Monitoring the Social Media Sphere
As the web transitions into a more semantic web and Tim Berners Lee’s dream of a web that acts more like the human brain comes closer to fruition, where a web of data can be processed directly and indirectly by machines, consider content, links and clickstreams. Search engines are mining data, the search trails of surfers, user and activity data. As well as signals to search engines from curated content and links, search results are significantly influenced by user behavior. Today search engines are capable of analyzing the majority of data on the web and user activity data provides search engines with insights that help identify the most relevant websites to a specific search query.
“Content created and curated by users carries greater influence and travels faster than doing it on your own. Voice of the customer (VoC) feedback, questions, testimonials, and insights surface through social interaction, discussion, and sharing.” – Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps
According to the 2011 Search Ranking Factors Survey from SEOmoz released in early June, industry experts believe the top three influential social metrics to date are: authority of users tweeting links to a page, quantity of tweeted links to a page and quantity of Facebook shares for a page. Google currently uses Twitter’s XMPP feed and some signals from public pages on Facebook to influence rankings.
In todays competitive and crowded economic landscape it is important to stay connected with your audience and potential clients, not only initiating social networking but also monitoring the social conversation. It is also important to remember that a bookmark or a tweet is considered a backlink and these types of links are usually quality backlinks with relevant anchor text. Search engines are putting more emphasis on the wisdom of crowds and the voice of the end-user, the links, that are essentially sending signals to search engines of the relevance of content influence what appears in search engine results pages.
Real-time search engines such as Kurrently.com and Twitter allow you to put a finger on the pulse of search. Organizations are gaining links to their web properties in a number of different ways including press release distribution, article syndication and social bookmarking. A couple helpful resources for linkbuilding and SEO research inlude Majestic SEO and Blekko.com. The aforementioned resources not only help to analyze the diversity of a link portfolio but allow the ability to get a sense of how engaged the competition is in social.
