Is Social Media Content Ranking More In Google Search? And Why The Overlap of Social & SEO Matters

By Ethan Lazuk

Starting in mid-to-late 2023 and now well into 2024 — and especially over the last few months — I’ve been noticing more instances of social media content ranking in Google Search results.

I’m not saying that social media helps your website’s rankings. (That’s a common but separate question, which I’ll touch on later regarding “social signals.”) 🤙

What I mean by “ranking” is that more social media content is appearing alongside website content in Google’s search results.

In my view, this makes social media content a type of “SEO content,” just as much as any blog post, service or product page, or other website content would be.

It also means social media strategies are contributing to SEO performance (and vice versa), like through brand awareness, audience trust, and organic or referral traffic.

To give you an example of what we’re talking about, here’s a social media post appearing in Google’s main search results:

That’s a link to this very blog article you’re reading, except it’s not from my website but rather a post I shared on LinkedIn.

In other words, that result creates organic traffic to LinkedIn, and then LinkedIn gives referral traffic to my website.

More broadly, depending on what your audience searches for on Google 🧑‍💻, they could see a page on your website 📄 or a social post that links to your website 🤳.

That’s a dynamic that both SEO and social media strategists should care about, and can take advantage of. 🤝

It’s not only happening in Google’s main search results, either.

Google has all sorts of surfaces where organic content appears, like AI Overviews, Discover, and People also view.

Here’s a recent example where my tweet appeared in People also view, and Google showed my profile picture as the thumbnail:

First time I’ve noticed this tweet treatment in People also view: profile pic as a thumbnail pic.twitter.com/1jw6KifyDy

— Ethan Lazuk 🪬 (@EthanLazuk) June 11, 2024

This phenomenon can also apply to results in Bing (Copilot), Perplexity, and other AI answer engines, agents, or chatbots.

However, Google seems to be leveraging social content heavily, and since it’s a huge organic traffic source, we’ll focus on it here. 🤗

In this article, we’ll explore the overall relationship between SEO and social media.

The biggest topic of interest will be how content shared on social media platforms (such as X, LinkedIn, Instagram (Meta), TikTok, and Reddit) can be indexed by Google and appear in normal organic search results as well as other surfaces that SEOs monitor.

I’ll go through a bunch of examples of social media content appearing in Google’s search results.

We’ll be talking about social media-focused Google Search features, like the Perspectives carousel, Discussions and forums, and X and TikTok carousels, as well as Google’s normal web results, Image search, and alternative surfaces.

We’ll also be looking at the ways Google has introduced more social media-like features into Search, particularly for local results. We’ll also have a special section dedicated to TikTok.

I’ll also explain why this could be happening and how you can incorporate it into your holistic marketing strategies. 🙌

In short, my theory for why we’re seeing more social content in Google Search is due partly to a paradigm shift that began in May of 2023 with the announcement of “hidden gems” and ramped up in November 2023, after Google finished rolling out a series of ranking system improvements.

From what I’ve observed during and after Google’s recent March 2024 core update, and now into the summer, this trend of social content ranking in Search has only grown.

From that perspective, this topic feels as relevant as ever.

I’ve also updated this article recently with information about a Google patent that I think is relevant and included a video summary, so feel free to check those out!

*As a caveat, this post gets updated a lot. (Search and social are constantly changing.) I’ll do my best to keep it all organized, but it’s a bit of a lengthy and detailed article.

Here’s the read time:

😳

Of course, feel free to skim or jump ahead. 😮‍💨

🏓 Table of contents:

• Why SEOs should care about social media content 🤔
• My personal journey using social in SEO strategies 💡
• Examples of social content in Google Search (recent discoveries) 👀
• Google’s paradigm shift (the “experience era”) 💅
• Google patent on “content types and sources in search” (new!) 🧠
• Risks and rewards of social content 🫣 🏆
• Why social media specialists should care about Google Search 🥰
• Optimizing social content for Search 🙌
• Closing thoughts (part 1) 🗣️
• Other ways social media and Google Search overlap (part 2) 👇
  • Google Business Profiles 📍
  • Social signals “do not” influence your rankings (controversy) 🥊
  • Content distribution 📬
  • Sharing links on social can help with crawling and indexing? 😲
  • Google Search features reminiscent of social media 🌟
• Don’t forget about Bing (and Meta AI)! 🤖
• Addendum: TikTok 📱
• Closing thoughts and the vibes 🎵

Who should read this article?

Whether you’re a search marketer, a social media specialist, or a marketing manager, the time for SEO and social teams to collaborate more is now.

When I say “social media” in this article, I mean organic social content, excluding sponsored posts and ads.

However, I have seen influencer marketing content and even promotional UGC appearing organically in Google Search results (via TikTok).

But whether it’s normal web search results, Perspectives, AI Overviews (formerly SGE), or People also view, the places for social content to appear in Google Search are growing.

This article is intended to be read top-to-bottom. However, if you don’t have time to read it in full, that’s totally cool!

Here’s a summary of the introduction to give you some main ideas:

• Personal history – the longer I do SEO, the more surfaces and content types I optimize for (holistic brand building vs. keyword rankings).
• Google Search evolution – today, I’m noticing more X and LinkedIn posts in regular search results, as well as AI Overviews and People also view, where I didn’t as much before, not to mention the growth of Perspectives and especially now forums. This seems related to a paradigm shift that began in May of 2023 and ramped up in November of 2023 and now into the summer of 2024.
• Implications – SEOs and social media specialists should collaborate, because their disciplines now overlap more than ever, and the visibility of social content in search may help fill a void created by generative AI.

Prefer some tunes while you scroll? 🎶 Here’s a Pink Floyd song to jam to while you read:

Also, before we delve in too deeply, I want to quickly reference the data and reporting implications. 📊

This is an important component, because ultimately, your clients (or company) needs to know how your marketing efforts are paying off.

As SEOs, we typically report on performance metrics like clicks and rankings (average position of queries) in Google Search Console or organic page views and engagement rates in GA4.

But what happens when someone clicks on our “SEO content” and it’s a social post ranking in Search (rather than our website content)?

We likely won’t see that in our data, at least easily.

If a user clicks on a social post in Search, that’s organic traffic for the social platform. If they click on a link in that post next, that will likely show as social referral traffic in GA4.

You can see below where people visited my blog posts from LinkedIn, except I don’t know if they were already on that platform or saw my post in Google Search and then went to LinkedIn:

That’s a challenge for SEO reporting.

