Social Media Conversation At The Heart Of Emotional Search And Social

The online experience no longer revolves around simply finding a website every single time. Shorter attention scanning has led to a new complexity of search and social user behaviour, which is influenced more by making an emotional connection and responding to peer group trust amongst a multichannel of possibilities.

It would be fair to say that today’s online marketing process is increasingly bound up in the processes of social media networking and the shared consumer experience. Savvy businesses are focused on knowing why their prospective audiences share content, comment and engage.

Site owners can no longer rely on simple one-way marketing strategies to sustain brand identity awareness, belief and loyalty. With an overload of often contradictory information available from a dizzying array of channels, target audiences are simply doing their own word of mouth marketing and creating social link building connections through their own user-generated content choices. Hence, the instant success of a site like Pinterest or Instagram.

Content sharing has become important social currency for the new social business model of the web. At the core of social commerce is relevancy to real world needs and motivations as expressed by human voices not brand slogans. For eCommerce to move forward, new ways of seeing and listening must be adopted, which also takes into account the context – by channel and platform – of how their audiences want to consume and share content at any given point in the interaction process.

Site owners must evolve to become a genuine source of trusted influence and a credible site authority. It’s a key determining factor for both human audiences and search algorithms on the social web, where traditional marketing is giving way to the ‘managed’ conversations of Twitter and social network relationships of Facebook or LinkedIn.

Keeping follower audiences and customer prospects engaged by content and conversation is the pre-eminent challenge facing eCommerce, which can sometimes sit uneasily within an established company persona and their daily business routines. It can be no easy task to be suddenly asked to identify all known customer touchpoints, account for previous interactions and get up close in the social spaces.

‘Cutting through the noise’ or ‘creating an edge’ has always been a mainstay of marketing. Grabbing eyeballs away from the rapid scan in social business relies on presenting a human face with human values at the heart of the endeavour.

It’s a social signal that can cut through the noise and your web presence is dependent on all the social edge you can get!