Our suspicions have been confirmed: Social Media buzz does affect the organic rankings of Google and Bing. Below Google gives clues for us to speculate on what are the key factors that are used to affect the authority and the trust of the social media links. Please note that the below factors are not officially confirmed by Search Engines:
- The number of Followers on Twitter
- The number of Fans on Facebook Fan Pages
- The number of tweets & RTs on Twitter
- The number of Shares & Likes on Facebook
- The ratio between Followers-Friends
- The authority of the people that follow you
- The authority of the people that share your content
- The average quality of your previously shared messages
- The number of unique mentions/shares (similar to Link Diversity)
- The rate and the source of links that you share
Search engines are expected to use Social Media buzz to determine:
- How fresh a particular post is
- If an page is still useful/valid/up-to-date
- What are the current trends
- Which terms are related to the particular post. They are likely to use the keywords and the hash tags that can be found in the content of the shared messages.
- The theme or the topic of expertise of each Author. Users that tend to post high quality messages about a particular topic are likely to be considered as experts. Bing already uses this feature by recommending users on Twitter.
Source: webseoanalytics.com, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land
