There are many web site owners who spurn social media marketing, preferring to concentrate on search engine marketing. I can understand their attitude given the relative newness of social optimization and social media marketing. In a period where costs and profits are high on the agenda, being able to establish a firm ROI in this area can also be difficult.
Basic social optimization is not necessarily a difficult or costly process, particularly if you have a blog. The latest rumour from the web suggests that Bing is in the process of forming a partnership with both Twitter and Facebook.
This partnership could push Bing to the front of ‘real-time’ search with Tweets and Facebook public updates becoming searchable. More importantly, I would imagine this data would be streamed through to Bing ‘as it happens’ or in ‘real-time’.
Creating a Facebook page and a Twitter profile is not a difficult or time wasting exercise. Once established, there are certain auto features available on both sites that further reduce the time impact. In fact, if you have a blog, often all that is required is the publishing of a post and the details are posted on both Facebook and Twitter.
If Bing is receiving this information in ‘real-time’, there is a good chance that your post will be indexed in Bing before Google. I know many will claim that since Google is by far the number one search engine – ‘real-time’ indexing in Bing will not account for much.
There is a certain truth in this, however, as Bing adds features and improvements along these lines, their share of the market may well increase. Google has a big slice of the pie – Bing will slowly eat into it. More importantly, does it matter who has the biggest share of the pie – if your social optimization strategies lead to an increase in traffic – does it really matter where it comes from?
Footnote: the latest news reveals that both Bing and Google have agreements with Twitter. Bing has already unleashed a beta version of their Bing/Twitter search. You can find it at http://www.bing/twitter/ . At the time of writing this post the site was up but not returning any search results.
