Aside from the tried and true tactic of building high-quality, content-based backlinks to your website, contractor marketing experts are always looking for ways to leverage social proof to get more leads online. Social proof sounds a lot like “everyone else is doing it” and includes everything from testimonials to “likes” and “follows” on social media sites. Like getting a referral from a friend, social proof helps people feel a lot less nervous about doing business with someone they don’t know directly.

Social search is a newish development that could be important for contractor marketing purposes… unless it tanks.

What is social search? It’s the brainchild of the marriage between Bing and Facebook. The union between the two made it so Facebook searches incorporate Bing’s search results. Now the pair will turn that around the other way and make Facebook data appear in Bing’s search results. Integrating with a user’s social connections, this will make it so the search results are influenced by the “likes” of your network.

In other words, with this contractor marketing setup, data will be gathered from your friends and connections and show up when you go looking for products and services online. If you’ve got a friend who’s made any opinion of a product or service public, it’ll show up when you search. It could be the ultimate in personalized search.

Or people could hate it.

Feedback from the field varies widely. Some users say this contractor marketing enhancement will make it even easier for excellent businesses to succeed. As they gather raving fans, they position themselves to become even more popular. Others say this is SEO equivalent of “The New Coke” and that people will demand a return to relevance-based search results.

One guy said, “My friends are morons! Why would I want to follow their recommendations?” A little harsh, but he brings up a good point. People have lots of different reasons they might “like” a business on a social network. Maybe they’re related to the owner, maybe they’re a paid marketer trying to help a client, maybe someone hacked their account and went nuts one day “liking” like there was no tomorrow. There’s no guarantee a “like” means anything at all. There’s a lot of room for crazy stuff to happen and completely skew the search results.

So what should you do? Be prepared either way:

• Keep going with SEO – build high-quality relevant links by distributing great content.
• Build your social network presence – encourage your contacts and customers to “like” your pages and content.
• Don’t forget to incorporate the highest form of social proof – testimonials. A powerful testimonial is heavy on credibility. A video is the best, audio and a photo next, text and a photo next. Never, ever fake a testimonial.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens with social search when it is incorporated with contractor marketing, but if you stick to proven strategies and dip a toe into what seems promising and new, you’ll be covered.

So, a question for you – would you be more or less likely to try a product or service based on your social network’s input – or would it have no effect at all on you?

Chris Marentis has written 115 articles on this blog.

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Chris Marentis, is the Founder and CEO of GenNext Media LLC, and the creator of the Surefire Social Marketing System, a lead marketing system for local small businesses using social media and other Web 2.0 applications to leverage online visibility and generate quality, long-lasting leads. Chris's Google+ Profile

Tags: contractor leads, contractor marketing, reputation, search engine marketing, social media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Blog, Contractor Marketing Techniques | Effective Contractor Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.