And the same dilemma can be true for social media teams, too.

If your social content is ranking in Google’s search results, and people view it there instead of in the platforms themselves, are you seeing those impressions in your reporting?

What if a user sees your Instagram post or TikTok video in Google, but then searches for the brand (or product or service) and visits the website through organic traffic (navigational intent)?

That’s data SEOs will see, but who should get credit?

Technically, SEO and social teams are assisting each other’s efforts. 🤝

That’s why, practically speaking, I believe SEO and social teams should be collaborating on their strategies and reporting.

SEO content strategies should include social media posts and videos, while social media strategies should account for organic search visibility from their content ranking in Google (or other search or AI answer engines).

Together, SEO and social teams can create unified content strategies and reporting metrics to measure conversions, sales, and brand awareness holistically. 🌍 👏

🌟 Ok, let’s begin our journey by asking a core question:

What might the fusion of social content with Google’s search results portend for the future of SEO and social media strategies?

I believe the introduction of more social media content to Google’s search results creates new opportunities for brand visibility.

That visibility isn’t limited to your own website or brand’s content either.

For example, I’ve taken more of an interest in AI research lately. Here’s one of my tweets (X posts), getting visibility in search results for sharing a research paper with commentary:

While that might not send referral traffic to my website, it does create brand associations between my name and AI research content, further demonstrating E-E-A-T.

For SEOs worried about the impact of AI overviews, like Google’s SGE, incorporating more social media content that shows genuine experience could help offset the impacts that generative AI answers will have on organic website traffic and content visibility in Google’s search results.

In other words, our content strategies should focus less on blog posts based on easily answerable questions (long-tail keywords) and more on leveraging social media content to elaborate on pertinent questions to our audiences that require genuine expertise or experience.

I also think having more social content ranking in Google Search opens up new avenues for creativity in SEO and social media content strategies.

Growing discussions about a social media and Search overlap

Beyond digital marketing discussions, the overlap between social media and Google Search is making its way into broader marketing and tech circles.

Check out this discussion by The Vergecast from February 2024 on TikTok about Google’s search product “being organized around real-time social conversations”:

@verge

Google has struck a $60 million deal with Reddit that will give it access to real-time data on the platform, allowing it to train its AI models. #google #reddit #ai #podcast #tech #techtok

♬ original sound – The Verge

More recently, there have been discussions in SEO circles around Google’s Discussions and forums feature showing up for medical content and Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) queries, which are considered sensitive and require the highest levels of E-E-A-T.

If Google is showing forums for medical searches, you can bet it’ll be highlighting social content in the SERPs for most topics related to your clients or business.

Later in this article, I’ll show different examples of social media content appearing in various parts of Google Search, as well as ways Google itself is becoming more like social media.

We’ll also touch on related topics about SEO and social media, like if social posts can help with indexing website content, whether or not social media signals impact website rankings directly, plus other areas of overlap.

Why should SEOs care about social media content?

As SEO professionals, many of us love (or love to hate) social media because it’s a way to share knowledge.

One must be discerning when it comes to taking advice at face value. (Next to content, context is arguably king.) 😉

I’ve personally learned a lot over the years from following people on X and LinkedIn. (It’s what led to Hamsterdam, my weekly news recaps.)

Most of the SEO knowledge shared on social media platforms doesn’t pertain to social content itself, though.

Every once in a while, someone might suggest that sharing a link on X could benefit its crawling and indexing, that social channels can amplify and distribute content, or that SEO content can be repurposed for social media audiences.

All good stuff, and we’ll explore social media’s other roles in SEO later.

But first, what’s of focus here is social media content that’s indexed and appearing (ranking) in Google Search results

We as SEOs are attuned to drawing conclusions about search intent from keyword research, SERP analysis, and competitor insights.

From there, we might create topics for helpful content to satisfy our audiences along their buyer’s journeys.

What isn’t often discussed is how to optimize social media content for Google Search visibility.

The closest we get is usually when local search marketers share Google Business Profile optimization tips, like for posts, reviews, or photos and videos.

However, there have been articles written about Google Perspectives, including suggestions for how to optimize content for it.

We’ll discuss Perspectives more later (and if you’re not familiar, that article linked above has an overview and examples).

But our focus here is how social content can appear in Search more broadly, including a couple of new-ish instances that I’ve only just started noticing since early February or so.

Is social media the new “SEO content”?

No way.

Blasphemy!

Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic …

But I wouldn’t even go so far as to say social media content is equally as important as website content to SEO strategies.

However, based on trends I’m seeing lately (albeit anecdotally), we could be moving in that direction.

(I hope to gather some hard data in a future update, though I did add an interesting patent below.) 🙂

Hmm, so when did this all start?

Social content ranking in Google Search or appearing in SERP features, like Twitter (X) carousels or knowledge panels, is nothing new.

For as long as we’ve had Google (since 1998), we’ve had social platforms.

Notice the Google+ icon from 2011 in that chart? We even had a fusion, for a time.

However, (as we’ll discuss more below) I believe a paradigm shift happened around May 2023.

That’s when Google introduced the Perspectives filter (now a Forums filter) but also “hidden gems,” a series of core ranking systems improvements that fully rolled out in November 2023.

However, before we dig into the tofu and potatoes of that discussion, I’d like to share a personal history and related context with you.

While I can’t speak for other SEOs, my journey was an evolution.

A personal journey of discovering the value of social media content for SEO purposes

In the early years of my SEO career, I largely focused on website content for Google’s main search results:

• “What keywords should this blog post rank for?”
• “What service or guide pages do we need to target our personas?”
• “Which cities should have their own location pages?”

Over time, I added more Google Search features into strategies:

• “Let’s optimize the Google Business Profile.”
• “Let’s try to build a robust knowledge panel.”
• “Let’s ensure our Merchant Center feed is dialed in for free product listings.”
• “Let’s create FAQs that target People also ask.”
• “Let’s add unique images for those image packs.”
• “How about YouTube content for those video results?”
• “What about structured data for rich results?”
• “Oh, customer reviews are showing, so let’s encourage those, too.”
• “Ah, AI Overviews now, so let’s revise those sections into chunks for generative AI responses.”

Then came a broader emphasis on building brands, pleasing users, and recognizing more opportunities for organic visibility relevant to buyers’ journeys:

• “Which of our blogs are ripest for Google Discover?”
• “Can we get our related content into People also view?”
• “Oh look, our TikTok video is in the Perspectives carousel; let’s lean into that!”

