All posts by Marcus Taylor

Marcus Taylor is head of social media at SEOptimise and has an interest in social networking psychology. Marcus has written a book on the topic and has spoken at leading industry events including SMX and SMM as well as writing for many blogs including State of Search, The Wall, and Social Media Club. You can also find Marcus on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

You’ve probably heard by now that Google announced the roll out of social search yesterday, dubbed ‘Search, Plus Your World’. There has been vast speculation about Google’s motives, with the most credible of which suggesting it’s to do with…

  • Gaining market share in the social network market.
  • To improve the quality of search results through increased trustworthiness and personalisation (research by Nielsen suggests that 42% of people trust search results, but 90% trust recommendations from friends).


In reality, all of the above will contribute to why Google’s launched social search. However, in this post I don’t want to talk about the politics – I’ll leave that to the tabloids. I want to talk about how this is inevitably going to impact our jobs as SEOs.

What’s Google’s Game Plan With ‘Search, Plus Your World’?

To really understand the impact, we need to realise what Google’s game plan with social search is. I’ll point out now that I’m not an expert or an insider in any way, but this is where I think Google might be going with Search, Plus Your World and Google+.

  1. Google is creating a ‘map’ similar to Facebook’s Open Graph that connects people with their content, websites and readers to understand who produces what content, what happens with that content and how people react. This is where the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags play a big part (I wrote a post about this on Social Media Explorer).
  2. Google will then learn contextual information about readers and content producers taken from their Google account activity (e.g. what YouTube videos they watch and searches they make when signed in) and use this data in combination with existing ranking factors and G+ sharing data to better place content in search results.

If I’m right, then I can see a shift in prominence in the SERPs to content producers with an active audience, but only in niches where communities exist.

For example, in the social media niche, sites such as Mashable, Social Media Explorer and Social Media Today will receive extra prominence in SERPs because they have an audience containing not only the ‘influencers’ but also the remaining mass of social media enthusiasts who share their content. The social media sites that don’t have an active audience or community will lose prominence.

In niches where there is no community (think ‘septic tank maintenance’ or ‘zinc coating of ships’) social search won’t change anything, at all. That is unless a company creates an active audience from scratch – for example, how Compare The Market arguably created an active audience in the insurance niche using Aleksandr Orlov.

As I never wrote a ‘2012 predictions’ post, here are five things I think this shift towards social search will make us think about more as online marketers.

A few days ago I was looking through my mentions on Twitter and I noticed a rough correlation between the strength of relationship I have with a person and the frequency/consistency of their interaction with me. I also noticed that strength of relationship was in rough correlation to the medium(s) that I’ve communicated with them on. In other words, the followers who I’d only spoke to over e-mail or Twitter weren’t interacting with me as often as those who I’d met in real life.

It got me thinking:  if the depth of a relationship impacts frequency of interaction online, and the medium in which I communicate with people on impacts the depth of relationship, is it possible to increase the loyalty of your followers by meeting them face-to-face?

How real are you to your Twitter followers? Image Credit: Aristocrats-hat

Meeting Face-to-Face Increases the Likelihood of Social Interaction, IF You Have Shared Interests.

When you meet someone face-to-face, you become more likely to then interact with them online, providing that you have shared interests and consider them to add value to your newsfeed. Having met someone in real life is a ‘filter’ that some people (subconsciously) use to prioritise who they interact with socially.

This post originally appeared on State of Search.

Given that engaging on the social web can benefit your brand’s marketing, recruitment, PR, sales, customer service, and other departments, the question of ‘who should manage and represent your brand on the social web?’ will inevitably arise. The answer is, all of them.

I believe that all employees with a passion and interest in representing the brand should be encouraged to. Utilising the expertise and networks of the people within your business is incredibly valuable when it comes to engaging on the social web and is not something that can be easily outsourced.

