Social media and search: SMO in the real time age

More and more people are making use of social networks to share their views and opinions about different events, topics or current happenings and of course news gets spread fast as well.

These days, when a news story is posted on a major website, only a few seconds later it is tweeted, bookmarked, dugg, added to Facebook or Friendfeed, etc.

On top of that, if the news story is about an event that occurred in a public place, it’s only a matter of minutes before the first images and videos are posted on Twitter or platforms such as Flickr and YouTube.

Why understanding SEO alone is not enough anymore

Most search engines show results based on the real time social media factors. We are all used to find social network content in search engines now.

This inclusion of social media factors has every potential to make search engine results much more organic, Punch says. As a result, the company says (I quote) “the influence of algorithms and Google's page rank system on non-paid search responses could be lessened.”

At the same time, marketers have found a better way of getting quality traffic to their sites, needless to explain why many SEO business become SMO (Social Media Optimization) specialists as well.

Marketers are on the way to use social media to give answers to users’ queries and are already trying to identify the influencers and most important channels in the “social sphere” to reach and influence end consumers. Furthermore, social interaction is starting to define the discovery of content and search engine results themselves.

Search engines, user queries and social media, it’s far from a finished story and in the end it's about social relevance and customer-centricity, as always.