Social content has been creeping into search for a while. Google, Yahoo! and Bing signed a licensing agreement with Twitter and added real-time news and Tweets to their search results pages. The recent announcement of Twitter’s promoted tweets just makes this a closer bond.
“Smart online marketers have also been using social search for other reasons including competitive research and opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends,” says Lee Odden on the TopRank Marketing blog
Social search makes it possible to find content in status updates, real-time search, generating, labeling, and finding user-generated content, ‘long-tail’ events and interests, finding vs re-finding, and trend identification.
A study from GroupM Search, M80, and ComScore found that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media content are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms. What’s more, consumers exposed to social media are more likely to perform deeper searches, going further down the purchase funnel and completing more purchases.
Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a purchase, and, overall, brands reported a 50% lift in click-through rates from consumers exposed to both social media and paid search, according to the study.
What these statistics show is that stronger brand awareness through social media helps drive paid search effectiveness in three ways:
- Target audiences are more likely to search (more impressions on your ads)
- Target audiences are more likely to click (more clicks on those impressions)
- Because of higher clickthrough rates, ads are placed higher on page (higher quality score)
Tips from Mashable on how to make the best of both worlds:
Make your social campaigns search-friendly
Experiment with keyword advertising on social media sites
Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns
