While search engines still dominate the content discovery landscape on the web, social media is gaining a significant share of the noise. According to a post on MarketingPilgrim, social media is the fastest growing destination for users to find new information. The reason being ‘too much information’ in search engines.
Too much information?
Well, too much irrelevant information to dig through. A search engine gives you the top 10 listings for your search. You need to take this as accurate, or keep searching through page after page of results. On the other hand, social media gives you opinions and reviews of real people who you are at least somewhat familiar with. Users in social media trust their friends / followers to deliver interesting results that relates more to what they are interested in. Many view social media as a filtering tool that will provide ONLY the info they may be most interested in. Portals are also driving content discovery as well since we see them in a more customizable form now. iGoogle, AOL, and Yahoo dashboards are all customizable.
What does this mean?
Well for any business it means that putting all of your eggs in the SEO basket may not be the best thing to do anymore. Of course search is still important, but you need to understand what is being said about your business online. As social networks continue to grow, discovery of new information, purchasing decisions, and product questions are all moving towards the social space. People go to social media because they trust what friends and peers are saying. If you’re not engaging potential customers in social media and listening to what they’re saying about you, you’re missing a big part of the conversation.
