Usable Clicks

What Facebook Instant Personalization on Microsoft Bing Search Means for Brands

A big announcement from Facebook + Microsoft today: Facebook’s social graph will now be incorporated into Microsoft’s Bing search results. What this means is when you search for anything using Bing, articles your friends have ‘liked’ anywhere on the web will start to gain priority in the search results. This is the deepest integration of Facebook’s personal social graph into search content ever, and it’s only happening on Bing.

What does this mean for brands:

1. This gives Bing a valuable layer of data that Google doesn’t have, and it sounds like Facebook won’t allow Google to have it any time soon. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder) said on stage today “the thing that makes Microsoft such a great partner for us is they’re the underdog in search…We’re interested in working with companies that are really scrappy, that are underdogs… they have an incentive go to all out and innovate”. Bing is already growing, and a full alliance with Facebook could help them steal market share from Google.
   
2. As more and more social data gets layered into search results, it underscores the importance for brands to have a successful social strategy. Brands need to be talked about, and their content needs to be shared. Content generated and endorsed by people’s personal connections is going to be increasingly prioritized in search results. That means social is increasingly a search engine optimization strategy.

This should be going live soon on Bing, and it will happen automatically for you unless you’ve opted out of instant personalization on Facebook. Read more about the Facebook + Microsoft Bing partnership here.

=====

Additional reading on the power of social in search:

• The Emergence of the Facebook Search Engine + Facebook SEO Needs
• The Importance of Social Media in Search Engine Optimization
• 9 Reasons Social Media Marketing is Important For the Bottom Line