Last week I attended Wappow’s Social Day. Rand Fishkin gave an insightful two-hour presentation and has posted his full presentation on Slideshare: “Why Search Needs Social.” His presentation delved into how the most popular search engines, Google and Bing, are integrating social signals into their algorithms and what these actual social annotations look like on the search engine results page (SERP); the impact social media optimization can have on your rankings; and, recommendations for useful social networking, social marketing tools.
During the event, I jotted down some takeaways that I thought readers might find intriguing:
Analysis & Insights:
- SEOmoz ran a data analysis on the relationship between number of tweets, Shares, Likes and Facebook comments to rank (similar to Optify’s own research on the convergence of social media and SEO). Just based on raw data, the direct correlation between social shares and ranking on the search engines was very high (i.e. More tweets = higher rank). When controlled for links, however, the correlation between tweets and rank dropped, yet the correlation between Facebook (specifically, number of Shares) and rank didn’t drop too dramatically. Check out our blog post for Optify’s research findings on the relationship between Facebook Likes and Google rank and the graph below:
- Rand also shared data, which evaluated the relationship between the length of a tweet to its click through rate (CTR). For the most part, there was a trend suggesting shorter tweets yield a higher CTR. He mentioned that this is a good practice to keep in mind for other channels too, like with Facebook status updates.
Recommended Social Tools
- followerwonk.com: Indexes Twitter bios, allows you to filter and search by number of followers, good tool for finding influencers and follow recommendations
- trunk.ly: Indexes tweets, highly searchable, great for tracking down a link you’ve tweeted without having to scroll through your whole Twitter timeline
- namesake.com: A professional networking community that helps people locate and match opportunities in real time.
- summify.com: Aggregates content from your social news feeds, like Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader and delivers them by web and/or email.
Interested in attending Wappow’s next Social Day? Check out their Social Day schedule.
