Chapter 18

Social Networking — Driven by Drivel

In This Chapter

Understanding social networking

Avoiding the hype

Reaping the SEO benefits of social networking

Is there a place for social networking in a book on SEO? Well, to some degree, yes. But I don’t go into great detail about social networking, because many of the benefits (when there are benefits) are not related to SEO. Social networking can be used in various ways to market a product or service, or an associated Web site, but that’s not all about SEO.

Just What Is Social Networking?

Before I go any further, I should answer a basic question: What is social networking?

A social-networking service is one that helps people communicate together and share information quickly. Consider for a moment a basic, informational Web site. Clients come to the site, read about the products or services being promoted by the site, perhaps take some kind of action — make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or whatever — and go away. The communication flow is all one-way.

Of course, you could add two-way communication to a Web site — a chat system that allows customers to chat online with customer-service staff, for instance. But it’s still fairly limited communication.

A social-networking service, though, provides multichannel communications. Members of the service’s “community” can communicate with any other member who wants to communicate. Facebook, the world’s largest social- networking service, had 750 million active members by June 2011. If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third most populous nation. Any of those 750 million members can communicate with any other member, assuming the other member is interested in communicating.

Social networking is more than just “communicating”, though. Social network sites often encourage people to set up their own minisites or profiles, on which they can post information about themselves, such as photos and messages. They can search for and connect with other members with similar interests, or members they know out in the real world.

The social-networking landscape is large and amorphous. You can certainly argue that discussion groups are part of social networking, and there are many tens of thousands of discussion groups. Blogging is also often considered a part of social networking. I think one important characteristic of social-networking sites is that they make publishing easy for people with no technical skills. All of a sudden, through the power of social networking, virtually anyone can be an online publisher, rather than merely a consumer of online information.

Social networking is a relatively new term; even most of today’s Facebook members probably didn’t know the term until relatively recently. (Facebook didn’t open to the public until September 2006.) But social networking is actually an old concept, going back to the late 1970s or early 1980s. Online services such as CompuServe might be thought of as proto-social-networking services, allowing one-to-one communication between members, group communications in forums, the sharing of digital materials (text documents, images, software), and so on.

Today, though, what are the really important social-networking sites? The four most important are definitely Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

By the end of 2011 Twitter had 300 million individual users tweeting (that is, for those of you who have been held hostage in a cave somewhere, sending short Twitter messages) around 300 million times a day. (Is Twitter really a social-networking service? Yes, because it allows multichannel communication. However, the majority of Twitter users never send a message; they use it to receive information, so for most users, it’s really more of a message-delivery service than a social network.)

Then there’s Google+. This site, as you see in this chapter, is very important from an SEO perspective. Launched in 2011, it’s a slick new Facebook competitor that has suffered from Facebook burnout (who needs another social network when you’re already wasting too much time on the ones you have?!) and benefited from the power of brand Google. Within six months, Google+ had grown to 90 million members, though I’m sure not all are active. Still, Google+ is reportedly growing extremely fast, with some observers claiming it will reach 400 million members by the end of 2012. But from an SEO perspective, it’s not just numbers that count. Google+ can be, as you see later in this chapter, an important factor in SEO regardless of the size.

Many other social-networking services exist, of course. Here are a few of the biggies in North America:

MySpace: Almost 33 million users, and dropping fast (it had 70 million users the last time I revised this book); it used to be the world’s #1 social-networking site. Many teenagers use MySpace until they decide they’re too embarrassed to hang out with the kids and switch to Facebook.

LinkedIn: A business-networking site (based on the “six degrees of separation” concept), with around 125 million users and growing.

Pinterest: Over 10.4 million active members and growing rapidly among female users. Pinterest lets you organize and share beautiful things (primarily images) you find on the web.

Flickr: A photo-sharing network with tens of millions of users.

Orkut: Not so popular in North America, actually, but I need to mention this because it’s owned by Google and has perhaps 100 million members (mostly in India and Brazil). It’s really a Brazilian social-networking site now.

There are many, many social-networking sites, including “social-bookmarking” sites (such as Delicious and Stumbleupon), sites related to particular interests, sites designed to help people find old friends (Classmates.com, for instance), and so on.

Beware the Social-Networking Hype

Social networking, properly used, can most definitely be a very valuable marketing tool. Having said that, I want to warn you that there’s a lot of social-networking hype out there, and it’s easy to get swept up into social networking only to find you have wasted a lot of time and money.

First, consider that social networking will work better for some companies than others. For instance, take Twitter. This service can be a great way to communicate with people for some businesses. ShopAtHome.com has around 190,000 followers of its Twitter feed. This company provides shopping discounts, so a Twitter feed is a natural fit for it; people like deals! Groupon, a “deal of the day” service, has dozens of separate feeds, one for each city it works in; the GrouponChicago feed currently has almost 30,000 followers.

But what about a company that provides air-conditioning installation service? How many people want to hear from them every day? I’m not saying that it’s not possible for such a company to benefit from a Twitter feed, but I am saying that the chance it will succeed is much lower.

