By now you have been told countless times that you need to have your business on Facebook and Twitter. That’s where the people are. And maybe you have been told that pages and entries on social community sites have slowly crawled into listings on search engine results pages.
And maybe you have put off signing up for an account, or building a fan base, because you were ‘waiting to see what happens.’ Well, it just happened.
Both Google and Microsoft have recently come to agreements with Twitter, while Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook as well (you know Google can’t be too far behind there). These agreements will allow the search engines to integrate updates on the social media sites right onto the SERPs.
You can read more about these deals here.
So what does this mean for you? If you have been at the forefront of social media, and have accounts on Twitter and Facebook with lots of fans and followers, then you are in a good position to gain more exposure (and hopefully traffic) from these deals.
If you have accounts but have not kept them up to date, or if you don’t have any accounts at all, there’s still time but you have some work ahead of you. These deals are about real-time search, so it’s not necessarily what you have done in the past that will count (although having more fans and followers will probably be a plus, so you’ll want to increase those numbers). You can position yourself for real-time search by:
- Opening or updating your account
- Building up more fans or followers
- Starting conversations on current topics
- Respond to comments and other posts on topics you are an expert in
So what type of situation are you in? Are you ready to take advantage of real-time search?
