Get More from Search - Trends in Search & Social Media

Love it or hate it, use it or ignore it, profit from it or have your customer service gaffes illuminated by it, social media is buzzing because it has become foundational to digital marketing. User generated content allows people around the world to share ideas with each other. Social media’s reach now outperforms traditional media outlets like TV, radio and print. And while it’s now undeniably part of our culture and marketing disciplines, the growth has really just begun.

Random Social Media Stats

• In 2010, Gen Y outnumbered Baby Boomers and 96% of them belong to a social network.
• 78% of people trusting peer recommendations on websites; only 14% trust ads.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are linked to user-generated content.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. in 2009 met via social media.
• Facebook has over 500 million active users. 50% of them log in every day. Collectively, 700 billion minutes per month are spent at the site. 70% of users are outside of the U.S. Facebook has over 200 million active mobile users and are 2X as active as non-mobile users.
• Twitter has 175 million users, generating over 65 million tweets and more than 800,000 searches per day.
• The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube. The site has over 2 billion viewers daily.
• 73% of Wikipedia users edit the site’s content because they want to share knowledge.
• LinkedIn has over 60 million users with 12 million unique visitors per day.
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.

What Do Strangers Recommend?

Word of mouth is the most popular option for deciding on your next product of service, with 78% of people trusting peer recommendations on websites. The profound influence that strangers have on our decisions is relatively new and remarkable territory. Plain old advertising only impresses 14% of people.

Brand Rankings Succumb to the User Generated Content

As mentioned above, 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are linked to user-generated content. The platform provided by social media combined with sheer numbers of customer contributors outpaces the content that even the world’s largest brands can generate.

This can be a very good thing if your priorities are right. If the preponderance of your customers are saying good things, they will do the marketing for you. If not, or if your company has a bad rap for lack of engagement or courtesy, customer reviews can do more damage than any failed ad campaign. Large brands typically have it more uphill battle to humanize their messages and deal with customers at a one-to-one level. On the other hand, small companies have the most success at finding new customers through social sites.

2011 – Dubbed “The Year of Facebook” for PPC Marketers
2011 will have search marketers delving even deeper as it is anticipated to be the “year of Facebook” according to Covario, a search marketing firm to Fortune 500 companies.

72 percent of active users have two social network accounts on average, with Facebook being the platform of choice with 51 percent of users having an account – the most popular by a landslide.  Integration between search and social media is priority number one for respondents to Covario’s recent search and social media survey. The allure of user-generated inbound links to product sites is a major draw for advertisers.

Paid search advertisements on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn should also see major upticks – as much as 10% to 20% of PPC budgets – as marketers aim to engage their target audience in the middle of their networking sprees.

Make Social Media a Priority

The takeaway is that consumers now have the largest impact on a brand’s messaging and it is doubtful that we’re going to cede that voice anytime soon. Social media here to stay. So, whatever your feelings are toward connecting with consumers, engaging in social media and integrating it with your digital and offline campaigns needs to a top priority for your business in 2011 and beyond.

Long gone are the days of, “If you build it (a website), they will come.” I don’t know if that was ever really true but today, getting users to your website is a fairly complex issue. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the most heavily researched, contested and coveted marketing disciplines because search is still where it’s at for attracting engaged users to your website.

Yet, search engines don’t offer us marketers a how-to guide on how to rank well in their engines. That’s why it is essential to glean your knowledge of SEO best practices from plenty of trusted blogs, forums and articles online as well as from consultants and employees who have experience and success in page one search rankings.

A recent SEOmoz post by Rand Fishkin disclosed an interesting forum thread between himself and eight other SEO sages on the subject of whether great content equals great rankings. Herein, I’ll attempt to sum up the expert’s thoughts on what relevance great content has in organic search rankings.

So, does great content equate into great search rankings? Great content is important because people generally want to read well-written, engaging content. But just having great content on your site doesn’t mean that you will rank well. Other factors like site architecture and inbound links are major contributors to rankings. Now, if all things are equal (site architecture, inbound link quality/number) and your competitors are content with stale or inaccurate content, your great content will motivate people to link to your site and share your information with others which will in effect, produce better rankings.

As Matt Cutts of Google has a habit of repeating, Google strives to provide the most relevant search experience and he encourages marketers to produce great content. But for the time, great content isn’t a ranking factor!  So while it’s only logical to provide the best content you can for your users, it won’t automatically earn you a top spot.

Google and Bing are always aiming at improving relevancy,  so it is possible that over time, the better your content, the more useful your site will be for their searchers and thus, the better quality score you’ll  get from those engines as part of the total ranking equation.  Social media is one such trend that will likely affect ranking factors in the near-term: real-time tweets and updates may affect a site’s relevancy.

However, as it stands now, it gets down to a less noble conclusion: the content that is marketed the best is the content that ranks the best. Those who have the best quality and sometimes highest number of inbound links generally rank the best.

Vortaloptics custom search engines include revenue components that empower its clients to maximize the return on investment from their engines. Since the engine is completely controllable by the client, they can improve the relevancy of the search results and also place key partners and affiliates into their engines.

Vortaloptics never recommends listing irrelevant content just to profit from clicks, but rather consults our clients to focus on the most relevant content that users are seeking and match advertising, affiliates and partners to the search results pages to those search phrases to build a better user experience.

Because the content on our client results pages is hyper-relevant to the search terms and those results pages provide contextual ad and partner content, the ROI from clickthroughs is typically much higher for our clients than from traditional ads placed on blogs, for instance.  Search results page ads typically outperform regular page advertisements anyway, but because our clients can control the content of their results pages the ROI is on average, 10 times greater.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.

With clients being able to hone in top performing ads, they can now focus on the search phrases and clickthroughs that pay the most. Optimizing your website revenue is particularly important in a tough economy. One way to do this is to seek out the top affiliate programs and add as organic search content and banner listings.

As an example, Speedy Cash is launching a new affiliate program with one of the highest commissions per lead in the financial payday loans industry. Vortaloptics’ local search clients could signup for the Speedy Cash affiliate program and insert banners, text links and search results into their search engine for this payday loans affiliate program. When users search for or click on the financial services subcategory, the Speedy Cash program can receive prominent placement.

Being able to maximize revenue efforts by focusing on the top paying affiliate, partner and advertising initiatives makes good business sense. A well placed $85/lead link is worth the effort over a $1/lead program. Vortaloptics provides the technology to help administrators quickly focus their efforts on the top ROI programs and provide better value to their users.

Post by David Gosse.