Those last two parts, People also view and Perspectives, are largely what inspired the discussions in this article.

The more I explored their content, the more opportunities for using social media as “SEO content” that came to mind.

Social media content appearing in Google Search, plus recent discoveries

If you’re already familiar with People also view and Perspectives, feel free to scroll past the next two sections. Otherwise, here’s some info and examples of each.

People also view (in AI tools while browsing)

I consider People also view as like a mini Google Discover.

Its results appear in SGE while browsing when visiting a webpage directly from Search or Discover, as long as you’ve enrolled in the Google Labs experiment.

People also view results are interesting because they don’t typically align with top results for the query, seem highly personalized, and often include results from the same domain or author.

That creates a whole lot of opportunity to surface related content during your audience’s buyer’s journey, turning that single webpage click from Search into a rabbit hole with your brand’s content at the center.

Here’s a recent example of a social post from X appearing in SGE while browsing (People also view results) just like any webpage would:

Consider the effort it takes to create a blog post. Then consider the effort it takes to sent out a tweet (X post). That’s efficient organic visibility. 🙂

Perspectives

While it’s the name of several Google features, Perspectives in this context refers to the filter (which has now changed to a “Forums” filter) and carousel (which is still around) that shows organic social media, video, and forum or discussion content accessible from the main SERP.

What’s interesting about Perspectives is that it gives SEO strategists a seat at the table when other marketing channels plan their content.

If those social posts and videos can bring visibility to brands through organic search result carousels, they count as SEO content.

I saw something recently that more strongly suggested an expanding overlap between social content and Google Search

I often use my website’s content for sharing examples of SEO findings on social media, because then I don’t need anyone’s permission to share the discoveries. 😉

Just a few months ago is when I first noticed social media content in People also view results.

I was on my homepage, and People also view was showing my LinkedIn and Instagram profiles. But what made it particularly exciting was a single post from X (Twitter), which was actually a reply to another post:

I’d never noticed an individual social post in People also view before that, let alone a reply to another post! (Looking back, it seems like what I thought was “new” in the tweet I put in the introduction had actually been happening. It just used a round thumbnail.)

Then a little later that same day (or maybe the next), I noticed two more individual social posts, one from X and another from LinkedIn, pulled into an SGE snapshot (now called AI Overviews):

I’ve seen this happen even more lately with AI Overviews.

Here’s a recent example (from a Search Labs version of SGE) where I searched for a specific Search Engine Journal article on desktop and the AI answer cited a tweet, while the regular search results below it returned the article itself:

What I find really cool is how the AI Overview shows the favicon for Search Engine Journal and X (Twitter).

When I post on social media now, I often also consider how my content can be used to influence AI Overview answers or show as citations for branded (or even non-branded) queries.

Again, those are individual social posts, not full articles or profiles.

I’ve also been noticing individual LinkedIn posts in Google’s traditional web search results.

LinkedIn articles ranking in Google Search got a lot of attention starting in late 2023, including both Pulse articles and AI-written collaborative articles that invite expert contributions. (I contributed to several of those and wrote about that experience.)

But we’re currently talking about individual LinkedIn posts ranking in Search.

(Keep in mind that it’s also hard to discern normal LinkedIn posts from Pulse articles sometimes, as their snippets appear the same way.)

Here’s one LinkedIn result that recently appeared in a SERP I’ve been monitoring for “10x content”:

What’s interesting is that author, Grant Cardone, doesn’t really have E-E-A-T for the topic.

His post does have “300+ reactions,” but I don’t know if that matters.

Because I later saw this other LinkedIn result ranking for “Google Perspectives.” It was created 7 months prior and only had “1 reaction”:

Many of the above screenshots were from February through March of 2024.

In April of 2024, I began noticing a continuation and growth of this trend.

As a general example, if you publish a blog post and then share its link in a LinkedIn post, it’s possible that post might appear alongside (or even outrank) your website’s page.

I’ve been seeing these examples lately where the LinkedIn post says “[Author Name]’s Post” on desktop:

While the mobile results shows the page’s full title:

One way I think about this dynamic is that the LinkedIn post could have added context from the author’s commentary, or maybe even a summary of the post or other users’ comments.

From that perspective, Google might assume people want to see commentary (on social) before reading the actual article.

This phenomenon also extends to Images results.

I’ve noticed social media content populating the Images box in Google’s normal search results (what we might consider a Google Images feature):

And I’ve also see social content profiles used for knowledge panel About sections and even People also ask question answers (which are informed by featured snippet technology):

This creates a new strategic consideration for SEO content distribution on social media.

It also means your referral traffic from social media in GA4 could, in reality, be organic search traffic originally.

Be sure to monitor those assisted conversions and user journeys with Explorations. 😉

We got a hint that social content might be appearing more in Search during Google’s November 2023 announcements

In a blog post on The Keyword from November of 2023, Google’s VP of Search wrote:

“And starting today, we’ll show new information on search results that highlights information about the individual creator — like their social handle, follower count or the popularity of their content — so it’s easier to find content from creators you care about.

As part of this work, we’ve also rolled out a series of ranking improvements to show more first-person perspectives in results, so it’s easier to find this content across Search.” [Highlights added.]

– New ways to find just what you need on Search, Cathy Edwards (VP/GM, Search), The Keyword

The ranking improvements mentioned were the “hidden gems.”

Meanwhile, the “individual creator” information refers to things like the “reactions” numbers we saw in those LinkedIn posts.

Here are two points of clarification around these announcements from Danny Sullivan, Google Search Liaison (referenced in Hamsterdam Part 32).

First, the information about creators isn’t tied to rankings (it’s more just a display element, likely for transparency):

We’ve done work to show more first-hand perspectives in results. But that’s not based on showing stuff only from “verified” accounts plus it can include forum discussions that don’t have that concept. But where individual creators are shown, we’re also displaying more above them.…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 15, 2023

Second, and here in this “hidden gems” explanation, we might have found the answer to us seeing more social posts ranking:

It's really that our core ranking systems are designed to show more of this type of content if it seems helpful. It's not that they are somehow classified as "gems" but rather that this type of content sometimes hasn't surfaced as well in results in the past, so bringing it to…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 15, 2023

The line that sticks out is, “this type of content.”

We know from that previous response that Discussions and forums are considered perspectives content. (More on this later.)

As it turns out, we also later got a more direct connection between Discussions and forums and hidden gems via a tweet by Danny Sullivan in April of 2024.

