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If you haven’t yet jumped on the Social Media Networking bandwagon … now is the time! Using your Twitter and Facebook Fan page to encourage your community to post more, will increase your “being found” by the search engines.

Breaking News

At the end of October Bing inked deals with both Twitter and Facebook to start serving up real-time updates from Twitter and Facebook in their search results. The very next day, Google inked a similar deal with Twitter as well.

Not too much will be different with the Twitter posts being added to the search engines. This is because Twitter posts have long already been publicly searchable. However, most of Facebook’s status updates and posts have previously been kept private. Now, these posts will potentially be searchable in Bing’s real-time feed. Facebook will create new tools that allow users to be able to control what information they want to have public.

Value of Real Time

These strategic agreements are important because they change the face of how search works. Now both Bing and Google will have the ability to offer “real-time, live results”. Stop and think about the impact for a moment. If you are a business who benefits from real-time interaction with your client base … you’ve just been offered something of tremendous value.

For example, say you are a food vendor who travels the streets of New York each day. Your business has probably expanded greatly since you started tweeting about your specials, as well as your location changes as you move throughout the city. Now, if you add the use of keywords to your tweets, your tweets will be picked up by the search engines, and your potential audience has increased from just your followers … to anyone who may be searching for the “next best spicy, grilled, lamb skewer for lunch.”

How it Works

You can choose to view both recent tweets and most relevant tweets about a specific search term. As well, Bing includes a tag cloud of the most popular terms being chatted about on Twitter.

If you are still a diehard Google fan (like June is) you may want to consider giving Bing (Wendy’s favorite search engine) a try. For the first time in history, Bing will now have data and content that Google does not possess.

And it works really fast too! Within two minutes of tweeting, my tweet was on Bing’s Twitter search results page.

Tips to Get Found in Real-time Searches

- Use your keywords in your Facebook posts and Tweets

o Include keyword phrases not only in the content of your posts, but also in titles. For example, if you are tweeting about a blog you just posted, be sure that your keywords are used in the blog title, blog content … and also in the tweet. Do the same when sharing links via Facebook.

- Post about timely events

o Figure out what events may be of interest to your Twitter followers, and fans on Facebook. Post about these events. When others are searching on these events, your posts will be included in the search results.

- Grow your followers on Twitter, and have a lot of fans on Facebook

o Simply put … the more followers and fans that you have … the more potential your posts will be shared and retweeted. The search engines recognize and consider how often posts are shared – not to mention there will be more impressions of your posts to be found in the real-time search.

- Promote conversations both on Twitter and on your Facebook Fan page

o Inspire conversations on Twitter, on Facebook and within your blog. Discuss topics that gain people’s interests. It’s a numbers game … the more posts – the greater the potential for those posts to be found in the search engines.

- Include calls to action in your posts and tweets

o Encourage your followers and fans to retweet and share your posts by including a call to action to do so. Consider adding Tweetmeme or Digg buttons to your articles. These buttons show how many times an article has been retweeted or shared; and serve to provide motivation for others to share the information with their networks as well.

Bing and Google’s decision to include real-time results has added a new dimension to the search engine results. In addition to the traditional “relevant” search results, they’ve added an element of “visibility.” It’s time to get people chatting and sharing about your content. Social media is the perfect medium to host these chats. Keep in mind, this won’t be a onetime effort … in order to stay visible you will need to encourage others to continue chatting about you and your posts.

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