Position a Brand to claim their Social Search Real Estate

With the recent introduction to Google’s Social Search, brands will need to consider how they will get themselves into people’s social searches in good time before the Google social search becomes more mainstream.

Social search results are just another area of Google’s real estate to aim to be visible in for brands in addition to the standard results.

Google have already mentioned the social sites and resources they will use to identify who is within users social circle, so these exact places are where brands need to be. These include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Gmail Contacts
• Linkedin
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Google Reader
• FriendFeed
• MySpace

Being present in these online social arenas is not purely enough, but brands also need to be active here, using them as an everyday platform to promote their products and sharing their knowledge and expertise in their specialised areas.

Brands now need to have a voice and engage in social media to steal more Google real estate from beneath the feet of their competitors.

How will brands do this?

• Sign up to the social media accounts above
• Be active within these accounts
• Produce useful and interesting information
• Share information, knowledge as well as promoting products
• Aim to achieve as many contacts, friends and followers as possible through the various search spaces
• Invest in the brand voice
• Buy your own short URL

The type of content brands push through these social spaces should be tailored to attract as many contacts as possible, through being useful and interesting. With the highest number of contacts achieved as possible ensures a wider spread of visibility across more peoples SERPs.

Currently an opt in experiment, brands need to prepare for when this becomes mainstream and they are there ready to reap the benefits of their preparation as early on as possible.

It takes a big budget to participate and to be actively creating interesting & useful information and distributing according to a social media strategy, but with Google’s emphasis with ‘real time’ based results, it suggest that it will be more and more important to do so. Not only with twitter search results being included in the SERPs, but Google continues to prepare its rich application framework having a dramatic impact on real-time delivery, and potentially on the results page itself. Features such as the ’sort by date’ on Google blogs and ‘past 24 hours’, ‘past hour’ sorting as an option on the usual SERPs highlights the ever increasing importance and movement in the direction of having a continual voice to be published, increasing the chance to be found.

So my final take away is, social search needs to be invested in, a brand must have a regular voice published across a variety of social spaces, in order to succeed in future search strategies. Search & social are going to continue to become one and it is becoming ever more impossible to avoid engagement if you want a successful ecommerce strategy.