Posts Tagged Social Networking

Here’s a special treat for you and Marion. We’ve invited a special guest, Ryan Boots, to give his take on the Google/Facebook dichotomy.

(Just in case you hadn’t heard the word: Google and Facebook are totally not BFFs.) Take it away Ryan in Boots.

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Search marketers are or should be accustomed to change, even radical change, in the industry. But even by the rapid pace of the search industry, the last two weeks have seen a major upheaval. There’s no other way to put it: it’s all-out war between Google and Facebook.

What Happened?

Many observers have kept an eye on Facebook since the social networking site’s rise to dominance. In the space of less than five years, the site has radically changed the way people use the Internet, especially in how they communicate with and relate to one another.

There’s no denying the site has generated a lot of disruption for Google. The search giant’s system of delivering search results relies heavily on backlinks, or links among various pages, to determine the relevance of pages to search queries. Prior to Facebook, Internet users might have used forums or blogs to compare notes and exchange information, which suited Google fine as those sites tended to be publicly accessible.

The social web threw a wrench in the gears. Users began to take that same online conversation, and its attendant linking behavior, to the walled garden of Facebook. Because many people keep their profiles partially or entirely blocked from search, Google’s overall picture of the Internet began developing some pretty serious blind spots. Add in the shenanigans from shady SEO companies, and Google’s vaunted search quality began to suffer.

When it became clear Google wasn’t going to get access to Facebook user data, Google attempted to fight back with its own social networking features. These have mostly failed rather publicly: Orkut is unknown outside of Brazil and India, Wave was basically ignored, Buzz was a PR backfire, and the jury is still out on the +1 button.

Forget the Guns – Switching to Missiles

Following months of rumors that it would launch a competing social network, Google has gone from firing shots across Facebook’s bow to an all-out assault with the June 28 launch of Google+. Plenty has already been written on the subject – I especially like Danny Sullivan’s take over at Search Engine Land – but there are some additional wrinkles to consider for the sake of context.

In particular, Google’s contract with Twitter ran out on July 4, meaning Google Realtime Search essentially vanished over the 4th of July weekend. In a statement to Sullivan, Google says that Realtime Search will be back at some point, but: “Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.” In other words, they see Google+ being their replacement for Twitter’s data streams.

That may already be already happening, according to an experiment by SEOmoz. Short version on their findings: tweets still impact rankings (though apparently not as much) and Google+ isn’t as fast as Twitter for producing real-time search results. However, what is of greatest interest to us SEOs is that, according to SEOmoz’s experiment, Google+ is already impacting organic search results.

So it’s all-out war between the world’s two hottest Internet companies, complete with an arms race. Last Wednesday Facebook announced integration of video chatting functionality from Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft a few months ago. Also last Wednesday, Bing announced an alliance with Baidu, China’s leading search engine, to deliver English-based searches in China.

One major wildcard in this could be the FTC probe of Google. The company took an enormous risk launching Google+ after the probe was underway, and if the Feds decide Google+ is just too much influence for the search giant to have, all bets are off.

The Road from Here?

The primary lesson we’re taking away from this radically altered (and still changing) landscape is that social and search not only can work together, they must work together for mutual success. That genie is out of the bottle and isn’t going back in, so taking some sort of wait-and-see stance to see how things shake out with Google vs. Bing/Facebook simply isn’t a viable strategy. If anything, social media activities for the benefit of both engagement with the market and organic optimization just became even more vital. We had robust activities in place before this latest escalation by Google, and those efforts are continuing if not accelerating.

And since one hand washes the other, we are crafting our site content to help facilitate our social media efforts. As we develop new content for our various web properties, we’re taking great pains to make that content sharable and, more importantly, worth sharing. From our standpoint, if it’s worth sharing, it’s more likely to get organic traction.

No social SEO strategy should be predicated on simply doing social media for its own sake. Nor are we restricting ourselves to any particular medium – we blog, we monitor Twitter closely, and we’re hardly about to pull the plug on our Facebook accounts. We feel strongly that communicating meaningfully and effectively with our current and potential customers is the best way to proceed, regardless of how the Google-Facebook War of 2011 comes to a head.

 Ryan Boots is a Search Engine Optimization Specialist for Spark Energy.