Social Media Marketing: Google’s Fight

September was a whirlwind month for social media marketing news, particularly for social media leaders Twitter and Facebook. While those sites are optimizing their functionality to ring in a larger user base, it seems that search engine king Google has been left out of the picture, perhaps for a reason. Google rose to fame as a “search engine,” not a “social media marketing platform.”

However, there is an almost implausible search threat being posed to Google by social media sites. Twitter and Facebook have been great for social media marketing because of their real-time search capabilities, which Google lacks.

Earlier in May, Google premiered a search feature that allowed users to refine their search results by time and content type. However, filtering results by time only resulted in “fresh” results within a day’s time. It still couldn’t compare to social media sites’ search features.

Today, Google announced that they will be rolling out improvements to their search options that should be available to all users later today. The new search features will include various features that filter according to time, past sites visited, Google-only filters, among others. The updated time filter will search within an hour’s time to provide more relevant and current information, as opposed to their usual high ranking content formula.

Earlier this week, they also rolled out a new feature, “hot trends,” to append to search results to match social media marketing platform Twitter’s “trending topics” feature. They also rolled out SideWiki to make web browsing more social, as well as Places Pages to compete against social media site Yelp.com. Additionally, we reported yesterday about Facebook’s Friend Connect feature. Google has a social media optimization tool of the same name. However, because Facebook had greater distribution potential, Google’s Friend Connect didn’t catch on.

It will be interesting to see what Google plans to implement in the future to become part of the social media marketing experience. At this point, they are not innovating as much as imitating.

Written by Daisy K.