Bing enters Social Media/Search Marketing Arena

The phrase “second place is first loser” never seemed truer than when applied to Bing, the search engine that’s got all the other search engines beat – except Google. Some statistics don’t even have Bing in the number two spot, but trailing just behind Yahoo!. At any rate, one thing is clear: Bing has fallen far, far behind in the race to control search engine traffic.
Microsoft, however, is not the type of company that gives up easily. Their latest scheme to boost Bing is a new feature that links together search engine result pages with Facebook pages.

How It Works
The first thing users do is connect Bing to their Facebook ID by going to Bing.com/linkedpages and logging in, giving Bing permission to access and post to Facebook. Once this is done, the user runs any search they like, from a person’s name to their own websites. When the results show up, they can click “Link to me” to link that result to their Facebook profile. Alternatively, they can link one of their friends to the results.
Search Marketing Implications
For businesses working on their social media marketing strategies, linking their websites and related products to their Facebook profile offers quite a few possibilities. Not only does it immediately put a human face on the website, it also makes it easier for friends, colleagues, and potential customers to hook into one’s social media presence. From the point of search engine optimization, Bing’s new feature could potentially enhance both search results and social media results simultaneously.
Will It Matter?
As with everything Bing does to try to catch up to Google – in this case, Google+ — one must wonder if their new Linked Pages feature is once again too little, too late. Although Bing’s new emphasis on social media marketing indicates that Microsoft is realizing how important social media has become, it also indicates that Microsoft, once again, has fallen behind.
One major difference, however, is that Google invented an entirely new social network in G+, a potentially risky proposition, whereas by tying itself to the most popular existing network, Bing is leveraging the power of Facebook. Nevertheless, don’t expect their innovation to unseat the king of search any time soon.


blog.webprovise.com