Traditionally, online marketing has had a heavy emphasis on
search engine visibility, be that through organic search engine optimisation (SEO), paid
advertising or activities associated with SEO such as back link
strategies.
However, the recent changes to Google’s interface to put
‘universal search’ at our fingertips and bring us ‘real time’
information via Google Caffeine coupled with the exponential growth
of social media set down a new challenge to businesses in keeping
on top of their online marketing.
At this point, some of you will be thinking, “Oh no, not another
blog post telling me I should be ‘tweeting’ this and ‘liking’
that”, but before you click away, stop. This post is actually about
changes in user search habits.
Those of us who have been using the web for a long time have
probably schooled ourselves to use our search engine of choice to
look for information, products or services. However, many of us are
spending a lot of our online hours on other web properties such as
Youtube, Facebook or interacting via Twitter, and it has now been
proven that web users are using these tools as search platforms as
opposed to what we would conventionally call search engines.
Youtube is a solid example of where a social platform has become
a powerful marketing tool and now search platform; gone are the
days that Youtube is seen as the place to just see extreme sports
fanatics injuring themselves (although it still excels in this
area). Youtube is now packed with useful promotional and
value-added content which can draw you to in to commercial, branded
content. Want to know how to ice a cake, or change your iPod
battery? It’s there on Youtube. But from there I can easily
click-through to buy cake decoration materials or that money-saving
iPod battery kit.
Facebook users are now also following this trend, using the
Facebook search feature to look for products and services, when
they would previously have used something like Google. There is
already talk about social sites like Facebook taking search further
and using your Friends’ preferences to customise the results you
receive; effectively making them more like personal or tribal
recommendations.
Savvy businesses have already boarded these bandwagons for some
time, setting up Youtube channels, Facebook Fan pages or similar,
to support their existing websites. Going forward, the real winners
will be the businesses that understand how different segments of
their online audience access and interact with all this different
content, derive value from it, and then how it generates income for
their business.
Does a search in Google present your tweets and videos? Does
your audience search about how to do something with your product
via Youtube? Do they find you through a social networking site? If
you have not started broadening your online marketing tactics using
social tools, then now is the time to start evaluating the best
routes for you. If you have been doing this for a while, you now
need to evaluate whether your separate presences and aggregators
like Google are pulling your content together to best effect.