The Dojo

The integration of social media and search got a whole lot more interesting this week when Bing announced they were joining forces with Facebook to integrate ‘likes’ into their search results. The screenshot below shows an example of searching for a steakhouse in San Francisco, and how (when opted in to link your Facebook account with Bing) it displays your Facebook friends who have liked a particular restaurant.

Although the Australian market might not see this as a major change (with Bing only accounting for 4% of the search market) as Mark Zuckerberg (the big Z) said ‘this is just the beginning’ and social search is going to develop! I’d personally much rather my search results included things my trusted friends had experienced and enjoyed rather than a search algorithm spitting out results which (from a technical perspective) matches what I’m looking for.

So what does this mean going forward? With peer to peer recommendations slipping into the search realm, it will be more and more important to ensure you’re working to an overall digital strategy – where your social and search activity can better work together to deliver results. One thing that Facebook will need to be wary of however is companies using underhand tactics to get users to ‘like’ their product / brand just so they can appear in a preferential position in search results. This could really de-value the meaning of a friend ‘liking’ something. It will be interesting to see how they combat this, but even more interesting to see what Google’s next move will be.

Will the power of Facebook’s backing give Bing a better chance of gaining popularity in Australia? If our SUMO staff fish tank is anything to go by (where we had a fish named Google and one called Bing) it looks like Facebook did well to back the underdog…unfortunately Google passed away some time ago, and Bing is one of the few left standing (and continues to get bigger and fatter every day).

How do you think social search could affect and benefit your online activity? Will Bing gain in popularity after being first to market with social search?