Report: Social Media Infiltrating Search Marketing

SEO, keywords, cost-per-click… anyone in the search marketing sphere will be familiar with this terminology. This once exclusive domain – consisting of optimizing search results for specific keywords related to particular businesses through Google, Yahoo and other search engines – is now being infiltrated by social media. According to the 6th annual “State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010,” conducted by the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, we might be seeing terms like social search and social graph enter the search marketing jargon and completely change the way corporate websites attract and retain viewers.

1,471 respondents commented on the importance of social media in search marketing this past January and February, 2010. Those surveyed consisted of B2B and B2C companies of all shapes and sizes. Despite the vastly different corporate profiles among the group, one trend emerged rapidly from the data: social media matters in search marketing. 52% of companies and 74% of agencies included in this survey responded that social media has a huge or moderate impact on their search marketing.

Examining the budgets of companies often leads to an understanding of where their real priorities are. This survey revealed that 59% of those surveyed were planning on increasing their social media budget this year, while 37% indicated that it would stay the same. This means that we can expect to see a significant increase in social media search marketing over the next year, with companies reaching out to people’s social graphs in order to attract them to their websites rather than, or in tandem with, using purely algorithmic search marketing.

Among those B2B companies surveyed, Twitter stood out as the preferred social network for marketing purposes: 72% used Twitter compared to 64% using Facebook, 62% using LinkedIn and 52% using YouTube. Twitter makes sense as the top social network for business marketing. It is text-based, and fits nicely with the methods of search marketing that are already well established. Facebook and LinkedIn allow for multimedia to be more readily brought into the conversation, and YouTube’s video format is one of the newest entries into the complex search algorithm created by Google. This, along with the successful track record of companies like Spark360, indicates that video might be on the rise in terms of search and marketing.

Search marketing is important for business to reach clients and customers, and to make interested parties aware of their services. However, social media changes things up: rather than simply targeting keywords and trying to snare clients who are looking for something your business offers, you must now incorporate relevant social data about that client, including accessing and understanding their online social connections. Receiving product reviews via Facebook messages, hearing about a limited-time offer through a colleague’s re-tweet, or learning about a new service from a wacky viral video are all ways that users are engaging with businesses online, and they all depend on the business’s successful use of social media.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.