Our coverage of SES London 2014 continues! On day 3 of the event Nick Beck, Managing Director at Tug and Jonathan Beeston, Director of New Product Innovation at Adobe, spoke about the importance of an integrated social and search strategy.
Social search is the search right now – which is happening in real time. Google is trying to get into the real time search with showing hashtags in SERPs, but really, it is still about Twitter and (maybe soon) Facebook search. Different search engines such as Amazon are looking to speed up their index in order to deliver fresher results to their consumers.
When users search for an event or product such #olympics or #porsche Google is showing dynamic Google+ results – which is their attempt to get into real time search. Currently Twitter is being used for immediate results such as disaster management..
This means that Social Search is on Twitter. Facebook and Google are both trying to break into this area by working and launching new developments such as Facebook’s Graph Search, but neither is close to what Twitter is offering.
Mobile Strategy
One of the challenges users are currently facing is the increasing size of advertising space in comparison to the organic results. Both Google and Facebook have significantly decreased the amount of space for organic results last year. This means that the marketers’ efforts in securing clients and content organic listings are being diminished and for mobile, the organic space is even smaller.
- Both Facebook and Twitter rely heavily on access from mobile devices:
- 76.8% of Facebook’s monthly active users access the site on mobile
- This figure is 76.3% for Twitter.
If a company wants to succeed in social media, their images and content need to be tailored for the mobile. A mobile strategy is just as important as a social strategy.
Key points for reporting and tracking an integrated strategy:
- Unify social attribution (tag the links etc)
- Have one main dashboard to evaluate a content piece
- Have one place that pulls in different data
- Make it visual not numbers game full of tables – visual is the key to buy in and to understanding
- Monitor trends and social listen – don’t just track what you’re tapping into right now – track the market place too and interest
Keys to success:
- Evolve your organisation
- Figure out the company’s objectives for social
- Common tracking, measurement, reporting
- Common KPIs – all KPIs should funnel up to the right business goal
- Optimise > attribute > budget maximise
A good use of social media is to hijack timely searches on big announcements. Messages spread fast in social. It is important to become part of the conversations by talking about your brand alongside the event that is happening in real time.
For example, if there is a new airport built and your client made the material for the ceiling, promote this. While the news of the airport is out there, try and own some of this real estate.
It is absolutely crucial these days to have a budget for testing! This will give you an immediate upper edge on competitors.
Summary:
In order to break through in the current landscape companies need a content strategy that’s tied into paid and social strategy and which is also optimised for mobile. Writing and sourcing good quality content will also become harder and with that, it will be increasingly difficult for content to go viral.
Krystian Szastok is a Senior SEO Manager at a top UK digital agency: Jellyfish. Krystian is passionate about everything digital, keeping fit, newest mobile phones (and tech generally) and constant self-development.