Search and Social: What Marketers Need to Know About the Changing Landscape

Do you use social media and search to promote your business?

Are you wondering how the landscape of search and social is changing, and how to benefit from it?

To learn about the key changes in search and social, and how they impact your marketing, I interview Lee Odden for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Lee Odden, author of the book Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. He's the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and the editor of Marketing Blog. Plus there is a killer SlideShare tip you'll want to pay attention to.

Lee shares his insights into the world of SEO and content marketing, and the elements of his strategy that have contributed to his success. You'll learn about the four categories of content that you must create for your sites, and tips for getting the most out of them.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Search and Social
Graph Search and what Facebook is doing

Lee believes that Facebook is always going to progress towards having a more robust search engine.

Right now they are collecting a lot of data, and as Graph Search continues to roll out to more people, they will refine and optimize how it works.

It's not just about providing a better user experience, there is ad play too. Lee feels that this is the driver. Lee believes that Facebook will move towards providing marketers opportunities to get in front of people and offer contextual advertising in the way that Google does.

Before implementation of Graph Search, when you did a search on Facebook, the results would come from Facebook's own data set such as Fan Pages, Profiles, Groups, etc. If Facebook couldn't find what you were looking for, they would provide search results from Bing.

Facebook is still working with Bing, but the search result set they offer is a lot different. The filtering options are more robust. However, today when we want to find something specific, we still use Google.

As a marketer, Lee feels that it's important to understand the customer's journey and experiences. Often an idea surfaces on Facebook, and to validate the idea, people go over to Google expecting to find something that they can act on.

Listen to the show to find out how the Facebook search capability is similar to what they have allowed to advertisers.

How Google is using Google+ to impact the results consumers see

Marketers need to consider the public social content crawled by Google Bot, the integration of Google+ and authorship, and the association between Google+ profiles and associated content in search results.

Lee believes that it's virtually impossible to employ a successful organic search optimization effort without robust social content or social presence. These social signals have eclipsed signals like links.

When you look at simplifying SEO best practices, we are not just talking about content, keywords and links. We have to equally include the importance of social content and social signals.

Marketers really need to understand the search results landscape for their key search terms, and to what degree social content competes with you.

Lee gives an example of how social is impacting search results. Every search experience result could be unique because of geography, and whether you are logged in or not.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9TTBxarbs

As marketers, we still have to execute standard SEO best practices.