Photo courtesy of Bing

Bing has had a deal in place for the last week to integrate Facebook status updates and tweets from Twitter into Real Time Search Results.  Google announced their deal with Twitter last week as well, also announcing that Facebook updates would also be made available soon.  However, today Google released their deal with Facebook and revealed that only status updates from Facebook pages would be available in their search results (ie: not personal pages, but company pages).  Bing will also have the personal status updates, not just public Facebook pages.  The reason?  Facebook says, “The terms of the Google deal were specifically related to public updates on Pages. But our conversations with both companies are continually evolving regarding ways in which we might work together in the future.”

Sources: Search Engine Land, Bing.com

Photo courtesy of Search Engine Land

Yahoo! announced that they were adding tweets to News Results, but now are putting them in organic search results as well!  The tweets might be minutes or hours old, depending on which tweets the algorithm finds the most relevant to the search terms.  This becomes important for companies with social media accounts to maintain their feeds, since this traffic from Twitter could drive more traffic to your site.  Google announced that it was instituting this same practice just this week with its Real Time Search Results.  Both search engines are attempting to provide customers with up-to-the-minute results while also maintaining relevancy.

Photo courtesy of greatdance.com

In case you were wondering, Social Media is taking over the world.  Facebook statistics are astounding!  Over 350 million users with 50% of them logging on daily.  What does this have to do with marketing? Well, the fact is simple.  If you create a Facebook Fan Page, you are sure to promote your product or company in an organic way (through people “liking it” and sharing with others).  Facebook is comprised of the younger and older, friends, siblings, parents, grandparents, colleagues, students, and the list goes on!  Essentially, it reaches everyone.  With people actively using it every day, it is easy to see why it would be a great marketing tool.  Visiture can help you create profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or help you optimize the ones you already have.  Because these sites have so many pages pointing to them and are being updated so frequently, they are often at the top of the natural results on Google and Yahoo!.

The contest was four hours long for one day only.  ModCloth would post a hint on their Twitter account once an hour.  Then you had to get on their site and find a picture of their dog.  The dog had a bubble above his head that was saying something and you had to Tweet: @ModCloth, “Whatever Winston (their dog) had said.”  They did this four times.  Everyone who tweeted what Winston said once, was entered into a drawing for a $100 gift certificate.  If you tweeted the answer all four times, then you were entered to win the $1,000 gift certificate. 

The scavenger hunt not only got people on their site in large quantities, but it got them to look through many of their specific items in search for the dog’s picture.  It also gained them a lot of exposure through their following on Twitter so that they could promote future sales and items on ModCloth.com.  I thought it to be an ingenious marketing idea.  And from the looks of things, it seems that they are doing better than ever (if an item is sold out, it remains on the page with red bold type indicating that it is, in fact, sold out).

Modcloth's Twitter page

There are several ways to do this with a less-intricate plan.  You could host a giveaway by getting people to re-tweet your company’s message, make your company a trending topic or by instructing them to follow you (you could determine the winner randomly once you reach a certain number).  It is all simple and a great way to get the younger generation interested in your company, site or product.