What I wonder is whether another “type of content” that hadn’t “surfaced as well in results in the past” included social media posts, like from X and LinkedIn?

That Google blog post from November of 2023 also makes reference to the original May announcement for Perspectives, when Google Search, “added new ways to find and explore diverse perspectives on Search in the Google app and mobile web.”

In that November announcement, we also learned that Perspectives was coming to desktop.

Arguably, Perspectives and hidden gems were a combo attempt to surface more social content organically throughout Google Search surfaces.

Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn articles have gotten much of the attention so far, but social content from other platforms has also been appearing in Search more often (at least anecdotally).

Before the Perspectives filter was replaced with the Forums filter (a feature that goes back to 2009), I noticed Google was testing on the Perspectives filter, like by adding topical filters on top. (If you refer back to the “10x content” screenshot above from 2/7/24, the filters along the top usually weren’t there.)

At the time, I felt this implied Perspectives was a feature of some consequence, worthy of testing. Now I just believe it was part of the larger paradigm shift toward experience-based content, in general.

A paradigm shift: enter the “experience era” (more social content in Google Search)

As mentioned earlier, I believe the paradigm shift when more social content started appearing in Google Search began in May 2023 and was ramped up that November onward, leading to what we’re seeing in 2024 so far.

In that May 2023 article on The Keyword, Perspectives was announced along with a mention of hidden gems. The two were sort of a package deal from the start.

The fact that in November of 2023, Perspectives came to desktop (not to mention social information displays launched) in the same announcement where hidden gems finished rolling out — i.e., “a series of ranking improvements to show more first-person perspectives in results” — strengthens the case.

At the core of these efforts is Google Search’s clear desire to surface more content with demonstrable experience relevant to users.

This is likely in partial response to growing social platform use among younger users (TikTok as a search engine) and general user dissatisfaction over bland “SEO spam” content.

Personally, I was fixated on the part of hidden gems that referred to “a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic,” but the article also made mention of “the importance of ‘experience.’”

That section linked to a December 2022 Google Search Central blog announcement when Experience became the new “E” in E-E-A-T for the search quality rater guidelines.

In a subsequently updated version of the quality rater guidelines in November of 2023 (the same month we got all of those announcements mentioned earlier), something else was included for the first time: TikTok!

As mentioned, Reddit and Quora posts and LinkedIn articles have been getting more attention for appearing in Google Search lately, a trend that went back to the August core update:

Reddit was the biggest winner of the August core update by far. Quora saw big gains too.

Google seems to be incorporating more real user comments/subreddits into the search results for high-volume keywords

(E = experience) pic.twitter.com/enqo9yOUg2

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) September 7, 2023

Here’s a related article on LinkedIn about Reddit’s growth by Ann Smarty.

For Reddit and Quora, their visibility largely comes in both traditional web search results (blue links) as well as the Discussions and forums feature:

This was announced in September of 2022 but has grown in visibility since late 2023 (during the post-HCU and “hidden gems” eras), including for reviews queries and many other topics. (There’s also been some controversy about Discussions and forums showing for medical YMYL queries.)

Now we’re seeing more examples of “experience” through individual social posts from X and LinkedIn, which aren’t just tucked away in Perspectives or People also view but are also highlighted in AI Overviews and traditional search results.

Google’s recent patent on the “Selective presentation of content types and sources in search”

What I’ve discussed so far are my theories about why more social content is appearing in search results, based on public statements, blog posts, and features from Google Search.

What about more technical proof?

I’ll explain details of the patent below, so don’t worry if you’re not an engineer. 😉

You can also jump ahead to the summary and takeaways if you’re want.

*As a disclaimer, Google publishes lots of patents, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they use them in their search engine or other products.

The patent is called “Selective presentation of content types and sources in search.”

It was filed by Google LLC on March 8th, 2022, and granted on March 19th, 2024 (US11934474B2).

It’s inventors include Daniel Belov, Matthew E. Kulick, Adam D. Bursey, David Yen, and Maureen Heymans. (I always like to mention the people associated with patents or AI research, giving them credit for their hard work!) 🙂

Here’s the patent’s abstract:

“Implementations of the present disclosure include actions of receiving a search query, identifying potential search results responsive to the search query, the potential search results corresponding to digital content stored in one or more computer-readable storage media, determining that the potential search results include user-generated content that is generated using one or more computer-implemented social services, receiving data associated with the user-generated content, the data including one or more scores, determining, based on the one or more scores, that the user-generated content is to be provided as a search result, generating search results, the search results including web-based search results and at least a portion of the user-generated content, and transmitting the search results to a client computing device for display to the searching user.”

– Abstract (Patent US11934474B2)

Sounds relevant to our discussion of social media content ranking in search results, right?

Let’s see if we’re right.

We’ll start with some of the patent’s visuals.

Here’s Figure 4, described in the patent as “a representation of an example search results page including search results associated with the user’s social graph”:

In other words, it’s a search results page with social content included.

The “Web” tab means its Google’s main search results (or “All”). Google recently added a Web filter, which is different:

The third result in the figure is a social media post from “Jane Friend” at “socialnet.com.”

We also see a response from “John Smith” and a mention of “6 other comments from Jim Friend, John Friend and more.”

This reminded me of recent Reddit rich result test, so I turned to Google to find it from one of my news recaps.

But look what got returned instead:

Yep, it’s a link to a LinkedIn post about the recap, where I mentioned “Reddit gets special rich result treatment.”

How appropriate!

Here are the examples of the special Reddit treatment, shown in a Search Engine Land article by Barry Schwartz:

And here’s a close-up of the social result in Figure 4:

Scary thumbnails aside — 😉 — they look quite similar in some respects.

But it’s important to note one detail: this patent speaks to “the user’s social graph,” meaning the social results are associated with a searcher’s online relationships.

Let’s look at a few other figures.

Here’s Figure 2, which shows “a flow diagram of an example process for using social graph information”:

As you can see, it accounts for contacts, comments, subscriptions, likes, shares, and pretty much anything else related to social media behavior.

Here’s Figure 5, which shows “example components that can be used to provide user-generated content in search results based on a user’s social graph”:

Interestingly, “Social Content” and “Content” are separate data storage sources, same with “Profile Data,” which includes “Contacts.”

And here’s Figure 6, which shows “a flow diagram of an example process that can be executed in implementations of the present disclosure”:

This is how social and web content would be returned in the same search results, based on the patent.