It sounds obvious, but many businesses give a variety of social media responsibilities to the PR team, the tech team or external agencies, which is fine, but social media is not about using tools, it’s about extending your current business activities into the landscape of social media to identify opportunities. It should therefore ideally be the responsibility of the people within the business, assisted by those with experience in recommending tools and strategies to increase effectiveness and productivity.

Launching a social network is to some extent a bit of a chicken and egg scenario these days, as you need people to encourage the businesses to get involved, but businesses can also attract more people.

This morning Google launched the metaphorical egg in their social network chicken and egg scenario – they launched ‘Google+ Pages’ as a means for businesses to join Google+. The question now is:  if businesses join Google+, will it encourage more people to join and utilise the network?

Those of you who follow my tweets will probably know that I’ve recently launched a book called Get Noticed, which is a guide that explores the processes and techniques that successful networkers use to get noticed.

In the course of writing the book I carried out a lot of research around how people meet and what it takes to develop a strong relationship, which has had a tremendous impact on my understanding of successful blogger outreach. On Wednesday morning I sent out 100 e-mails to YouTube video bloggers and so far I’ve received 77 replies (not bad when most sources suggest anywhere from 3% to 25% is a good response rate for an outreach campaign).

In this post I want to share a few tips and tricks I’ve learnt about outreach from researching, writing and marketing Get Noticed to help you improve the success of your outreach campaigns.

Image Credit: ekai

I’m going to assume that you’ve already done some blogger outreach and know the basics like finding the right bloggers to target, personalising your e-mails, sending them at the right time and including obvious call-to-actions. This one’s for the pros

Over the past few weeks I’ve been surprised to see some really great posts struggle to gain any momentum, as well as seeing some really crap posts do surprisingly well in terms of being shared by a large audience. My suspicion is that in both cases it had a lot to do with the design of the sites that the blog posts were hosted on (here’s a very good post on how design impacts shareability). I thought it would be interesting to put this question to the community to see what people thought were the most important factors in assisting a blog post to go viral and to see how important design really is. I’d love to hear as many people’s opinions as possible on the topic, especially around design impacting shareability. What do you think?

For those of you who missed the Livestream of yesterday’s F8 Facebook Conference, CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced some major changes to the future of Facebook, which in a nutshell is to try and realise his vision of making the whole web social. Within Facebook, the focus is shifting from ‘what you say’ to ‘what you do’. Here are some of the major changes announced:

1. Facebook Profiles Are Replaced With ‘Timelines’
Facebook claimed that Facebook is no longer going to show ’15 minutes of your story’ but instead a timeline of your life. Here is a snapshot of the new Facebook Timeline design.

I’m always looking for ways to improve our social media audits at SEOptimise to make them more insightful and actionable. While there is no perfect way to approach writing a social media audit, here are some ideas on what I think are important things to consider when writing a social media audit.

What’s the point of a social media audit?

Several months ago I ran some tests on the impact of Facebook Likes on Google Rankings. After receiving several e-mails and tweets asking whether Google +1s have any impact on rankings, I decided to run some similar experiments in order to give a more conclusive answer.

Note:  on September 19th I’m going to be presenting a few insights on social SEO at Social Media Marketing and Monitoring 2011 London. If you’re interested in learning more about Google +1s and how to harness the benefits of social signals, come and visit! I’ve included discount codes and links to the conference tickets at the bottom of this post.

I began my Google +1 experiment by taking 35 URLs across six unique domains with various traits:  a mixture of indexed/unindexed, had links/no links, home pages/deep pages, had social signals/no social signals etc. All of these domains had experienced no significant changes in rankings for a while, i.e. the main keywords that I was tracking had not moved for a fair amount of time and there was very little other activity being done on them.

In the latest video blog from SEOptimise, Marcus Taylor and Dan Bianchini take us through how to use social media to create topical content for SEO benefit. They cover how to find the latest trends, how to write the content and finally how to promote it to get publicity and links.

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