3 Ways to Prepare Your Business for Social Search

It is quite easy to become overwhelmed with all the things "you should be doing" as part of your content marketing initiatives. There's your blog or blogs, your videos, your social media, your white papers, studies, search engine optimization, commenting on other blogs and industry forums. In most cases, no organization has the time or resources to do all of this, as well as experts say it should be done.

But there is one practical bit of advice that concerns only your blogging and your social media efforts, and it relates to Google, and the way Google is starting to alter its ranking algorithms to incorporate "social content."

"You may have already noticed that socially shared content is rising to the top of your Google search results," says Jeff Korhan. What that means, in part, is that Google is giving more weight to original content that social network users think is interesting enough to "retweet," "like" or otherwise share.

So, if you want to earn higher rankings with Google, you not only need to be creating high-quality content, but also actively encouraging its sharing on the social networks. To be sure, you can only "encourage," you cannot compel. So you need to write about things interesting enough, or provocative enough, or important enough, that other social network users will share it.

You will hear lots of people offer you lots of advice about how to create that sort of content. Personally, I don't think there is any "silver bullet." People share things that make them laugh, or think, that make them mad or happy, that are "news" items of interest or things that seem really "dumb." People share items of beauty or inspiration, and in almost all cases items that have some shared meaning.

Lots of people will share videos of cats doing funny, cat-like things. None of that is especially easy for brands selling consumer or business products to incorporate.

There is no one rule about how to create such copy. But the important bit of advice is that Google now believes items people share deserve a higher ranking than items people do not share. That means a bigger emphasis than ever not just on original content, but original content that is worth sharing.

3 Ways to Prepare Your Business for Social Search | Social Media Examiner