Google Social Search is now live!
Google Social Search has been in Google Labs since October last year, it was an opt-in product of Labs. Now Google has begun the roll-out to signed in users within google.com. Social Search Beta will be available to all English speaking users using google.com within a few days.
Before you get confused, Google Social Search is NOT Real Time Search. It retrieves information from your social circles and displays the result near the bottom of the page. Google’s algorithm is intelligent enough to link up different profiles within my social circles and display their website/s within my serps (search engine result pages).
If I use a keyword in my Google search that is related to friends within my social profile it will display something like this (I used “travel south africa” in this case):
As you can see from the above image I am linked to SmartGuide and Africa Bespoke via Twitter.
Social Search Backend
In Google’s Social Search new dashboard there are two features:
- a list of everyone in your social circle and how you’re connected to them
- a list of all of your own content that might appear in other users’ social search results
This is a great tool to analyse your social network at a glance but one limiting factor is that you cannot organise your social network. There is no option of deleting someone off your social profile or if there has been cases where one person creates two profiles and you only want to be connected to one. So it would be nice to be able to combine the two.
When using Social Search, you’ll be able to access this dashboard by clicking either of the “My social circle” or “My social content” links that appear next to the heading that tells you that you’re seeing Social Search results.
Social Search Optimisation
When Google launches something as influential as this, as a marketer you need to pay careful attention. There are ways you can improve your social search penetration;
- Add other social networking sites that you use onto your Google Profile.
- Make connections with more friends via Gmail and Google Chat (which gets top-billing on the dashboard’s list of contacts in your circle).
By doing this it’s only common sense that your website will pop up on more searches. To create a following on Facebook and Twitter become a thought leader in your industry so people will automatically gravitate to you. As your reputation increases more and more people will want to follow you thus increasing your exposure on Google’s Social Search.