We see it starts with a “searching user ID” (knowing who the user is).

It later asks if the search query is “trending,” suggesting that’s an important detail.

It also receives “search results,” goes to “Social post(s),” and then does a decision-tree (yes/no questions) to determine if social posts should “be displayed.”

We then get the final steps of “Blend social post(s) into search results” followed by “Display search results.”

Pretty cool, right!

Also note that what we’re talking about here is more personalization of social content in search than what we’ve been hypothesizing about so far in this article.

Let’s now read some excerpts from the patent to get more details.

“A searching user may give more weight to search results that are associated with reviews, opinions, or other content associated with the searching user’s social graph (e.g., contacts of the user) and/or other users. However, these search results can be clouded by content associated with other users.”

So again, this is about social content that’s personalized, or “associated with the searching user’s social graph (e.g., contacts of the user) and/or other users.”

In addition to social content, more personalization of Search (like with AI-organized result pages) has been my prediction as to our future in the Gemini era. This patent accomplishes both.

Also, wow, if you think this blog post has been wordy so far, try reading a patent. 😉

This next excerpt is all one sentence, but it has good information:

“In general, one aspect of the subject matter described in this specification can be embodied in methods that include the actions of receiving a search query, identifying potential search results responsive to the search query, the potential search results corresponding to digital content stored in one or more computer-readable storage media, determining that the potential search results include user-generated content that is generated using one or more computer-implemented social services, receiving data associated with the user-generated content, the data including one or more scores, determining, based on the one or more scores, that the user-generated content is to be provided as a search result, generating search results, the search results including web-based search results and at least a portion of the user-generated content, and transmitting the search results to a client computing device for display to the searching user. Other embodiments of this aspect include corresponding systems, apparatus, and computer program products.”

The “computer-readable storage media” are likely those “Social Content” and “Content” cylinders we saw in Figure 5.

Meanwhile, “computer-implemented social services” would include social media platforms, like X (Twitter), Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

It also says “web-based search results” and “user-generated content” would be displayed together, so a mixing of websites and social content (along with images, videos, shopping, and other results).

Here’s another excerpt that’s notable:

“… determining that the user-generated content is to be provided as a search result occurs in response to determining that the topicality score associated with the user-generated content is greater than or equal to the threshold topicality score …”

In other words, the social content will appear when it’s relevant to the query (search intent), just like a website page might appear.

This speaks to the overlapping value of SEO and social teams collaborating on keyword, buyer’s journey, and content topic research and strategies, in my view. 😉

The patent also speaks about further actions:

• “the user-generated content is recently generated content“
• “the search query is a trending search query“
• “the search query is not a trending search query“
• “the user-generated content comprises a digital image, and determining that the digital image is to be displayed within an image search results portion of the search results”
• “the user-generated content includes content generated by the searching user“
• “the author user is a member of a social graph of the searching user“
• “the user-generated content includes at least one of an electronic message, text provided in a chat session, a post to a social networking service, a digital image”

Basically, a lot of factors come into play.

If the content is new, about a trending topic, has an image (like for Image search), has replies (engagement), comes from the searcher themselves or a member of their “social graph,” it all matters.

The part about being from the same social graph is interesting. Perhaps it speaks to the value of posting content from colleagues or influencers who are likely to be followed by (or following) the searcher.

I’m sure there are lots of other strategic insights we could pull out, as well.

So, let’s summarize: why should SEO and social media strategists care about this patent?

For transparency, I uploaded the patent into Gemini 1.5 Pro in Google AI Studio to help generate a summary for us.

In a short word:

• This patent describes how Google blends social media content associated with a user’s social graph into its search results, especially for trending topics.

The challenges of the situation are:

• Information overload: search engines return so many results that users struggle to find the most trustworthy and relevant information.
• Social proof: people trust recommendations from their network, while traditional search results lack a personal touch (though I think that’s getting fixed, slowly)

Google’s solution (per this patent) involves:

• Social graph integration: Google analyzes a user’s connections on various platforms to build a social graph.
• Trending query detection: the system identifies when a search has a surge in popularity (like breaking news or a viral topic).
• Content filtering: for trending topics, Google prioritizes recent and topically relevant social posts from a user’s network (even if they have a lower overall quality score), because timeliness is key for trending topics; for non-trending topics, the overall quality and relevance of the posts is more important.
• Content blending: Google strategically places social content in search results, giving more prominence to higher-quality, more recent, and more relevant posts, potentially even grouping lower quality or less relevant ones separately.
• Image integration: images from social posts can appear in Image search, even without the posts accompanying text. (We saw an example of that above.)

Meanwhile, the implications for SEO and social media strategists are:

• Social signals matter (even more): engagement on social platforms directly influences search visibility, especially for trending topics; building genuine communities and encouraging interaction is important.
• Content freshness is important for trending topics: it may be less about quality in the short-term, but if you want a post to last beyond the trend, make it quality. 😉
• Visual content can boost visibility: this can lead to inclusion in image-based search features.
• User intent matters most of all: social content must satisfy a user’s search intent, just like any other SEO content.

I’ll also include one of Gemini’s key takeaways verbatim:

“In essence, this patent confirms that Google is blurring the lines between social media and search. To succeed, your strategies must do the same.”

– Gemini response

Ain’t that what I been sayin’?!

[Here’s the real GIF I wanted to include. Maybe I’ll add it in the future, after I’ve established my business and have even fewer limits.] 😉

If you want to learn more about the patent, Olaff has a post for his members, as well.

And final reminder: just because it’s in a Google patent, doesn’t mean it’s being used in Search.

Ok, let’s get back to the topic in general and discuss the pros and cons of social content in search results.

Risks and rewards of social content appearing in Google Search

Let’s think for a second about the implications of those earlier examples where we saw the X post and LinkedIn and Instagram profiles appearing in People also view for my homepage.

Proper planning, or not …

That homepage now represents my business. I’ve worked hard at phrasing it and other pages’ content to convey the right attitude to prospective clients.

But now a random comment I left on X, which probably took me 3 seconds of forethought to craft and send, is potentially visible to visitors, whether they follow me or not.

Is that a risk?

Not really, if your brand voice is consistent everywhere. 😉

Fortunately, my brand voice is my normal human voice (mostly).

Reaching new audiences

There’s also a chance for increased reach.

For example, lots of people have left X since it rebranded from Twitter.

Similarly, lots of people prefer to use LinkedIn instead.

