Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 – Real-Time Social Search

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 – SEO, we continued our series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts and talked about basic Search Engine Optimization techniques. In this post, we take a look an emerging trend – Real-Time Social Search – can help get you found on social media.

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Real-Time Social Search

As the social computing phenomenon gains momentum, search engine experts are increasingly talking about the growing importance of real-time search, or social search, by which they mean search that can tell you what’s happening on social media sites. Google recently revamped their search to add a real-time component, and has reached agreements to index Twitter[1] and Facebook[2] content.

Some pundits worry that the primacy of traditional search engines like Google, and the cottage SEO industry they support, may be threatened by the rise of social search, wherein recommendations and referrals from within social networking communities outpaces the referrals from Google, et al.

For example, after the 2009 Oscars, celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton recorded a single-day high of 13.9 million page views, and the site’s top traffic source was Facebook.[3] So what, you say? Well, Google is generally the top referrer for pretty much any site — the undisputed king. That Facebook dethroned King Google as the top referrer for a popular site was big news, and demonstrates the changing nature of search.

Google itself recognizes this trend, and has introduced social search features to its traditional search listings, as we discussed in the post Advanced Google Searching for Social Media. To summarize from that post, if you belong to the popular social media sites, and if Google can identify you (by you logging in to one of their services, like Google Docs, for example), you may be presented with search results ranked based on information from your social network.


Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 is the 65th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 208. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Dealing with Negatives


[1] ReadWriteWeb’s article on indexing Twitter: bit.ly/c1Rtd1

[2] SocialBeat’s article on indexing Facebook: bit.ly/cnsF2p

[3] GigaOm’s article about Hilton’s traffic: bit.ly/9zUexn

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