The necessity to change and adapt to current trends in the way people communicate and pass on their opinions of products and services is as important to giants like Google as it is to mom and pop sandwich shops. Google has been the dominant player in search engines and, as a result, took home the largest slice of the advertising dollar pie. This is being challenged, however, as Facebook received more hits from U.S. visitors last year than Google. Besides Facebook, other social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Quora and numerous others are all competing for visitor loyalty, not to mention advertising revenue.In order to compete and maintain relevance, Google may have no choice but to shift their creative powers toward balancing traditional search methods with significant growth in social integration. Many believe that this may well be the motivator behind replacing outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt with co-founder Larry Page. That entrepreneurial spirit could be key to navigating this course adjustment.
As business owners, it will be important to not only monitor these shifts toward social media in the major players like Google but, more importantly, to understand how sites like Google, Facebook and even some you may not be familiar with, such as Quora, are being used by your customers to share their experiences. As significant as word-of-mouth endorsements or criticism were to business in the past, today it has taken on viral proportions and any business that underestimates that does so at their peril. While Google has had some limited success with incorporating social aspects into their famous algorithm, many internet watchers feel it’s too soon to tell just how successful they will be. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to create a search engine that would return the most accurate search results possible and due to their focus on the ever-evolving and more complex algorithm that weeds out the junk and the blatantly self-serving, they have been enormously successful. However, users have shifted toward demanding more social interaction and are looking to sites like Facebook to provide a much larger share of their internet experience.Conclusion:
Long gone are the days when a business owner could hope to be successful by putting an ad in the yellow pages and mailing out a coupon once in a while. Even that most sacred of endorsement, word-of-mouth advertising, has morphed into something nearly unrecognizable. While nostalgia for the way things used to be might seem understandable, any serious tendency to continue doing things the old way is practically guaranteed to undermine the growth of your business.With Google taking an interest to include social media into search results, business owners should communicate promotions, specials and other content associated with their business throughout their social media assets as they will eventually be served up in search engine results.
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