How to Optimize Your Brand for Social Search

Brand optimization for social search is a crucial part of the overall social media strategy for any business. Building a great social media profile is only half the battle won and the other equally important half is to ensure that your business gets listed on top in the relevant social searches engines.

An effective social search strategy widens the reach of your business as a large number of relevant users see your business profile while querying for information on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

What is Social Search?

Wikipedia defines social search as a type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the Search Query. So, how and why is it important for your business? Since it is contextual to people and has relevance to their social graph, they tend to easily relate to social search results.

Social Search Optimization vs. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a revelation ever since it was introduced. It’s a common misperception that Social Search Optimization (SSO) is the same as search engine marketing; the reality is that they are poles apart. SEO focuses on organic search (e.g. Google, Bing, etc.) while SSO is focused on gaining more traction within the social network realm. SEO is algorithmic while SSO is contextual.

It’s an interesting decision for businesses to make – Whether they invest in social search optimization or SEO or both? While SEO specialists are quick to write off social search as merely another link-building exercise, social search specialists claim that though SEO is beneficial in any marketing campaign, it is not the defining factor.

The truth is that picking either SEO or social search is not the solution. They are not alternatives to each other. While the end goal is the same, the means of social search optimization and SEO are drastically different from each other.

Is Social Search Industry evolving?

Though it may still be at a nascent stage as compared to SEO, the social search industry is growing in leaps and bounds. Twitter took a giant step when it collaborated with Google to display tweets for search queries. Facebook-Bing partnership is another milestone in the social search realm.

Google, Facebook and Twitter already offer real time searches which classify as social search. Facebook recently overtook Google as the most accessed website in the United States and going by the rate at which the number of Twitter searches is increasing with every passing day, it will be unsurprising if Twitter overtakes Google as well.

How to Optimize Your Brand for Social Search

Now back to the all important question – how do you optimize your business brand for social search? Though my observations relate more to Twitter and Facebook, they should apply equally well to other social networks as well.

  • Ensure that your social media profile is informational with relevant keywords and leaves a positive impression on visitors. Avoid being too flashy or stuffed with random incoherent keywords with an attempt to game the social search engines. Keep things simple but try to present them in an attractive way.
  • Track what your followers/ fans/ other users are saying about your brand by using social monitoring tools. Accept constructive criticism and ensure to hand out clarifications whenever required.
  • Track your competitors to see how they are performing on the social search front. Once you know where your competitors stand, it provides an objective assessment of where your business is.
  • Moreover, make it a point to keep track of what people are saying about your competitors. Your competitor’s loss is your gain.
  • Periodically monitor your social search performance. If the results do not match up to your goals, it’s time for a reality check and corrective action. Measure your success and failure – it helps.

I read an interesting statistic somewhere. To reach, the 50 million users mark,

  • Radio took 38 years
  • TV took 13 years
  • Internet took 4 years
  • Facebook and Twitter took less than 6 months

The choice is yours. After all, it’s about your business and how you grow it. Remember to leave your comments below.

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  1. Excellent Post Douglas!

    Very eye opening for me!

    Now I see how much more I would like to learn about social media.

    Wish there was a simplified social media solution.

  2. Excellent post, but your metrics about FB and Twitter are off by a wide mark. At the end of their first year, FB had just 2M registered users, and it took Twitter 2 years to get to 1M.

  3. You say it right, SEO and SSO are two sides of the same coin, one shouldn’t favor one or the other nowadays, but try thier best on both.
    A good designed and engineered website and/or blog and a solid social media strategy to support your efforts, that’s what works the best in my experience.

  4. I like that term “social search”. I’ve been doing my own SEO for 10 years now, so I can relate to how important it is to be as high as possible to get eyeballs.

  5. I like that term “social search”. I’ve been doing my own SEO for 10 years now, so I can relate to how important it is to be as high as possible to get eyeballs.

  6. It is always great to find different ways of strengthening your brand presence in the search engines; you raise some really good points about adding SEO to your Facebook page, Thanks for really informative post.

  7. Great article. Optimizing Blogs is just like optimizing websites. You should start with type accordant keywords for your blog. Again create relevant content and optimize your blog with your blog with your called targeted keywords. Once you accomplished accomplishing on-page optimization, than make link building. Get more backlinks from accordant sites and also be alive accommodating on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

    contextual link building

  8. A useful list of recommended strategies for social media marketing brand. I am excited by the appearance of the search algorithm in real time and human. I look forward to hearing your views on these trends, and to develop and prioritize.
     

  9. A useful list of recommended strategies for social media marketing brand. I am excited by the appearance of the search algorithm in real time and human. I look forward to hearing your views on these trends, and to develop and prioritize.
     

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