The benefits of using social search

With the ever-escalating popularity of social sites, with millions of people recommending, opining, sharing, liking, tweeting or pining, to name a few, it’s no wonder social has come to search or let’s say search has become social.

What is Social Search?

Social search is a type of web search that shows results related partly or wholly on online relationships between people, or social networks, typically displaying related things of your friends (your friends’ blogs, images, links, comments, photos, recommendations, tweets, likes, pins and shares) along with ordinary search engine results.

Social search is based on online social relationships among people in social networks, particularly their social activities in relation to it being useful to the person initiating the search query and its queries.

For example in Google Social Search, Google is now showing social search results mixed throughout your results based on their relevance, displaying results from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created; and showing notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites.

So if you’re thinking about looking for result-oriented SEO services and your colleague Jen has written a blog post about the best SEO service, then Google will bump up that post with a note and a picture. Or if you’re looking for a video of Matt Cutts on YouTube and your friend Tom tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Tom.

Importance of Social Search

User-wise, social search makes it easy for searches to quickly in the shortest possible way to find results or contents that are more personalized and relevant to your query as well as more safe, secure and trustworthy as the sources given with social search are generally from your connections, links and contacts.Business-wise, social search is very beneficial. This is according to 2 recent studies that highlighted the importance of search in the purchase process and thereby also provided indirect support for social search. The studies by GroupM called it “The Virtuous Circle” revealed that:58% of potential purchasers started with search while only 24% started with the company site51% of the searches converted compared to 48% for search and social combined in the purchase process86% of shoppers use generic search terms before the shopping trip90% of searchers clicked on the generic results when compared with branded search

With these results, these suggest businesses should SSO (Social Search Optimization) optimize their online business and profiles in social networks as search is still key in the purchase process and Google is now showing search results which your friends have also shared on Twitter or have +1′d, et al, influencing result rankings. 

Social Search enables you to do micro-searching, allowing you to use social media in order to connect and engage with people based on keyword, location, and niche, thus increasing your audience.Easily do Local Search. With Social Search, you can easily geo-target your query, restricting your searches to only the most relevant distances and topics for you. Social Search will show your connections, friends, circles, followers from your social sites. This is great if you are holding a local event and want to get locals involved or if you have a service or product that you need local people to avail or buy.

Sources: http://www.articlesbase.com/