3 Real-Time Search Engines Discover Social Media Trends

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Google and Yahoo transformed how we find information. But now social media is creating real-time content that requires special search engines.

As online publishing platforms and social networks have exploded in popularity, there is a new need to aggregate and search the dynamic “real-time” web.

New platforms hold much promise for marketers who want to understand trends and customer problems in real time. In this article I review three of the top real-time search engines (in no particular order), and each has a unique profile that fits certain use cases particularly well.

#1: OneRiot

OneRiot is the largest real-time web search engine today. It aggregates information about popular topics from Twitter and other social media sites.

OneRiot consolidates all these articles into one headline that you can click that leads you to a list of articles associated with a topic. This is a great way to see multiple articles on one topic all at once and in real time.

Instead of having to search different news sites looking for a hot topic, users can access OneRiot’s aggregated real-time information on the topic. Also, OneRiot does a good job of blending hot topics from different spheres. It has a balanced mix of entertainment news and hard news, but seems to concentrate more on entertainment news.

OneRiot has a bar on the right side of the page that breaks common topics into categories. If you’re looking for the latest news on trends or culture, politics or technology, you can easily find it.

Though OneRiot focuses on news organization sources and provides more reliable information, it lacks the personal touch from integrating commentary from individuals into the feed. This eliminates how the public is reacting to the news. OneRiot is great for lists of news articles related to the topic, but it’s important to get the public’s take on these articles as well.

The best way to use OneRiot for online marketing would be to use its search results about important topics. You could give your audience up-to-date information aggregated from multiple social networks. For instance, if you sell cars, linking to the OneRiot results page with the latest information about models you sell could be a great way to display feedback for people who own your cars.

By going to OneRiot, you can quickly see what the most frequently posted information is at the moment. Overall, OneRiot has the potential to be a great source for generating organic leads.

OneRiot’s real-time results display information about the first person to tweet a story, up-to-date news coverage and social media commentary on those news items.

#2: Collecta

Collecta has more of a mainstream U.S. and international news focus, and does not offer the entertainment and lifestyle content that OneRiot integrates into its results. As a result, Collecta is a great source for people who want important news stories and like to view several sources to understand the breadth of angles on a topic.

The main page displays a general headline for each topic and then three suggested articles related to the topic. This makes it easy to read and gives it a professional, news-style approach. Also, Collecta does a great job of gathering recent social media updates from several sites such as WordPress, Digg and niche blogs; whereas OneRiot seems to pull most of its content from Twitter.

Collecta aggregates multiple sources and displays them based on recentness. There is the option to filter results based on the sources of data you want to include in the results.

Though Collecta does a good job at pulling information from multiple sources, its user interface makes it somewhat difficult to see the information it’s pulling from Twitter and other social media sites. The first suggested article on the homepage is usually an article related to a popular topic, but the next two subheadlines are the newsfeeds for the various social media sites discussing the topic.

The best way to use Collecta for online marketing would be to scan a variety of social media sites updated with the latest information on your business and industry within seconds. Collecta maintains a newsfeed that is updated by the second with several personal and professional social media accounts listed. This is a great way for marketers to research how the public is responding to a topic in real time.

#3: 48ers

48ers focuses more on the collective reactions of individuals to news events in real time. The site is great if you’re searching for keywords and want to see what people are discussing about a certain topic. For example, during the eggs recall you could enter a search for “eggs” and see the discussion on all social media sites about eggs.

The tradeoff here is that if you aren’t aware of a particular topic, you don’t know to search for it to explore it further. Twitter and Google have both overcome this problem by adding trending results and searches. The main page of 48ers is set up almost like Google where you type in one word and review the results. The difference is that 48ers results are social media results, not news articles or irrelevant articles about eggs from last year.

This is a great source for viewing the most up-to-date information on a particular topic, but it isn’t great if you don’t know what everyone is already talking about. OneRiot and Collecta are superior to 48ers in this respect because they offer the functionality of 48ers while also offering suggested hot topics.

48ers has a more streamlined interface than either Collecta or OneRiot, but it also integrates multiple data sources and offers the ability to filter results based on source.

The best way to use this site for online marketing is to analyze a larger number of social media results on a particular topic and discover brand mentions or industry discussions. Results are being pulled by the second and you have a lot more content to work with compared to the suggested social media results from OneRiot and Collecta.

The Final Word

All three profiled real-time search engines offer benefits, and it’s not clear who will plug the holes in their service first and offer the most compelling real-time search offering.