Also, social-networking campaigns need to be well thought out and well managed. Plenty of companies are happy to take your money for setting up some kind of generic, “me, too” social-networking system that hasn’t a hope in Hades of working.

Here’s an example. Way back when — say, five or six years ago — I would hear from new clients who said things like, “My friend Joe [my nephew/the last SEO firm I worked with/and so on] told me that if you want to do business online, you must have a MySpace account.” I even heard this from real estate agents. (My answer? “Oh, are you selling houses to 13-year-olds”?) It was complete nonsense, of course, but the hype was strong, too powerful for many businesses to resist, and led to millions of dollars of waste.

So before you let someone talk you into a social-networking campaign, make sure you understand exactly how it would work. Why will people join your group or subscribe to your Twitter feed? What do you expect them to do? How will you communicate with them? How will all this benefit you?

Before anyone accuses me of being “against” social networking, let me just reiterate. Social networking can work well, at least for the right companies that have all their ducks in a row. However, I’m pretty certain that most dollars spent on social networking are wasted.

The Drivel Factor

If you don’t know this already, you need to learn quickly. Most — the vast majority — of social networking is drivel. (Drivel: senseless talk; nonsense; saliva, drool; to talk nonsense; to talk senselessly.)

Do I have to prove this, or can you take it as a given? Okay, here’s an example. Pear Analytics did a study of randomly selected public Twitter messages and found that

40.6 percent were “pointless babble.”

37.6 percent were “conversational messages.”

8.7 percent were “pass along” messages, those useful enough to have been forwarded by another Twitter user.

3.6 percent were information about news from the mainstream media.

5.9 percent were company self-promotion.

3.9 percent were spam.

What is “pointless babble”? You know the type of message: I want to eat cereal, but I’m out of milk!!! or Where has that postman got to?! — the sort of thing that burns up perfectly good electrons for no good reason.

Taken together, then, the pointless babble, conversational messages, and spam comes to around 82 percent of all messages.

The challenge for the marketer is to somehow cut through the drivel and find the value.

The SEO Benefits of Social Networking

Because this is a book on SEO, I want to get back to that subject: How can social networking help your SEO efforts? There are essentially four ways:

Link benefit: Links from social-networking sites can, in some cases, help boost your pages in the search engines.

Search engine real estate: As the search engines index some social-networking pages (and Tweets), being in social-networking sites gives you another online location, another possibility for being found by the search engines.

The social networking sites are search engines: What’s a search engine? A site where people search. And people search on social- networking sites.

The Google+ factor: You may not be surprised to discover that Google is integrating information it gleans from Google+ into the search results.

Getting links through social- networking sites

You find out about the value of links in Chapters 15 through 17. Well, Google has indexed almost 8 billion Facebook pages, and many of those pages contain links to the page owners’ Web sites.

Here’s the problem, though. These links are nofollow links (see Chapter 15), so, in theory at least, they have no link value. Twitter also uses nofollow links, as does MySpace and many other social-networking sites.

So, do those links have any value? In Chapter 15, I told you no. In this chapter, I’m suggesting a theory. I don’t know whether this is true, but . . . what if the search engines do sometimes read nofollow links? After all, what is the point of nofollow links? The original purpose was to stop people from spamming blog comments by telling the search engines not to follow the links and thus removing an incentive for blog comments. But the purpose of nofollow was not really to stop search engines indexing links — that was just a mechanism to discourage spam.

Now, imagine that you are a search engine programmer. You want as much information as you can get to help you rank pages. Aren’t all those links on social-networking sites useful? After all, Google was based on the concept of examining links to learn about referenced sites. In the pre-social-networking days, Google recruited a relatively small number of site owners to tell them which sites were important.

Now, with the barriers to entry being much, much lower for social networking and social bookmarking — it’s much easier to set up a Facebook, or MySpace, or Digg account than to build a Web site — Google has a much larger army of site reviewers to help it figure out how to rank Web sites. There are quite simply many more social-networking accounts than there are conventional Web sites.

So you, the search engine programmer, know that all this great information is out there to . . . but wait! They are nofollow links! Do you decide not to use the links?

To make nofollow links accomplish their original purpose, search engines don’t have to ignore the links; it’s good enough if people think the search engines ignore the links. But perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they do read those links to extract this vast amount of useful information.

That’s just a theory; again, I don’t know whether it’s true. I can tell you that under the commonly accepted nofollow theory, many social-networking links have no SEO value. On the other hand, if my unproven theory is correct, these links do have SEO value. (And remember, links have value in their own right; sometimes people click them!)

How do you generate links from social-networking sites? By engaging your community. If you have a strong social-networking community, you can use various techniques to encourage members to create links to your Web sites, on their own Web sites, their blogs, their social-networking profiles, and so on.

Grabbing search engine real estate

Another way that social networking can help you — perhaps — is to grab real estate in the search results — that is, when someone searches for your keywords, your site comes up in the search results and some of your social-networking profiles come up in the results.

