanks for the tip about Quora too – I’m going to check it out.
Thank Jeff,great information. There are so many thing to learn in social media. It is great to have an expert share his views. =)
Lynda – Lots of buzz and excitement about Quora. We don’t know where its going but this nod by Google suggests it deserves some of your attention.
Jeff
Thanks Rachel – I’m always careful not to call myself an expert, but if there is anything I’m good at it is the trending big picture.
Thanks for noticing.
Jeff
This is all very helpful to study and learn about. I’m made uneasy, however, by Google serving up to me only my social graph for answers on searches, feeding me the known — I need the unknown, too, or I will be in a bubble. To be sure, that social graph return seems to be further down the page, but I sometimes wonder if I’m seeing returns higher up because they’re in my graph, whereas for other people, they aren’t, and yet, objectively, that content could in fact be better.
In other words, I don’t prize merely a social hand-stamp on an answer — just because it’s a friend doesn’t mean it’s best or true.
I also can’t help thinking that the @scobleizer and @aplusk types of the world — the power users with zillions of folowers to start with — will be rewarded by the geek-created new search paradigms like every other new bauble in the tech space as early adapters, sometimes even alpha and beta invitees on platforms not immediately open to everyone (like Quora). So they get a leg up filling up the content and filling up the cred bar — perhaps not merited.
Tech blogs show as the highest ranking traffic blogs in Google. But they are a minority of blogs for the average blog reader.
Catherine – I just had a conversation with a gentleman yesterday who started a blog on cranes -where his company is a regional leader. It’s amazing how quickly the blog has become a gathering spot for industry professionals that want to share on that topic. They have over 30,000 subscribers within two years – very impressive. The point is that just going out and doing a good job is the best way to accomplish your business objectives and maintain your sanity as well.
Jeff
Technorati is a search engine exclusively used for blogs where it features the latest updates happening in the blogosphere. It serves as a different world for online users who thirst for more detailed news and facts.