In the world of search engine optimization, 2012 has been full of talk about the blurring line between search and social. With Big Brother Google unleashing Panda and Penguin to keep black hats in check, the industry has been forced to take a more holistic approach to SEO. Google’s acolytes are now paying attention to other players in the space, and Facebook is suddenly alone in the spotlight.

A Facebook social search engine, which is becoming more of a reality every day, would completely change the way we approach search. As an SEO specialist at The Search Agency, I’ve been closely monitoring this paradigm shift away from indexing billions of pages.

Search and social are merging, and it is clear that Google and Facebook both hope to claim this new territory. Google is actively attempting to take more of the social market with Google+, most recently adding Google+ Local Pages, which forces businesses to create a Google+ business page in order to have control of the Google reviews landing page. It remains to be seen if Google will be able to eat into the social space and win over businesses that have concentrated their social efforts on Facebook.

For its part, Facebook has been very quiet about its foray into search. Rightfully so, because users may not be receptive to the idea of a Facebook search engine. But Facebook isn’t trying to replicate Google’s search engine indexing. Since the company can’t compete with the sheer volume of Google’s more than 8.6 billion indexed pages, it needs to change the paradigm and use its existing social network to approach search with a leaner, smarter eye. If Facebook can develop a social search product that curates good results based on users’ profiles and social graphs, it might be able to compete in the search business.

The following are some of Facebook’s potential advantages in building search functionality.

1. Facebook crawls may be more efficient than Google

Facebook doesn’t actually need to crawl the Web like Google. Instead, it can crawl just the pages that are liked or linked to. Facebook doesn’t have to scan lines and lines of code either. It can crawl just enough to create a snippet and thumbnail, or skip directly to the Open Graph tags.

2. The breadth of Facebook user profiles

Facebook could implement a weighted algorithm that returns curated search results based on a user’s interests, likes, event attendance, in-app activities and social graph interactions. This is all self-identified data given to Facebook willingly by users and is perhaps the most accurate and in-depth user data available.

Meanwhile, Google has to guess almost everything about a user based on a comparatively meager amount of information, including IP location, previous searches, and maybe a Google+ profile. Google is very good at figuring out user data and sometimes user intent, but not always. However, in Googlelandia all searches are weighted nearly equally, because they mostly rely on the actual search term.

3. The Facebook “like”

As Facebook looks to curate search results, a Facebook like can be treated as a vote for a page. By prioritizing all the liked pages connected to a user’s social graph, page load time can be minimized and the most popular pages can be cached to load quicker through selecting which pages are most likely to be clicked. This is very similar to the Google +1 feature, but a Facebook like is a more trustworthy vote and potentially drives a higher click-through rate, because your Google contacts are more removed than your Facebook friends.

4. In-app activities and “Action Links” within the Open Graph

When a Facebook user listens to a song on Spotify or reads an article on the Washington Post’s social reader, this is a strong signal of intent that can affect how Facebook curates its search results. Publishing in-app actions to a user’s friends becomes a valuable vote for that app, song, article, product page and brand timeline. All in-app activity collects valuable user data that can help curate search results.

On Facebook, users generally identify the type of content they share, and this will be even more prominent with the newly introduced Action Links which allows businesses to add additional “action verbs” into the Open Graph structure. The objective is to allow businesses to personalize company pages and product pages. It can drive engagement with this customization and allow for purchases directly from Facebook, such as with an “add to bag” Action Link.

We’re deep in the age of the social Web, and Facebook has been extremely careful to avoid questions about developing a search product and it has tried to drop the word “engine” to avoid any direct competition with Google. Facebook is not trying to replicate search engine indexing, and it has no desire to compete directly with Google’s search engine — only Bing has stepped up to that challenge, and a partnership already exists between Bing and Facebook to power a social complement to Bing’s search results. This partnership further proves that Facebook has no interest in developing an actual search engine, but rather wants to leverage its existing resources and social network to develop a new social search paradigm. It still remains to be seen who will dominate the intersection of social and search. But Facebook is extremely well positioned to edge out Google — if they can figure out how to move users away from the existing indexed search paradigm.