In practice, grabbing real estate is harder than it seems, because social-­networking pages themselves are not given much weight by the search engines. How do I know that? Because they don’t often come up in the search results.

You can find significant exceptions, though. For instance, search Bing for the name of a band or musician, and you’ll often find their Myspace page appear in the results. When searching for individual’s names LinkedIn.com pages often come up pretty high in the results.

Google has also experimented with incorporating Twitter tweets into search results; you may have seen the small scrolling boxes in the search results, sometimes carrying news links but also sometimes carrying tweets. This is called a real-time search and is usually placed into the results with a Latest results link above the scroll box. However, I think it would be exceedingly hard to target real-time search positions because the results are so fleeting, and, in any case, Google shelved real-time search (though it could return at some point).

Still, if you want to grab real estate through social networking, the way to do it is to create various social-networking pages and then ensure they have lots of links pointing to them, containing the correct keywords, of course (see Chapters 15 to 17).

The social-networking sites are search engines

The major social networking sites are also major search engines, with billions of searches a month; in fact Facebook alone gets more searches each month than Ask.com.

So, social-networking sites are search engines. Now, it’s true that many of these searches are for people, but many will be for interests and products, too. So another SEO reason for a social-networking strategy is that you have a chance of coming up in the many social-networking site searches.

The Google+ Factor

Google+ is Google’s new social-networking site. After failing with Orkut (most Americans have never even heard of Orkut), Google started over and tried again. This time, Google seems to be really getting somewhere, with 90 million members in the first few months.

One reason for its success — and one reason why it’s so important to SEO — is that Google is working to integrate Google+ pages into the search results themselves.

Have you seen those little pictures next to Google’s search results, for instance (see Figure 18-1)? If you search for a subject that is heavily blogged about by technically savvy people, you’re likely to see small author photos to the left of many results, along with a couple of links: by Charles Arthur and More by Charles Arthur, for instance. Where do these come from?

They’re being pulled from Google+. In effect, you have to set up a Google+ account (if you don’t have one, go to www.google.com/+) and then link from that account to the Web pages where your work appears, and vice versa.

You can find details on Google’s Author Information in Search Results page, of course (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986), but essentially there are a couple of ways to do this. (Those of you who want to be really sure Google picks up your data may want to use both of them.)

First, you can make sure that your name and e-mail address appear next to every article you publish online. Then you just need to go to your Google+ account and make sure that it contains the exact same information (your name is spelled the same and the same e-mail address is in your Contact Info). You also need to add a profile photo to Google+, of course.

You can also add a link to all your pages to your Google+ profile, either a normal link (including the rel=”author” attribute in the <a> tag), or perhaps using the Google+ icon. Then you need to link from your Google+ profile, using the Contributor To option on the right side of the About page in your profile.

Finally, consider the picture. Different pictures will have different click-through rates; a murky hard-to-see picture may, for instance, discourage users from clicking, while a clearer, attractive picture might get more click-throughs in the search results. In fact, attractive, female authors are likely to get more click-throughs than unattractive male authors. It’s a whole new world of search-engine optimization!

Search Plus Your World

Early in 2012, Google also introduced something it is calling Search Plus Your World. Essentially, when you search for something while logged into Google, and you have a Google+ account, you may see results from your Google+ friends at the top of the search-results page. The more connected you are, the more results you’re likely to see. In some cases, you may see results embedded into the regular results, showing your friend’s profile picture, and Google may also recommend results from other, nonfriend, Google+ users.

Exactly how Search Plus Your World will pan out is unclear, as it’s such a new thing; Google is still experimenting. What does it mean from a search-engine optimization standpoint? It certainly ups the ante, making a Google+ strategy much more important, which, of course, is just what Google wants. The deep integration between Google+ and Google search is something that simply won’t happen between Facebook and Google.

In particular, Google+ is going to become very important to local service businesses. It remains to be seen whether Google+ can come to rival Facebook, but if it does, then businesses will want to encourage customers to recommend them and talk about them on Google+.

Google +1

Another feature you should be aware of, and that could become very important to local businesses, is the +1 button. When you point at a search result while logged into your Google+ account, a small gray +1 appears next to the result, allowing you to recommend that search result (see Figure 18-2). This provides another way for Google to gather ranking information on Web sites; the more often the +1 button associated with the link to your site is clicked, the more likely your site is to rank high. You can also put this button on your own site, with the hope that visitors will click it (see www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button).

Of course, Facebook has had the Like button for some time, which you can place on your site to encourage visitors to recommend your site to other Facebook users (see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/ reference/plugins/like). So the Google +1 button is similar, but with an added benefit; it provides popularity information directly to the world’s most important search engine.

Social Networking — a Book in Itself

Social-networking marketing is a big and complicated subject that deserves a book of its own. I outline in general terms how social networking can be used to help your site from an SEO perspective, but social networking is a form of marketing by itself, independent of any SEO benefits you may derive from it. So I leave it there and move on, in Chapter 19, to a related subject: using video for SEO purposes.

However, to find out more about using social networking for your business, see Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond (published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) and The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media, by Paul Chaney (also published by Wiley).