When Two Worlds Collide: Social Media Marketing & SEO

Last week, I wrote an opinion-ish conjectury type post about the impending Google-Twitter-Bing Deal , where Twitter was purported to be in talks to license their full feed of Tweets to Google and Bing for real time display of all of our Tweets in their search engine result pages.

Well, that has happened. Only, it's even a bigger deal than that. Facebook has joined the party and made it a foursome.

Here's the news:

• Bing licenses Twitter feeds and launches Twitter search . (Microsoft)
  
• Bing licenses Facebook feeds . (ReadWriteWeb)
• Google launches Twitter search . (Google)
  
• Twitter Founder (and former HubSpot TV guest) , Ev Williams announcements of the Google Deal and Bing Deals . (Twitter)
• Google launches social search in labs. Marshal Kirkpatrick provides details and analysis of the deal making . (ReadWriteWeb)
  

As a marketer, what do these developments mean for you?

In short, the worlds of social media and search have collided. I still stand by all of my previous prognostications . But, in summary:

1. Search traffic to social media sites will make Twitter and Facebook even more ubiquitous. Expect social media to be as indispensible as the phone. It already is for many. With a flood of traffic from SEs, it'll be impossible for web users to avoid social networks. 
2. Search will eventually become personalized to each user based on their social media activity and friends' activities. All of the basics of SEO will still be important, but your social media presence will be a critical part of securing your search traffic.
   

I whipped up a few slides to explain how social media marketing and seo are colliding into one discipline. 

Social media will most likely become just as important as content creation and inbound links for priming the SEO pump.

And expect social network analysis to be a core part of search engine ranking algorithms in the near future:  

Here's the full slide deck:

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