Social and search get a lot of headlines.
If you read the marketing news each day you’ll see headlines about Google+, Twitter, Facebook and every other new social site that comes along.
There seem to be new social sites each day and it’s difficult to keep up. How is a person supposed to know where to spend their time and just how do you put one of those little icons on your website?
It’s enough to drive you crazy.
And then there’s search.
Search is always in the marketing news as well. Each day there is an article out about how Google has changed their ranking algorithm. There is always a new best practice to follow to make sure your website is SEO friendly.
All the information surrounding social and search these days is enough to drive you to the medicine cabinet for a pack of aspirin.
The reality is that there is a sweet spot amongst the entire social and search noise out there.
Your need to be looking for the intersection of social, search and your website.
The Intersection of Social, Search and Your Website
Business is about profit.
The intersection of social, search and your website is where the profit is.
The key to utilizing all the great things social and search have to offer is to focus on how they interact with your business and your own website.
The Social Community
The world is made up of communities. People have congregated together for various reasons throughout time. People come together because they have similar interest, come from similar backgrounds or simply because they have the same aspirations.
If you look throughout the Internet you will find communities. Twitter is a community. Facebook is a community. Google+ is a community.
There are even smaller communities on each of these social sites. People have circles, groups, family and friends. You probably belong to multiple communities on the Internet and don’t even realize it.
Search is another community.
The Search Community
The largest search community uses Google. People use Google multiple times each day to find information on the Web. Up to this point, Google has provided the best search solution on the Web and as a result they have the biggest community of people using their service.
Other search engines exist because they have strong communities. I’m sure you can think of some folks that still use AOL for their search engine. There are tons of people that do this. AOL was their original online community. They trust it and will likely never leave unless something really powerful comes along.
The Intersection
Your business sits at the intersection of social and search on the Internet.
Both social and search work together to bring people together. Your business is a community. You serve a specific target audience. These folks look to your business for solutions to their problems.
It’s a community.
The goal you need to have with social and search is to bring people from other communities into your community. That’s the goal of social marketing and search marketing.
You are looking to add to your community of customers.
In order to do this there are a few things to focus on.
First, your website needs to be the central point of your efforts online. Spend the most time focusing on your website and making sure it’s optimized for capturing the attention of your target audience. You want to make sure your website is optimized for long-term customers relationships.
Provide content that your customers crave. Provide the experience your customers are looking for from a website. Work with your designer to really hone in on the three most important things your customer needs from your website and make your website really good at these three things. The rest is not as important.
Second, focus on making your website a place where folks in the search communities can find your content. This is search engine optimization. You want to do the things that allow your business to get found by the right people in the search community. This requires some keyword research and some understanding of how your customer searches for information online.
The search space is always changing, but the basic fact remains that search engines want to provide the best results for their customers. Focus on pleasing the customer and the rest will kind of fall into place with search.
Third, social is worth spending some time on, but don’t get so involved that it takes time away from focus on your own website. You want to make sure you are tending to your own paying community first.
The opportunity with social is that you have access to other communities that have people that might want to join your business community. You will have to bring something interesting and valuable to the attention of these folks.
Spend some time on Twitter or Facebook or wherever your target community is in the social world. Learn where your target audience is and learn what they are interest in. Provide a solution to their interest and you should be able to bring a few people from social sites to your site and into your community.
Summary
The intersection of social, search and your website is how you can find success online.
People tend to focus on social and search as separate things. The truth is that both are simply different communities of people on the Internet.
Today, social and search are becoming more intertwined with each other. Google is using more social signals in their results pages.
The key is to focus on your own website first. This is the channel you will have control over.
Google, Twitter and Facebook will always be changing and you won’t really have a chance to ever catch up. There will also be new sites that you’ll have to pay attention to.
To keep things constant it’s best to focus on how your site can interact with the appropriate search and social communities. You want your website to be a place where people from other communities on the Internet can come together and join your business community.
This leads to profit.
This leads to success at the intersection of social, search and your website.