Jessica Lee is a SEO specialist with The Search Agency, the largest independent U.S. search marketing agency with expertise in search, display and social media. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user FindYourSearch.

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When it comes to the social networking crowd, sex apparently sells. Victoria’s Secret ended June as the top retailer on Facebook with more than 14.3 million fans, according to the latest data from e-commerce software provider ChannelAdvisor. ChannelAdvisor’s Facebook Commerce Index (FBCI) is a monthly report that tracks and analyzes how the top retailers and brands are doing on Facebook by fan count. Adidas Originals and Victoria’s Secret Pink take the second and third spots on the FBCI, respectively.

But it isn’t just photos of supermodels in lingerie that have helped Victoria’s Secret snag two of the top three spots on the Facebook fan rankings. According to ChannelAdvisor, Victoria’s Secret has adopted a savvy social networking strategy that incentivizes users to click the “Like” button by offering rewards such as discounts and first access to new collections. The company has also customized its Facebook landing page to show links to Victoria’s Secret social media sites and mobile apps, rather than the typical Facebook Wall.

But Walmart is gaining on the competition: The retailer gained 13 percent more fans during the month of June to move from sixth place to fourth place on the FBCI. This may be because Walmart has upped its social media strategy by adding giveaways and contests to its Facebook site, going beyond “the typical wall posts [and] surveys,” ChannelAdvisor reports. For instance, this month Walmart is conducting a promotion for Disney Pixar’s Cars 2 movie by giving away free movie tickets and other prizes via its Facebook page hourly.

Overall, it seems that some of the most successful brick-and-mortar retailers have officially come around to realizing that social media has a rightful place in their marketing strategies. Here are a couple key graphs from ChannelAdvisor’s Facebook Commerce Index for June 2011:

Feature image courtesy of Facebook.com/VictoriasSecret

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As best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her recent book Bright-Sided, that positive thinking is “a water carrier for the business world, excusing its excesses and masking its follies.” I am a cynical optimist and that is why I often wonder, what are likes really good for? In a recent piece, Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, pointed out that Facebook Likes tend to boost traffic to various websites. He cites Facebook data as saying that by implementing Facebook Likes, denim maker Levi’s say they received a 40-times increase in traffic.

But did those likes increase Levi’s sales or their market share? No. The San Francisco-based denim maker is still sucking wind when it comes to growing denim sales, likes notwithstanding. Confounded, I started looking for answers, partly by reaching out to my virtual Twitter friends. And that led me to Scot Wingo, CEO of Channel Advisor, a web commerce services provider based in Research Park, North Carolina.

Money and Likes

When I asked Scot if there was a direct correlation between Facebook Likes and actual sales, he candidly admitted that at present there isn’t much correlation. But he, like Facebook itself, is betting that the Facebook Likes will become an increasingly powerful signal in transactions on the web.

“In 12 months it (Facebook) could become a legitimate monetization option,” Wingo predicts, and in the process it could end up becoming the disruptor of web commerce. It would then become a big thorn in the side of Google, which currently derives nearly 40 percent of its revenues from e-commerce-related activities. He is predicting that we are going to see “like” influenced web commerce during the holiday season this year.

Wingo says that, today, merchants big and small are interested first in Facebook, then in mobile and then in local when it comes to their e-commerce strategies. With nearly 700 million members, Facebook has the momentum to become a big driver of sales for these merchants. And the Like button is at the heart of it.

Not all likes are created equal

On Facebook, there are likes that allow you to become fans of a brand or like a photo or an article. Of course, when you like a brand, you also open yourself to becoming the “sponsored ad” that is sent to your friends on Facebook. A lot of retailers are doing that. There is another aspect to that: when you like a brand (aka you become its fan), you are essentially giving the brand permission to message you. Think of it as a way for retailers to use Facebook to send you coupons and deals based on what you like.  While these deals are not personalized, they are personal since you are a fan of that brand.

