Search and Social I’m craving steak, find it for me

I’m craving steak. What was that new restaurant?

I know I saw it the other day in my stream, not sure what platform – I think it was my friend Patricia Wall who mentioned it.  Wait a minute – maybe it was one of her friends?  I can’t remember.  That’s okay, because the search engines will find it for me.  Back in 2011 I predicted that social platform interactions would start having an impact on search results.  By 2012, Google had started proving my prediction.

[Tweet “These days, everything  happening on social affects search results”]

Now I make a point of responding to posts that have something interesting, like a restaurant or funky shoes, as my response will be the trigger for the search engines to include related information the next time I’m asking them to trigger my memory of a restaurant.  This works for my friends too, as my social network activity affects their search results just like their social activity can affect mine.

Plussing or commenting on any post is like building a scrapbook online.

I don’t have to look back through the scrapbook of my platforms for my comments, because Search is integrating many social interactions for me.  In fact, if I’m clever with my search phrase, it could bring up the actual post that mentioned the restaurant to remind me of the name.

I hope the restaurant in question has claimed their free Google Places page so that they’re easy to find.  For restaurants and any bricks and mortar businesses, a Google Places page will impact any local search.  If they don’t have a site, maybe they’ve taken advantage of a directory site like Yelp or Urbanspoon to have some web presence.

I hope you’re updating all your profile information regularly as that’s how your clients find you.

When you’re active on your social platforms, commenting on and sharing  those interesting posts, you become easier to find.  When you take advantage of social platforms directly linked to Google, like Google+ and YouTube, you are really loading the search in your favour.  The advent of Google’s semantic search makes your efforts in social have an important impact on your ability to be found in search.

Besides making great friends and discovering cool stuff online, building your online scrapbook of interests is part of building your presence as an interesting person that your potential clients can come to know, like and trust.  Plus on!