Social media has created a medium for opinions to be shared on a global level that cannot be ignored when evaluating businesses, brands and services. The organic rankings and results also need to factor the buzz created by the social media. Social media links also contribute to being indexed faster and search engines are now paying attention to the social media link on your website. However, the impact of social links on the search engine rankings is yet to be studied. Google and Bing confirm the inclusion of social network to obtain a search result but judge the opinions based on the authority of the author and the quality of the post. The connection between search results and social media buzz are likely to affect Search Engine Marketing, Pay Per Click services and campaign management. Regular search results are affected by the buzz created by social media, especially for news items. Authority metrics are used to determine the valid posts that need to be taken into account. The number of posts and the authority of people posting are both considered to derive accurate search results.
Though personal walls are not considered an important source of information, shared links from fan pages are taken into account. Author quality is measured with the help of social metrics used by Google and Bing. Google’s Author Authority metric and Bing’s Social Authority metric is used to measure social media. Google evaluates the authority of the profile to give weights to links while Bing compares Twitter and Facebook shares. Another important aspect in evaluating social media metrics is that it is not the only factor that is considered to rank a page. The impact of social buzz can be minimal given that a lot of spam has to be filtered out through numerous calculations. The key factors used to judge social media buzz are: authority of each author, trust and weight of the links, popularity of the page and the possible theme of the discussion.
There are also a list of factors that are used to evaluate the trust and authority of the social media links. An example of such evaluations include: Total number of fans or followers on fan pages or Twitter, number of tweets and re-tweets on Twitter, number of shares and likes on Facebook, the authority of people who follow you or share your content, average quality of shared links and the source of links. The quality of information and links are evaluated through different screens, such as number of followers that access quality content and number of real people reading it as compared to web crawlers or bots. SEOs need to ensure that relationship building through social media networks must be real and one which can sustain continued communication. Another important factor is the authority of the fans and the authority of their friends or followers because spamming media profiles with promotional material or posting updates will alienate both users and search engine users alike. Basic factors such as quality content and traditional SEO practices cannot be abandoned in the search of top of the heap visibility. Social media is here to stay and will have to be incorporated to develop the optimal search engine marketing strategy.