Last year, Google tied up Twitter to include tweets in its search results. In October this year, Microsoft announced a partnership with Facebook to allow users to bring their Facebook friends into the search experience. Facebook has already overtaken Google as the most visited site in United States. Twitter is increasingly being perceived as Google’s biggest threat in the search space.

Are we heading towards the ultimate convergence of search engines and social media? Can the so-called socialization of search results help your business? Is your business’ social media presence as important as your Page Rank? How do you leverage this lethal combo of search engines and social media for your business? Let’s find out.

Search is changing

There’s little doubt that search is changing, it’s becoming more social and more personal. It’s no longer the uncharismatic experience of typing in some text, looking at the results and being done with it. It’s now about how to transform the search results to be contextually related to a user’s social media presence. Whether its tweets those show up in Google Search results or the Liked Search results on Bing, search is getting personalized.

Tweets

Given Twitter’s mammoth and ever increasing user base, it’s unsurprising that all leading search engines including Google and Bing index tweets. For a business, this represents a fantastic opportunity to tweet their way to top search results on leading search engines. For consumers, it’s beneficial as they can directly impact their web search results.

What do you think of the revamped Twitter Business Center? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.

Facebook

Microsoft says that nearly 4% of its search queries are related to finding people. Therefore, it decided that integrating Facebook Profiles in search results is the best way to let users find the right person without a lot of effort. While Bing does the job of redirecting users to your business profile, it’s only half the battle won. Having an active and well maintained Facebook profile is important in order to make that redirection count.

Social Connectivity

From a business perspective, you must make a conscious effort to enhance your social connectivity by linking your site to engage with leading social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. For example, following a standard authentication scheme such as oAuth would allow customers to login using their Google, Facebook or Twitter credentials to your site. This would allow users to conduct Google searches, access their Facebook account and be logged in to your business website without having to explicitly logout.

It’s often said that human beings are social animals. All our needs have a social aspect attached to them and internet search is no exception to that rule.

What do you think about the socialization of search engine results? Do you think it offers a valuable business opportunity? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.