Future of social and search
Social networking is growing every day as millions of people resort to Facebook and Twitter to share, flaunt, connect, and even hang out. Social signals have been playing an ever greater role in search results. Earlier, internet marketing experts only had to worry about links, tags, and content for the search engine optimisation of a particular site, but now social signals also play an important role in search engine rankings and their importance will keep on increasing with time. What is the reason behind this transition? Ask an average man and you will get the same answer, the growth of Facebook and Twitter. Even though these social media giants have amassed a trove of users, they are not the main reason behind the inclusion of social signals as a parameter to rank search results, their growth is not the actual reason. The reason is very trivial, human psychology. All good digital marketing agencies have always emphasised on human behaviour to enhance results from marketing campaigns. What do people generally talk about? What do they want to see? What are their needs and expectations? And other such things are of great importance to any marketer. With people sharing all this and more on social network sites, it was necessary to include social signals to rank search results in a better way. Internet marketing experts have taken social media as a very serious information source for designing their marketing campaigns. People not only 'talk' about things on social media, but they even hold off on their purchase decisions before they have had some positive response from their Facebook friends. Integrating social signals with other parameters for search engine optimization ensures that buyers get real-time results of what other people, which may also include their friends, search for on the internet. This means that the next time you go online to make a purchase, you won't have to wait to get a response from your friend because his or her response will reflect in the search engine results. Integrating social signals also allows searchers to gauge the popularity of a particular service or product depending on the number of 'likes' or 'tweets' about it. Even those who are not frequent users of social media will understand that a high number of likes means that the product has something to it. Companies have also started considering the importance of social signals for their search rankings and have hence started setting up dedicated social media management teams to help them get social signals which can leave a positive impact on their search rankings. If you want your search results to go up because of your search signals, you will have to make some effort. Start engaging with your followers and remember that not every post or tweet will go viral. If the post has not received many likes, it does not mean that your social media management is failing; it still might be leaving a good impact on the search results.