And then there are the off -Facebook Like buttons — about two million of them spread across the web. There are two kinds of off-Facebook Like buttons (though they look the same) – ones thatfolks like GigaOM use on their website and the special Open Graph protocol-based Like buttons that are for brands, retail outlets, musicians, anyone who wants to create a direct relationship with an actual person. A Facebook spokesperson described these Like buttons as Facebook away from Facebook.

So for example, if you like a band it will publish that information to your newsfeed. So far only entertainment sites and a handful of news outlets are using these special kind of like buttons. However, they are the ones that can create a new dynamic for commerce. Facebook’s Open Graph API has had some enhancements and in theory it allows retailers to have richer metadata such as product types and SKUs attached to their Likes.

In theory, if you liked a pair of jeans on the web, a retailer can target you on Facebook with a discount to get your business. Remember the “personal data” resides with Facebook and not with the retailers, so these interactions can only happen on Facebook – for now. Similarly, the metadata attached to “likes” can help deliver search results that are optimized around one’s preferences, as long as you are logged in using Facebook Connect.

Google doesn’t like the Likes

And that is one of the things spooking Google, which launched the “+1” feature almost as a defensive countermeasure, though it’s not clear if that is going to have any impact anytime soon. Google’s latest revision of the +1 button will allow publishers to embed the button into their web properties.

In a blog post, Google writes, “Today, we’re releasing +1 buttons to the whole web. As a result, you might start seeing +1 appear on sites large and small across the Internet.”

To the naked eye, it seems all about bringing more traffic to web publishers, but in reality it is all about business, as Frank Watson had pointed out on Search Engine Watch earlier this year. As Google itself notes, “With a single click you can recommend that raincoat, news article or favorite sci-fi movie to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time your connections search, they could see your +1’s directly in their search results, helping them find your recommendations when they’re most useful.”

The Like button, when put in the context of web-commerce, is as powerful an indicator of intent as search is, Wingo said. “I would say because it is more personal and social, it is one step closer to the end customer, and as a retailer, that is something that is very appealing.” No wonder Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt is kicking himself for blowing it when it comes to social!

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Likester taps into Facebook’s public data to make a global database of who likes what, where they are from, and when they like it. When a user signs into Likester and accepts the privacy conditions, they give the company permission to access information about what they and their friends have “Liked” on Facebook. Likester then aggregates that data in a digestible format that can be viewed by topic or geography. I’ve embedded two screenshots of Likester at the bottom of the post.

Fueled in part by its American Idol analysis, Likester is growing at a rapid clip, with “thousands and thousands” of users having joined in the past three weeks, founder Kevin McCarthy told me. The site is only as good as the amount of data it can aggregate, so Likester hopes to get better with time. Clicking around on the site, I was really impressed with the amount of data it already has, and especially the easy-to-read format in which it’s presented.

Likester was built by a five-person team led by McCarthy, who designed and built most of the site’s front end. The company started in late 2010 as an app dubbed “What Your Friends Like.” After the demand for that app grew, McCarthy and his team decided to “double down” and work to build a larger site that could analyze and aggregate Facebook’s Like data in a deeper way. “On Facebook today, when people Like stuff, it goes by quickly, and you never see it in an aggregated format,” McCarthy said. “We set out to create geographical and temporal analysis of that information. There are not a lot of developers out there focusing on deep integrations with Facebook.”

Likester currently generates revenue through ads, but McCarthy tells me the company may soon get rid of advertising altogether to focus on building a “freemium” business model. Under this model, the basic version of the site would continue to be free, and Likester would offer a premium version of the site with more data analysis tools to professional users like brands, marketers, and researchers.

Likester is currently entirely self-funded by McCarthy, a serial entrepreneur who previously built and sold a search marketing startup to ChannelAdvisor in 2005. Likester is currently in talks with potential investors as it looks to further scale out the business, McCarthy said. “We’re self-sustainable as a small team at least for another year, but opportunities are coming for us on a daily basis,” he said. “We’ve only just scratched the surface on the amount of data people have expressed their opinions of.”

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