Seeing X posts in Google Search gives those people, who wouldn’t usually see your content on X, an opportunity to view it.

The same is true of other platforms.

But there’s more …

The personal and the professional collide

That screenshot of People also view results from earlier, it also included my LinkedIn and Instagram profiles.

LinkedIn, that’s more formal, so you’re unlikely to be at risk there, unless you’re posting platitudes that put your audience to sleep … kidding!

Side note/tip: I see a lot of the same content verbatim on X and LinkedIn. It can be better to adjust the post to the platform. For example, I rewrite my X posts for LinkedIn, considering the slightly different audiences and contexts.

Meanwhile, that Instagram …

Instagram can be a sticky wicket.

I’ve worked with corporate figures who wanted to build a Google knowledge panel yet expressly asked to exclude Instagram from their pages and sameAs schema because it was for personal use.

I largely use my Instagram for family photos and miscellaneous. I’m sure no one would have an issue with dog walking photos, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what other photos are in my account from several months or years ago. Do you keep track of yours?

And sure, that Instagram content is accessible online anyway, but it would usually take effort to find it, whereas now, Google is surfacing more Instagram and other (potentially personal) social media results in SERPs, just as it would legitimate SEO content.

Here we see Instagram recently started appearing in Perspectives (news version):

Google Perspectives now with Instagram posts https://t.co/1enoB4tiUS pic.twitter.com/nkIQF1Vz1Z

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 24, 2024

One of those types of content we might spend hours or days creating, while the other might get 5 seconds of thought behind it.

Brave new world …

Outside voices in your customers’ ear

Bigger brands likely don’t have to worry about inconsistency between their website and social results in Google Search.

They’re usually measured and strategic about their social content.

Unlike an individual who might pop off a reply on X in the moment, brands use professional social media teams that consider the impact of every character they post. I suspect some are even using generative AI.

So, even if their social content shows up in Google Search unplanned, they’re still good.

But what if the social content that shows up is someone else’s talking about their brand?

For example, I searched for “Semrush keyword tool value,” which is kind of a review keyword.

Page one of the results was largely branded Semrush content, but then on page two was a LinkedIn post:

In this case, it was an article (Pulse), but I think it speaks to how “perspectives” can enter the conversation.

Then if you consider actual Perspectives content, and how it can suggest ancillary questions, like about how accurate a tool is or its cheaper alternatives, it opens up side alleys in buyers’ journeys that brands should account for, yet necessarily can’t control.

I’ve worked with larger brands where one rude comment on Reddit caused huge headaches for navigational queries on Google Search, and that was in the pre-hidden gems era.

One door closes (with SGE and AI answers) and another opens (with social media)?

At the same time Google Search is ramping up content that shows “experience,” so too is it exploring generative AI in search.

After all, People also view actually predates SGE, but its current iteration is a direct result of SGE while browsing.

SGE snapshots can also surface social content as citations, as we saw in the earlier screenshot with the X and LinkedIn posts.

Maybe SGE, and generative AI in general, will take a bite out of organic traffic to some website posts or pages, particularly those relevant to easy answers, informational queries, or comparisons. (Not to mention generative AI features coming to Maps.)

But on the flip side, if people and businesses can use their social platforms to get visibility in Google Search, just like a blog post could (or did) do, that exposure can have downstream effects for brand awareness and audience trust that supports conversions later in the sales funnel.

While social content in organic search isn’t going to result in better keyword rankings in GSC or organic traffic metrics in GA4, we might see more referral traffic from Search to social, and thus better social metrics.

We might also see more navigational searches or conversions across all channels, organic search included, as a result of that social engagement and cumulative brand awareness and trust.

Users who see a positive brand or product representation in social content from Google’s Perspectives, People also view, SGE, or normal search results might be influenced in how they perceive and engage with that brand’s other digital assets throughout the buyer’s journey.

If our overall goal as SEOs is to help build brands and get revenue for businesses, sure the ROI of organic search visibility might be trickier to report, but if we can contextualize its contribution in assisting conversions, its value should be readily apparent to stakeholders.

Who knows, users may be more apt to click a blog post or product link in SGE all because they recognize the brand from a social post or video also in Search.

This also helps explain …

Why social media specialists should care about Google Search

I spent just over 8 years in digital agencies before starting my independent consulting business, where I often worked collaboratively with paid and organic social media teams.

Our collaboration usually revolved around topic ideation (“Which content is popular on search, so we can get inspiration for our social content?”) or correlation of timing for publishing (“When are you publishing those blog posts, because we can create accompanying social posts and also amplify them?”).

Let’s say as a social media specialist, your goal is to earn followers and get positive engagement signals (likes, comments, shares, etc.) to grow a client’s brand awareness, sales, and brand evangelists.

Whereas before those metrics were limited by the exposure your content could get on the social platforms themselves, now Google Search might index and rank that social content for relevant queries, placing it in more surfaces along your audience’s buyer’s journey.

Your social content might even see exposure from new audiences who don’t use social media and wouldn’t ordinarily find your messaging.

The traffic to that social content would likely be referrals from Google Search, but it could also result in more views, likes, comments, or shares on the actual platform.

I’m sure there are a lot of other benefits a social media specialist would identify, as well. (Maybe I’ll reach out to one for round two of updates to this article.) 😉

Optimizing social media content for Google Search

We know what makes great website content for Google Search today.

It should be original, helpful, people-first, and created with real expertise or experience to satisfy an intended audience’s search intent.

The same can be said for creating social content for search.

If what you’re posting about on social media has unique value for an intended audience’s search intent, is relevant to their buyer’s journey, and has a personal appeal, it’ll encourage engagement signals and have cross-channel value.

That said, the key is brand voice consistency.

While the formats of content can be different across social platforms, and the audiences can vary, as well, the messaging of your business or brand shouldn’t waver.

Whether you’re posting a thought on X, shooting a video for TikTok, or writing a blog post on your website, your audience should immediately identify the perspective behind all that content is one and the same — yours.

