In the last few years, search has changed quite a bit. What was once envisioned as a pure, “objective” and numerical evaluation of the best sites for a given query has recently become much more personalized and it is benefiting services other than Google.
Bing in particular has benefited greatly from the integration of social indicators and tools into their search results. In fact, since they first started using social tools from Facebook in 2011 and the release of the social sidebar in May of this year, Bing has gained market share, jumping to 8.5%, the highest for a Microsoft search engine in nearly a decade.
A lot of this has to do with a general decline in Yahoo!’s market share but quite a bit can also be traced to the integration of social search. Now more than ever, users are interested in seeing what their friends and family are searching for than what a faceless, nameless machine somewhere thinks is the best result.
How Social Search Works
Bing’s social search sidebar currently uses Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare data. Soon it will integrate other services including Quora and LinkedIn. The goal of this is to make it so that when someone searches for something, they will also see recent posts by friends related to that search. They can also ask questions about a given topic, share anything they find in Bing, and more. Beyond this, users can interact with business pages directly from the search results, while also posting to and interacting with their social media accounts.
Suddenly, search has become a very interactive process and people are getting excited about that. It’s a perfect combination of the online tools that most people are already using to make decisions.
What This Means for Small Businesses
If you own a small business in the age of increasing socialization of search and eCommerce, you need to take advantage of this development. While Bing’s marketshare is still small, it is growing rapidly and will only continue to do so with the soon to be released Windows 8 integrating so many Bing features into its core design. On top of that, you can expect Google to follow suit, using social tools such as Google+ and soon twitter to provide data to its users, albeit integrated with the main results and not separated.
As a small business owner trying to reach a rapidly growing number of social media savvy consumers, it is important for your social media marketing that you are present in those sites, with an active profile, page and feed that will make it possible to be seen by as large a percentage of your target audience as possible.
The future of search is undeniably tied in with the future of social media and it is a golden opportunity for those that are willing to take action to use it in their own business. This can be you and it can offer a very real advantage in almost any niche if you act quickly enough.
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