The crux of social media’s staggering marketing success is the premise that people would rather make decisions based on information from trusted resources (ie, your Friends) than a commercial spokesperson.
Facebook has recently announced a partnership with Bing to make your search ‘more social’.
Facebook have said, “We’re partnering with Bing to give you a way to bring your friends’ recommendations to online search. Your friends have liked lots of things all over the web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend’s profile to see which restaurants they like, we’re bringing everything together in one place.”
When you search for something on Bing or in web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you’ll be able to see your friends’ faces next to web pages they’ve liked. So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search?.
In addition, we’re providing improved people search results on Bing, making it easier to find old friends or connect with new ones. Now when you search on Bing, rather than showing you all the Joe Bloggs out there, Bing finds and provides the results most relevant to you based on your Facebook connections—those with whom you have mutual friends will now show up first. Bing is also making more prominent the ability to add these people as friends on Facebook directly from Bing.
Over the coming weeks, as you and your friends like more things across the web, the idea is that Bing search will become more social and useful for you.
I plan on testing out Bing’s new social search features. But will they be interesting enough to make me switch from Google? Never say never… Give it a try and let me know what you think about Bing’s new partnership with Facebook.
Morello take: This is undoubtedly a more personal, tailored service. A lot of the “grunt” work will be taken out of search if you like. But Google is so ingrained in our thought conscience when it comes to search, it may take some time to rewire us!