These independent companies are also competing with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other larger companies that are offering some version of real-time search and actively seeking to improve them.

Have you used real-time search engines? Do you think they hold promise? Let me know your thoughts in the box below.

Tags: google, information, search engines, yahoo

Social Media: So, Are Numbers Important Or Not?

September 9, 2010 by Francisco Rosales
Filed under content engagement, conversion, facebook, followers, Retweets, Social Media, Twitter

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Are Numbers Important In Social Media? Followers, Likes, Retweets, Subscribers… Is any of this stuff important? I’m sure you’ve listened to both sides, “get more followers” and “numbers are not important”.

There is a lot of noise on both sides, people telling you that numbers are important are usually trying to sell you some kind of software and people telling you they’re not, have 50k followers and get retweeted like crazy. So which one is it?

I’m going to tell you when and why numbers are important, or not.

Let’s take it step by step…

Business Objectives

First of all, the most important thing is that you understand what your business objectives are and how they translate into online goals. That will make the difference and you will be able to determine if numbers, either high or low, are important for your business AND, if it’s relevant to display them on your site/blog.

Profit Anyone?

How do these numbers affect your bottom line? most likely not directly, having higher Retweets than your direct competitor means nothing on the front-end. Having a bigger influence over that same competitor could mean everything and Retweets, Likes and RSS subscribers could be part of that.

The point here is that higher numbers don’t necessarily translate into profits. I know of a few individuals out there with very small communities that are very successful creating a sustainable income. In other words, when we talk about a profitable business, we should focus on dollars, not on Retweets. When we talk about reaching a bigger audience through a blog, then we focus on Retweets.

So when exactly are these numbers important?

On two different fronts:

Online Community

IF (notice the big “IF”) our business objectives require that we reach a higher audience then numbers like followers, “likes” and others become a measurable item. For example, if you sell information products through a blog, then your social media strategy should include increasing those numbers.

When you create something, you need to put that creation in front of people.

Social Proof

For the same reason a book cover reads “Author of the Best-Seller…”. 10k monthly readers, 15k Twitter followers, 10k Likes indicates that you are a successful whatever you are, a leader in your industry or at least an important blog in your niche. People don’t join Ning communities with 8 members or share posts with 2 Retweets. This is the same reason why blogs have comment counters.

As a quick exercise, visit the blogs from different leaders in your niche and see if they display these kind of digits.

Social proof builds credibility, like it or not.

A Reality Check

Our reality check also comes on two fronts:

Externally

On external platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, there is a publicly accessible digit known as Likes or Followers, however, you have to be realistic and admit that only a tiny fraction of those digits are actually engaging or are relationships. Those could mean people that you interact with or people that consume and share your content.

If you run a Facebook Page for example, it’s very easy to get an idea on the users that actually engage with you. Just a look at the number of “Active Users” and compare with the total number of “Likes”. It looks something like this.

Facebook Page Active Users

In this case, only 16.87% of the users are active. A higher percentage however, clicked the “Like” button and never came back to the page.

Internally

By “Internally” I mean your blog. These numbers are considered “Content Engagement”. If you want to analyze the performance of a single post, you could start by measuring visitors or pageviews and then see how many of these actually shared your content through a Retweet, a Delicious bookmark or other.

The truth is that you could be kicking ass at this level BUT, if this content is not converting then all these numbers are useless. I’m not saying traffic or content engagement are not relevant, of course they are. What I’m saying is that if tons of traffic and shares are not achieving your online goals then it means nothing.

A lot of the Retweets on posts are done without even reading a single line, they are retweeted because people share stuff for different reasons. If you have an audience, a clever headline is sometimes enough to fly. Is this bad? not necessarily, you are getting more exposure after all. I’m just saying…

Final Thought

My conclusion, and this is just me (you should express your thoughts in the comments section), is that numbers matter. They matter in different ways and at different levels. You are the only one that can determine that.

One of the worst things you can do is to start following people on Twitter without having a clear objective. Can you drive traffic from Twitter to your blog? You bet… Can you get Retweeted? of course you can… the question is: For what?

Also, to make it very clear, these numbers are highly addictive and can waste a lot of your valuable time. Not recommended for people that gets distracted by shiny objects. Like my wife ; )

Your Turn…

What are thoughts? Do you care about social proof? What is your business goal behind having more followers? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and please… feel free to disagree!

One more thing before you go, please share this post! =)

Tags: blogging, web traffic

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June 20, 2010 by muneer1
Filed under Twitter

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