I’m a big believer in taking a holistic approach to how you present online. That said, today social media scored a major validation as the two big players in search, Google and Bing, have both confirmed that social media has an impact on how search engine results are displayed.

To read a detailed review you can check out this post by Social Times.

Google revealed that it uses Author Authority to gage the SEO ranking of sites, using Twitter users’ “author quality” to make the calculation. And Bing has a similar measurement called “Social Authority”.

Social Times

The implications for this are pretty interesting, particularly if you are operating in a relatively niche field, or perhaps a field with only a limited amount social documentation (blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter Account, and I’m assuming, especially YouTube videos) – there is a great opportunity for your business to get an added lift by becoming a social media authority on your particular space – this has now been confirmed by Google and Bing. Translation: Getting social with your business now has an additional benefit.

I suspect as time continues to march on social media will have an even bigger impact on search results, and at a certain point some of the big social media players will integrate much more heavily with both Google and Bing.