Closing thoughts (to part 1)

• If a primary goal of SEO is to generate brand awareness, qualified traffic, and conversions for through organic search visibility, then social media content in Google Search opens up more opportunities.
• Historically, we SEOs depended on website content (blog posts, product pages, etc.), yet, more and more, generative AI, Maps, knowledge graph features (particularly for shopping), and other SERP features act like buffers between a user’s query and clicks to a website.
• At the same time, we’re seeing more social content in Search, which creates brand visibility yet could also eat into web clicks.
• We also have less control over how that social content appears in Search compared to website results. It’s almost like how brands get mentioned in Gemini, Copilot, or ChatGPT. Sure, the corpus of online content we create contributes, but the exact context and content of an LLM’s answer to a person’s unique prompt is tough to anticipate.
• However, for the time being, whether it’s Perspectives, People also view, AI Overviews, or traditional web results, the fact that social posts and videos have a likelihood of surfacing means SEO strategists should have a seat at the table when those social content strategies are made.

Other ways social media and Google Search or SEO overlap

So far, we’ve focused on the growing instances of social media content appearing in Google Search, and why SEOs and social media specialists should care for their content strategies.

Now in part 2, let’s look at other ways social media and SEO overlap.

1. Social media profile links and content from Google Business Profiles & Merchant Center (product listings)

In the past, if you had a Google Business Profile (or Google My Business), your social links would get added programmatically.

I once worked with a business where a disgruntled customer created a spoof Facebook page, and it’s what appeared on that company’s GBP!

In August 2023, GBP added the ability to manually add social links to your profile, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X (Twitter), and YouTube.

Then in March 2024, social media content started appearing in GBPs:

Here’s a recent example of how that might look:

I caught a Google test. Check out the posts on this listing; they're FB posts, not GBP posts. Can't see it again. Has anyone seen this? pic.twitter.com/e7i1UVNZdA

— Amy Mattison Toman 🐚🩴🐚 (@BubblesUp) May 9, 2024

Clearly, Google thinks that your social profiles are also relevant to your business audiences.

Relatedly: GBPs can also have posts, which are similar to social media, but should be used entirely differently.

Social media profiles can also be shown in knowledge panels (example below). In fact, if you’re claiming a knowledge panel for yourself, logging into your social profiles is one way to do it.

I also include social profiles in sameAs schema for person or profile page markups (as well as related to businesses in organization or local business schema), to encourage entity associations in the knowledge graph.

Most recently, social media was spotted for branded social profiles in product review panels related to “Top-quality store” badges:

(NEW) Google is now testing adding "brand social profile links" in reviews panel which shows up when clicked on "Top-quality store" badge from Search Results.

With vs without social links here 👇 https://t.co/DBC7v5fvPO pic.twitter.com/TIwPMjjdzA

— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) June 16, 2024

So, in addition to local search results, product-based (ecommerce) searchers may also be encountering more social content (as we’ll also see with TikTok below).

2. Social signals “do not” influence your rankings (controversy)

What’s meant here is that links to your site from social media platforms are nofollow, so they won’t pass PageRank (boost website authority).

Social posts themselves can rank in Search, as we’ve seen throughout this article, but getting mentions of your page in social media won’t directly help it rank any better.

Or so we thought …

People suspected otherwise, or that social signals helped rankings (and so does some data).

This debate has gone on for about 15 years, at least.

My guess was social signals contributed to user engagement (brand awareness, navigational searches, ancillary traffic) or brand sentiment analysis that contributed to rankings indirectly.

After all, we saw that one LinkedIn page earlier ranking with just “1 reaction.”

Follower count (which gets shown in search results above social content) is reportedly not a ranking factor, either.

However, my view on this has matured given the patent we just read.

It seems like social graphs and content engagement would directly influence the visibility of social content in search results, based on that patent.

In other words, social signals would influence rankings, at least in that instance.

Of course, we don’t know if the patent is being used. 😉

3. Content distribution

When you create content for SEO purposes, such as blog posts, you can distribute those on social media.

This can get your content in front of a larger audience, and it may earn backlinks if people link to your article.

In a way, what we talked about in this article is the opposite of this.

Rather than using social media to distribute your SEO content, it’s using Google Search to distribute your social content.

Relatedly: You can repurpose your SEO content for social media. For example, the outline of your blog post can become the script of a TikTok video, a slideshow on LinkedIn, or a post thread on X.

4. Sharing links on social can help with crawling and indexing?

I’ve seen SEOs suggest in forums and on X that sharing the link to a webpage in a social post can help encourage its crawling and indexing by Google Search.

Anecdotally, I feel like this method has worked for me. Here’s an example:

Whoa. I shared a link to the Hamsterdam newsletter on X and LinkedIn. It’s not linked anywhere else. It’s now in Search (top one). Not gonna lie, that’s pretty cool. (Double vision.) pic.twitter.com/WbovfmCYaG

— Ethan Lazuk 🪬 (@EthanLazuk) July 2, 2024

Then in the latest version of the Google SEO Starter Guide (published February 2nd, 2024), there’s a section called “Promote your website,” which suggests that “social media promotion” of “your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines.” [Highlights added.]

So, it seems true, maybe? ✅

5. Google Search features reminiscent of social media

While Google+ had its day (2011-2019), Google Search still has features today that are reminiscent of a social media experience.

5A. Following topics

The first that comes to mind is the ability to influence the content in your Discover feed by following topics (or entities and queries) from normal search results or Discover. You can also like Discover articles with a heart icon to save them (and likely feed the algorithms).

News fans can also follow specific publications through Google News, which can appear on your Google homepage on mobile, alongside your Discover feed.

5B. Local Search features

In local news (see what I did there), a few Google Maps features come to mind. A photo-first results update launched in October 2023 selects photos from Google Maps community members (powered by AI) to offer suggestions for specific searches.

When you log into the Google Maps app, there’s also an Explore tab that lets you view trending happenings or locations in your area, as well as follow the Local Guides who post about them.

5C. Google notes

Google Search Labs introduced notes in November 2023 as an experiment. (In fact, it was included in the same announcement as Perspectives on desktop and hidden gems’ completed rollout.)

As its name implies, notes are a way for everyday searchers to add context to articles or other results they find in Google Search.

Google even says to “use notes to share your perspective on content that’s in Google results.” [Highlights and bolding added.]

Notes kind of remind me of comments on social media posts. They can be designed with different fonts, colorful backgrounds, and other add-ons, reminiscent of Instagram posts.

What’s most exciting, though, is because notes are indexable, you can find them ranking in normal search results, but also in other surfaces, like People also view!

Here’s an example of a note I left appearing for my Perspectives article:

Since notes are specific to a user’s Google profile, it could be a good branding opportunity for businesses or their representatives (team members) to leave them on relevant industry articles, showcasing their knowledge.

