The Intersection of Social and Search

Got a quick heads up for you today. First, a question.

Have you ever wondered just how much of an impact social media is having on your marketing efforts?

It’s a weird thing because with search, you can measure most of your results very definitively.

You get on the first page or you don’t. You might be on page five and get a plan to get to page one, or a number one ranking. And if you follow the steps, you get there or you don’t.

And when you have your ranking, sales go up or they won’t. If that happens there’s several things you can test or tweak. And they help or they won’t.

Social media is trickier, isn’t it? That’s not to say that what’s not measurable isn’t useful – and some of the things we can’t measure may just be a matter of not having the proper tools yet.

Look at Facebook.

On the one hand, sending out topical status updates or importing your blog can bring you visitors. And on one level, it’s pretty simple- they’re visiting you or they’re not.

But the WHY of whether they’re visiting you or not isn’t the same as it is in search. In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons Google doesn’t quite “get” social yet. The relationship between what I search for, and what I do once I’ve think I’ve found it, is very clear.

I type a search in the box. I click a result. If the site I land on is relevant to what I believe I should have found, I’ll stay there for some length of time. If it’s not, I’ll probably go back and do another search.

In Facebook, our relationship with the data is different from the way we come across it to what happens when we find it. Most of the things I find on Facebook I wasn’t looking for. Instead, I gathered people, communities and even businesses I’m already interested in, and they push information to me. If I find it pertinent and it finds me at the time when I’m online, I’ll have a look.

If not, the stream keeps supplying new data for me to elevate to the level of information, or simply ignore. I can even ignore all of a certain type of content or a certain person, and only reach out to it/them when I feel the need.

And so, there are so many other variables at play that are often unmeasurable. For example, we both know that the depth of your connections on Facebook plays a role in determining whether people are paying attention to you in the first place. And if they aren’t seeing your updates, they aren’t clicking your links.

And even if they are seeing them, the relationship you have, including how much they trust your information, often determines:

• whether or not they’ll click your link,
• whether or not they’ll read your blog post when they get there,
• if they’ll respond with a comment or a like, and if they do,
• if they’ll share it with friends with or without a personal recommendation.

But how do you measure how much someone trusts you? IF the point at which a relationship deepens is different for each person, at what point do you know if you’ve crossed that threshold?

Some of what we do in social media can’t be measured – and perhaps shouldn’t be. Wouldn’t you think it was creepy if your relationship with your barber or hairdresser was being quantified? It’s one thing to be counted. It’s another thing to be ranked on a scale of 1 to 100 in an attempt to gauge your “closeness” to someone you’re buying from.

And so, at best, we know that we’re supposed to be participating in social media (including blogging), but it’s hard to know how much energy to devote to it.

Now, what does any of that have to do with search?

If you’ve ever studied the way I put together the original Evergreen Traffic System, you’ve seen that each of the separate areas of traffic I suggest has an element of search marketing to it.

(Sorry, this isn’t a sale pitch for a new miracle product I made. There won’t be any links to updated products in this update. Maybe next time? Today it’s just a free tip for you to think about.)

If you’re going to have a blog, I tell you how to set it up to use your keywords to help your rank while still having a site that your readers will love.

IF you’ll be using article marketing, we discuss what you should be on the look out for to get those articles to both bring you pre-sold customers and help with your search rankings.

The question is – why is social media being taught as if it were divorced from the rest of your marketing sytsem?

Whether you’re using social media to bring customers to an online space or an offline location, your efforts can still have a mind toward search.

Why?

Because search still drives twice as much traffic to your business as social media does – be it foot traffic to your store, or online traffic to your site.

Whether or not Google’s +1 project is successful, social media signals are already a part of the Google algorithm. And since Google social search is already integrated into Google Web search results, your social media efforts don’t just count toward your immediate traffic efforts, or the connection you’re building with peers, customers and clients.

It’s affecting your Google ranking, whether you’re actively attempting to help it increase or not.

Start paying more attention to how you can leverage social media to help increase your rankings and you’ll be making your traffic efforts with social media  that much more effective.

These worlds aren’t going to converge, they already have.