Social Media

Social media and search complement each other and are increasingly becoming more intertwined than ever before.  Google has launched its newest search product “Google Realtime” in an effort to provide real time content from comprehensive sources.

So far when I search within Google Realtime, Twitter results are primarily displayed.

Search results can be refined by search type (everything, blogs, news, discussions, videos, maps, shopping, books and more), time period and location.

Twitter retweets and replies to an initial tweet can be viewed as an entire conversation with additional comments indented for easier viewing.  Messages are also organized from oldest to newest.

In addition, Google Realtime is integrated with Google Alerts, allowing for updates of specified topics to be emailed to you.

Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone reported that Twitter’s search volume has increased by 33% since April 2010 growing from 19 billion to 24 billion searches per month in June 2010.

Most of this traffic however, does not occur on the Twitter.com property itself, but rather through API requests from Twitter clients such as TweetDeck and Seesmic.  No one 3rd party delivers the main share of API calls.

In April 2010, Danny Sullivan spoke with Twitter’s director of search, Doug Cook, who said that at times, queries per day read 750 millions, and expects Twitter to have 1 billion searches per day in the coming months.

Walter Isaacson interviewed both Biz Stone and Evan Williams, founders of Twitter during the Aspen Ideas Festival, July 2010.

They stated the following metrics for Twitter are:

• 130 million registered users
• 70 million tweets per day
• 200 million users visit the site every day
• 800 million search queries a day

Biz describes Twitter as an “information network, to get information needed now”, rather than a social network.  Their positioning statement “what are you doing now” has changed over time to “what’s happening”.

Evan says that Twitter Search is still in its infancy.  Twitter messages are provided to Google, Bing and Yahoo to display within their search results, however even they say it’s a search problem that is yet to be solved.  Essentially search engines like Google use “freshness” as one of their signals to find the most relevant information, however since it is real time information, there is no history for the document so it is currently very difficult to deliver the best answer.

New functionality on Twitter allows users to tag tweets with location meta data such as venue name, neighbourhood or city.  The exciting thing about this aspect of Twitter if it is used widely enough is that it can provide users with extended search capability to find out what is happening around them.

View the full video interview with Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

I have a love hate relationship with Facebook.  On a personal front, I love being connected to my friends and hate the idea of businesses marketing to me.  On my professional side, I am a “search” person at heart, because I like being in control of what advertising is presented to me when I’m searching specifically for a product or service.  Being found at the moment a customer is searching for you, in my opinion, is an ethical way of doing business.  You are not bombarding people with messages that are irrelevant to their needs.

Since the inception of Facebook, there have been shifty marketers who create applications and trick people into providing information.  I absolutely despise that type of behaviour and it has rubbed off on my perception of what Facebook is about, even though there have been many changes made by the company in regards to privacy policies and user data access.

However, I cannot ignore the ever growing popularity of Facebook, and now the numbers stare at me in the face, that its community is using the internal search engine to search for products and services.

In February 2010, ComScore announced there was a 10% increase in the number of searches from the previous month conducted on Facebook.com.  This was a jump from 395 million searches to 436 million searches.

Jumping forward to April 2010, Facebook experienced 624 million searches, although there was a slight decline of 2% in May 2010 to 609 million searches.  It will be interesting to watch the search growth in the coming months.

Even though there has been substantial growth in the use of Facebook’s internal search engine, we need to analyze this further.  Do people use the search engine in the same way that people use Google or Bing? What are people searching for?  A keyword research tool for Facebook would be highly beneficial, but I imagine this will only be made available if it is of benefit to Facebook itself, in the same way that Google has their Keyword Suggestion Tool for the purpose of encouraging marketers to advertise with them.

AimClear Consulting Services underwent a Facebook SEO Ranking Factors study.  Following is a summary of some of those results posted by Marty Weintraub on June 24th, 2010:

1. The Facebook Suggest Box targets users that have the search query within their name
2. Facebook heavily focuses on personalization, by presenting results of pages you have visited previously
3. Facebook will also prioritize results of relevant events that the search user or their friends are attending
4. Facebook returns pages that the user or their friends like, when they have clicked on the “Like” button
5. Fan Pages and Applications are returned within the results based upon the highest friend count
6. Mentions of the business name, product or service by friends of the search user increases rankings within results

It is still early days for Facebook’s internal site search function and what impact this will have on the search industry.  Over the coming year we will keep an eye on developments to watch how social search unfolds, particularly with Facebook.

I read some time ago that people will no longer “search” for information or at least it will be greatly reduced, due to friends and connections “sharing” information online through social networks.  Why should I search for something, when content of relevance comes directly to me?

Yes it is true that our friends and friends of friends are sharing information, but it does feel like a barrage of noise some of the time.  It is a constant babble that is difficult to mine through and to find what is pertinent to you when you need it most.

Research shows that we are more likely to trust recommendations from friends than from a stranger or from a business who is trying to sell us something.  78% of people believe what other customers have to say about a product or service (Source: Edelman 2008).  If the customer happens to be one of your friends or a friend of a friend, then their recommendations, comments and research becomes even more believable.

Being called an “experiment”, we have just seen the launch of Google Social Search, a new search product that draws results from friends and friends of friends.  It’s currently available in Google Labs for anyone to try and comment upon.

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