Category: SMO

Google Social Search

As I mentioned in my blog posts on Universal Search and Personalized Search, Google has been working on personalizing its search results utilizing social media and networking sites.

Google Social Search is meant to help searchers find the answers to their questions from their own social circle, a set of online friends and contacts they trust.  The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is more likely to be relevant to you.

Google uses various sources to identify your connections and the relevant social search results such as:

  • Direct connections (friends, family or coworkers) from your Google chat buddies and contacts from Gmail or Google Talk
  • Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile such as Twitter, FriendFeed and LinkedIn
  • Secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connections
  • Posts from your Google Reader subscriptions

Google keeps updating your social graph every time you make changes to your connections.


Google Social Search


The social results only show up on search engine results pages when you are logged in to your Google account.  Currently the social search results for a particular search term is being listed at the bottom of the results page under “Results from people in your social circle” heading.  The content shown within Social Search is publicly available on the web through Google and other search engines. Social Search simply uses content from your social circle to provide a more personalized search results.

Here are some of the types of content you might see:

  • Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
  • Web content, such as status updates, tweets, reviews, from social networks that your friends have listed in their Google profiles
  • Images posted publicly from your social circle on Picasa Web
  • Relevant articles from the RSS feeds you are subscribed to through Google Reader

The impact of social search on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be huge.  This means companies need to be more involved in attracting audience to their social profiles, get them subscribe to their RSS feeds or add them to their social bookmarking sites.

May 05, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Social Media Statistics – Socialnomics

There has been so many talks about social media and its impact on our society, businesses and marketing.  Here are some interesting stats on social media gathered by Erik Qualman the author of socialnomics.

Statistics presented in this video shows the amazing growth of social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.



Apr 08, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Twitter Ad Platform – Advertising on Twitter

Twitter seems to have finally found a way to monetize its social media platform. Following their deals with Google and Microsoft to provide them with real time search, there are rumours that they are ready to launch their advertising platform.

Google has been long a believer of ad relevancy and they pioneered the concept of Quality Score to promote and reward the most relevant ads. Twitter seems to follow the footsteps of Google.   According to Twitter`s head of product management, they are planning to make the ads relevant and useful so that they are seamless and users do not think of them as ads. 

We have to wait and see if they can succeed in incorporating the ads in the tweets without negatively impacting user experience.

Social Media Consultant

Feb 25, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

My Space in Real Time Search

As I mentioned in my previous article on real time search, there would be more real time news feed added to the sources of real time search.  Google just announced that starting this week, they added the content of My Space to real time search.  Now Google provides a pool of news, photos and blog posts published by MySpace users.   Google ranks the updates by relevancy and freshness.  

Social Media Consultant

Feb 23, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Real Time Search – Twitter on Search Engine Results Pages

With the ever growing popularity of twitter and its role in providing real time news that search engines were not traditionally able to provide, Google decided to strike a deal with twitter and include real time search results on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Real time search is the new addition to the Google Universal search which can potentially impact the face of web marketing and SEO. The real time results take up a significant portion of SERPs and can potentially push down your organic rankings below the first fold. This shows the importance of taking real time search seriously and join the micro blogging stream.

Currently real time searches seem to show mostly for hot trends and event related searches. However, we have to see how this will trend moving forward.

Even though twitter is the application that is most known for providing real time search, there are many other applications that provide micro blogging and RT search including but not limited to facebook, friendfeed, and Orkut which could join the fleet of real time search.

Social Media Consultant

Feb 22, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Google Profiles – People Search Improvement or Social Media Supremacy?

Google announced earlier that by enhancing Google Profiles they give people a greater control over their online profiles when somebody searches for their names on search engines. Google has already started showing Google profile results at the bottom of US search queries for people names.

Currently only 4 profiles are shown for name-query searches. These results provide snippets from user-generated Google profiles and link to the profile pages. From your Google profile you can link to your blog, LinkedIn profile, or Twitter account. Currently the links are not using nofollow. However, that might change as spammers might start building bogus accounts just for the sake of link building.

By providing links to your other sites from your Google Profile, you can help Google better build a Social Graph of you on the Internet. Google can potentially use this data to better understand the relationship between sites, decide how to flow PageRank, and further personalize search results.

As Google Profiles evolves, Google will add more functionality to the product which will provide Google with more insight into people`s social connections.

Even the Google Profiles are currently shown at the bottom of the SERPs, they could potentially rank on top of the search engine results pages which could potentially divert the traffic from major social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter providing Google with more real estate/platform for socio-demographic advertising.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SMO Expert

Apr 26, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

Google goes Social with Google Friend Connect

Earlier this week, Google announced a preview release of the newest addition to its product mix, Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling sites on the web to easily add social features to their websites.

By offering Friend Connect, which can be added to a web property by simply adding a snippet of code to the site, Google removes the technological barriers of offering social applications.

Google Social Networking - Friend Connect

Website owners can now attract more traffic to their sites and keep them engaged utilizing the social gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers. Some of the main gadgets offered are member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing.

So in a nutshell, Google Friend Connect helps website owners in three major ways:

Increase Traffic -Visitors get engaged and bring along their Internet friends and connections from social networks such as Facebook, orkut and MySpace.

Improve Engagement KPIs – People can get more involved by getting engaged with social features developed by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

Reduce Cost to Market – With no programming needed, the technological and financial barriers of adding social features to the sites are removed.

Friend Connect can also give Google more insight into the websites’ audiences by mapping a virtual representation of a social user on the web. This will eventually help Google provide more robust advertising through Google AdSense and Placement Targeting by providing demographic and interest segmentation.

This Google application has major implications on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) as it incorporates user generated content to the sites.

Here is a video that shows how Google Connect works:

Update: now also posted on Onedegree.

Nima Asrar Haghighi

May 15, 2008 | 0 comments | View Post

LinkedIn Launches Company Profile

Have you ever wondered how to use LinkedIn? Asked yourself whether you should join another Social Network? Is LinkedIn just another network marketing Website? Well, you are probably not alone! With so many social networking sites why should you bother joining LinkedIn?

LinkedIn can be used for many purposes. It can be a simple way to keep in touch with your contact in your industry, conduct network marketing, market yourself or your business, find leads, jobs, or talents for your corporation.

LinkedIn recently announced the launch of LinkedIn’s Company Profile.

LinkedIn Company Profile The company profile provides interesting information such as employees, new hires, recent promotions and related companies. This could be a great source of information for direct response marketers.

Mar 27, 2008 | 0 comments | View Post