In the previous post, Find Your Community, we got an intro to finding where people are talking about you on social media using Google. This post delves a bit deeper into the subject.
No matter what you’re searching for, you should be sure to check out Google’s More button. It offers a wealth of ways to specialize your search, including searching for:
- Maps
- News
- Shopping
- Books
- Blogs
- Updates
- Discussions
Clicking “Show search tools” offers you ways to restrict your search by time and type:
- Any time
- All results
- Standard results
- Latest
- Social
- Sites with images
- Past 24 hours
- Nearby
- Fewer shopping sites
- Past week
- Standard view
- More shopping sites
- Past month
- Related searches
- Page previews
- Past year
- Wonder wheel
- Translated search
- Custom range…
- Timeline
Wow! Be sure to check out the additional search types; they’re pretty interesting. Here’s a result for our “small business accounting software” search as a timeline. It would be great if you’re doing a history of the subject.
Figure 8 — Google Timeline Search Example
As interesting as these options are, the one we really want to concentrate on is a relatively new one: Google’s Social Search.
If you’re active in social networking, you may have noticed that you often see little notices below the search results, like in the following figure. You can make this explicit by selecting “Social “by dropping down the “More” in the left column of Google search results. This causes Google to present results based on what those in your social network have tagged or otherwise recommended.
The concept that seeing results from people you know is going to be more interesting and relevant to you is called social search. Knowing that people in our social network have written or tagged related articles might make us more likely to click on these results. And any traffic generated to their sites was not so much due to any SEO techniques discussed in the previous section, but to their connection to us.
Next up: How Social Search Works
Advanced Google Searching for Social Media is the 19th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises. The book (itself part of a series for different audiences), is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why 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
