To Search or Social - that is the question

There have been a lot of press articles floating around the web recently talking about social media and search, and how the two mediums will ultimately come together. Keeping everything simple (the way we like it at Propellernet) the search engines have come from a technology background. They send ‘spiders” out to crawl the web to observe and record what they find on the 11 billion or so websites they visit. Their findings are then put through complex algorithms in order to index the websites associated to content and quality. Ultimately, the search engines are trying to manage and keep pace with the plethora of information, which is available out there on the web, and serve it up to you in a meaningful and relevant manner. Organisations, like yours, are striving to ensure their website is ranked highly by the search engines for your key search terms in order to attract your target audience.

A different angle

Social media, including sites such as Myspace, Bebo and Facebook come from a completely different angle. They have created an online presence where people interact with each other as individuals and as groups or social communities. These sites know an awful lot about you and I, based upon our interests and our behaviour demonstrated within these sites.

Convergence is now upon us, and Search engines are vying for our time and want to serve us better by providing us with the information we want to have at hand (i.e. toolbars, widgets and iGoogle). This helps them build up a stronger user profile and allows them to personalise search for us. The results you might get for a certain search term, may be different to the results a colleague of your will receive from the identical search term. Social media sites are now offering search capability on all the personalised information they have already captured; in fact Facebook launched a business area to their site last Tuesday. You should check it out.

Where to target your audience

All this now puts you in a quandary. You have a certain amount of budget for customer acquisition, where do you now put it to get the best possible return? Ultimately, this follows on from our article about Percy Persona last week. If you know who your target audience is, you should use the right complimentary blend of channels to attract and acquire them. Social media is now becoming a genuine channel to achieve this, and it should be considered as part of the mix. The way the Internet is being used by your target audience is changing at a staggering pace and it’s vital that your website is found in all the right places, no matter how random they may feel to you!

We are watching this like hawks, and already have suggested some combined search/social media strategies to a number of our customers. Please give us a shout if you’d like further discussion around this.