Facebook and Smart Search Marketing
In both the B2B and B2C sectors, many brands are turning to Social Media Marketing to build brand awareness. While search engine marketing is still driven by Google, as brands continue to increase use of Facebook pages to reach out to prospects and existing customers there is a continuing shift in search marketing and it is Facebook that is driving the change. Here are three ways that Facebook is altering the search marketing industry.
Blog Summary:
- Personalized search has to evolve to incorporate Facebook criteria.
- By incorporating Facebook criteria into their search algorithms, Bing could rise to challenge Google for search engine status.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) response goes from Active, using search terms via search engines like Google or Bing, to passive on Facebook where ads are shown based on site users likes and interests .
1. Personalized Search has had to evolve. In other words, search engines like Google and Bing have had to incorporate Social Media criteria into their search algorithms, the base programs in place to allow web users to seek out the information they desire.
Bing is working on including Facebook “likes” for FAN pages into their search criteria, and Google is building an algorithm set that includes social criteria for a multitude of sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. As a general rule, websites that are affiliated with Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook rank higher organically.
What does it mean to your business? Integrating your social media criteria across all your owned content, for example, adding “like” buttons to each of your blog posts, allows for increased exposure and ranking benefits from your online content.
2. Bing growth can adjust marketing budgets. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are part and parcel of many online marketing plans and historically Google has had the lion’s share of PPC budgets due to their enhanced database. This is changing as Bing continues to grow, as noted in comScorereports, changes to Bing’s algorithms to include Facebook “like” criteria could launch the search engine to meet or even pass Google in dominance.
What does it mean to your business? When looking for foothold in the online advertising world, keep in mind that as Bing grows in significance, which could speed up once they include the Facebook criteria in their search, to adjust pay-per-click budgets accordingly.
3. Active Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Goes Passive. Historically, PPC advertising was mostly found via search engines like Yahoo, Google or MSN, (Bing). Companies studied which search engines had the best returns for their industry and allotted a budget to the ad campaign they chose to run. That being said, with the increasing popularity and success rates of Facebook advertising, it’s necessary for businesses to consider the viability of blending their more traditional PPC campaigns with a Social Media based PPC campaign on Facebook to extend the reach of their online marketing spend.
While the ability to hyper-target Facebook ads based on geography and age demographics is a strong plus, the real differentiator between Facebook and traditional PPC campaigns comes from the fact that Facebook passively offers ads to Facebook users based on their liked pages, the groups they join and the content they share on the site. It’s not based on search keywords, like most PPC campaigns, so targets only those facebook users that show an active interest in any particular brand or industry.
With estimated B2B marketing spends for Social Media expected to reach 14% of total online marketing budgets by 2012, the turn to Social Media, in this case Facebook integration for online marketing plans is easy to see.
What does it mean to your business?
It’s easy to say that online marketing has always had to adapt to new technology options and market response, but Facebook has taken the advancement of search marketing to a truly distinct level. Incorporating real-time access to any prospects’ conversations and interests, combined with the adjustments being made by the larger search engines to utilize the data available from that flow, the future of search marketing has been altered inexorably to the benefit of the brands with a Facebook presence.