Many digital professional feel that the brands are now forced to dance to the tune of social media because of its significant and growing influence on the natural search results. Brands that take part in online conversation that concern them will be repaid in better natural search rankings for their sites and social media pages. But those who ignore them may find their search results dominated by negative comments and unanswered issues.
‘At a corporate level, social media ha a drastic impact on our search’, says Greg Assesmat-Tessandier, Bacardi’s global head of digital. ‘If you are running a campaign to maximise the efficiency of your search engine optimization, and something comes up in the social media space that isn’t the message you want to put out, it can have a massive consequences. It can be an opportunity or a problem.’
Already, the standard SEO brief has become multipurpose, trouble shooting job, dragging customer services and public relations in to the frame. Now that Google and Microsoft have concluded deals to include real time content from Twitter in their search results, social networking has an even greater potential to throw a spanner in the works of carefully laid search plans.
However, this also presents more possibilities for clever marketers as the brands begin to appreciate the possible halo effect of positive social media engagement on their search profile and their image in general.