As the world evolved from Web 1.0 to the illustrious Web 2.0, “SEO” quickly became a trendy, global term. Marketing tactics rapidly shifted from user-friendly content to Google-friendly content. The race for the #1 Google ranking was on and every ranking trick in the book was pulled from marketing hats across the world. As Google removed the kinks and blunders within its own algorithm (and continues to do so every day), the shift returned back to the heart of the Internet: creating a valuable space for the user. This refocus has shined a glaring light on user-generated content (UGC) and we expect this light to twinkle for quite some time.
Let’s start from a panoramic view of an overall social media marketing structure and zoom in as we get down to the details. To put things in perspective, about 30 billion pieces of Facebook content and over 5 billion tweets are shared monthly via people on those networks. Of that chunk, almost 25% of those shared posts include links to content. Even the smallest fraction of clicks from those billions would result in an astronomical shift in traffic. Remember, those numbers reflect monthly data. That being said, business websites must contain 3 critical buttons to promote sharing via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Let’s break down each platform to uncover exactly what matters, how search engines crawl or ignore certain information, and what type of social signals are being sent to Google.
Facebook
Generally speaking, Bing is the haven for Facebook content in search rankings. Using its “collective IQ”, Bing crawls Facebook data and ranks accordingly. Popular pieces of Facebook content being heavily shared, regardless of personal connection to those people sharing, will rank on Bing’s results page. Bing’s concentration of Facebook affecting searches marks the importance of a constant flow of user-generated content. When we shift gears to Google, Facebook plays a much less significant role in rankings. While Google does crawl public portions of Facebook, the buck basically stops there. One twist, however, lies in Facebook “sharing”. When a piece of content is “shared” via Facebook, a unique URL is created linking back to the promoted content. As a result, these actions are subjecting more and more people to content through each “share”. In fact, every “share” sends a social signal to Google. These social signals give Google the implication that the information being shared is coming from a quality, trustworthy site.
Twitter
If any social platform knows aggregated content, it is most certainly Twitter. The sheer concept of “trending topics” lends itself to useful, rich data for a search engine. Google and Bing have both implemented real-time results into their SERPs. As such, if the pieces of information are deemed relevant and reliable, Twitter-founded results will display above other content. In fact, SEOmoz conducted a phenomenal experiment to discover just how Twitter influences regular search results. Click here to see the experiment for yourself. And for those lazy readers, the results pointed to the impressive affects tweets have on new, non-indexed content. Social signals from Twitter are sent to both Google and Bing telling them that the shared content is of quality and is largely popular at that moment in time. Case in point, user-generated content via social networks really matters.
Google+
Comparable to Twitter, Google and Bing have the ability to retrieve data from Google+ activity. The experiment above was conducted in regard to Google+ as well, indicating the real-time ability of Google+ to display user-generated results to searches. More importantly, though, is the vast capacity for Google+ content to be displayed amongst Google searches. Business pages are continually showing up on SERPs, no surprise to a person with SEO knowledge. Google+ content trumps the majority of other content when the search is relevant. This is due to the smart SEO behind Google+’s very nature. The social platform lends itself to inbound linking, internal linking, and a massive amount of indexable content. Google+ is still in its infancy stage and we predict that Google will impart widespread influence on search results for a long time to come.
The bottom line is this: social media is user-generated content and user-generated content affects search engine results. Google and Bing place real value upon these pieces of content that are being composed at incredibly rapid rates. Businesses must utilize these tools to remain relevant, top of mind, and shared. Recall the fact that 30 billion pieces of Facebook content and over 5 billion tweets are shared monthly. Google is paying attention, are you?
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