Just as businesses encourage customers to leave reviews, like on their GBPs, maybe encouraging readers to leave notes — even though it wouldn’t have a rankings impact, most likely — could also be a way to drive engagement and community discussion, similar to GBP Q&A sections.

Relatedly: Google Search has “people cards,” which users can manage and that can get surfaced in search results for related queries. However, this is currently only available in India and a few African countries.

That said, even regular knowledge panels for individuals are looking similar to social media profile pages these days, in my opinion:

Interestingly, my knowledge panel also has an About section pulled from LinkedIn, specifically my consulting company’s page:

Think of social media as an extension of your SEO strategy and a way to connect the dots about your brand and service or product offerings.

In fact, I also work with musicians, and many of them are more focused on their knowledge panels and socials than their websites.

I’m sure there are many other examples, as well!

These are just a few that came to mind. 😉

And don’t forget about Bing!

Bing’s search engine usage may be higher than many SEOs realize, as it also influences results from other search engines, like DuckDuckGo, Yahoo!, and Ecosia. But the growth of AI assistant chatbots in social media platforms could increase the visibility of Bing search results, as well as traffic from them.

Meta AI assistant was recently upgraded with Llama 3, for example. As a result, this AI chat experience, which is available across Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, can show sources with organic links to results from both Google and Bing!

Here’s an example of a conversation I had with Meta AI, where I simply asked who I was and it referenced Bing’s search results to talk about some of my projects:

As I mentioned in the introduction to Hamsterdam Part 54 (an SEO news recap), SEO is becoming as much about influencing the information customer’s see during chat experiences as it is organic search rankings.

And social media use is at the heart of some of those opportunities!

Addendum: TikTok!

Earlier in this article, I suggested that part of the reason more social media content is surfacing in Google Search (the “experience” paradigm shift) was due to younger searchers’ habits — the whole, “TikTok as a search engine” topic.

Well recently, I came across an article on SEL by Ashley Liddell discussing this. It brought up some more ideas (and context) for our conversation about the overlap of social content and Search.

Let’s explore!

A note about incentives for the “experience” paradigm shift

First off, we have a statistic to mention now, which is that more Gen Z users (born 1997 to 2012) prefer social networks to search engines (48% vs. 44%) “when looking for information about brands, products or services.”

Incorporating social content into Google Search might be one way to lure back their interest. (If you’re interested, I recently wrote about young people’s search preferences in the context of Perplexity AI and Rabbit R1 in Hamsterdam Part 41.)

TikTok content appearing in Google Search

Also noteworthy, the article reminded us about TikTok videos recently being spotted in both Google SGE snapshots and featured snippets.

I’ve seen carousels of TikTok video results in normal search results before, as well as individual videos ranking. (I’ll add screenshots if I come across them again in the wild.)

However, just like the X and LinkedIn examples from earlier in this article, we can also include single TikTok posts (which videos are) as a form of “SEO content” eligible to appear across Google Search surfaces.

This also ties back to our earlier mention of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines update from November 2023, which added a TikTok content example.

As a recent example, Gisele Navarro of HouseFresh shared a great article called, “How Google is killing independent sites like ours,” about the dominance of big brands in Search. Some of the articles examples pertained to air purifiers, so I started searching queries around that and saw some TikTok videos appearing in Google Explore — a mobile feature similar to Google Discover, in a way, that appears below normal SERPs and suggests related queries or topics:

If smaller brands are to compete against “digital goliaths,” social media content may be one avenue to get there.

“Commercial” appeal

Relatedly, I caught an X post shared by Lily Ray about how her teammate, Jamie Reedy, found a TikTok Shop item in a product knowledge panel in Search (i.e., Google’s shopping graph):

If you’re not familiar with TikTok Shop, the best analogy I can give is that if Google’s shopping results are like a mall, and Amazon is like a big-box retailer, then TikTok Shop would be a bazaar.

Many SEOs are familiar with Google Gemini (as just announced). Well, for a while already, Google Lens could search for products in your screenshots (via the shopping graph). Gemini (now as a virtual assistant) could streamline that process (as could Circle to Search and other AI features).

I’ve also just noticed TikTok content appearing in Discussions and forums within Google product knowledge panels:

It extracts clips of video content (likely using multimodal AI technology like Gemini) and then when you click one, it takes you to a page of related TikTok results in the platform:

However, TikTok is similarly experimenting with AI to auto-suggest products from the TikTok Shop based on what appears in videos.

It seemed like the TikTok Shop was isolated from Google’s shopping graph (a Walmart vs. Target sort of vibe), but that instance of a TikTok Shop product in a Google product knowledge panel suggests even more areas of overlap between social content and Search, now in the context of commerce.

And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that once shopping results get involved, the floodgates open.

Influencing the story

Something I also remembered was from my Perspectives article about how ads and sponsored social content don’t appear in the filter (that I’ve ever seen), however, I was once part of a digital marketing campaign for an ecommerce brand that involved both SEO and influencer marketing (sponsored UGC in the form of TikTok videos), and while monitoring search results, I noticed some of our influencer posts were appearing in the Perspectives filter for branded queries.

In other words, social content needn’t be informational or for brand-building purposes alone to have SEO value. Even product reviews that are incentivized could appear.

That said, as a recent Think with Google article about creator content reminds us, quality is about personal relevance: “As one consumer told us, “I value authenticity and relatability as high-quality traits within content. For me these are just as important as audio and video [quality].””

In other words, a risk of leaning into sponsored UGC for SEO purposes, to use another SEO analogy, is that it could have the same bland inertia as a sponsored guest post.

Some guest posts do work for brand-building purposes though. And that’s the same lesson in this context, I think.

Whether it’s content for TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, or another social platform, focus on making a personal connection with the audience, satisfying their search intent or interest, and, most importantly, coming across as real.

To quote the character Wee-Bey from my favorite TV show, The Wire: “Either you real out there or you ain’t …”

Outro

Thanks for taking this journey with me exploring social content ranking in Google Search!

If you’re a visual learner, I also shot a video with some bonus information. Note that it’s from an older version of this post. Also, I don’t really wear collared shirts, but I dressed up, just for you! 😉

I’ll continue to monitor how social media content appears in Google Search results (and maybe add more information from other search engines or AI answer engines, like Perplexity).

Since publishing this, I’ve noticed other interesting examples of social content in Search.

Some I added to the article above, but here are a few stragglers.

The first was seeing Reddit posts in Google Discover. (I’ll keep an eye out for additional social content there.)

The second was seeing an X (Twitter) carousel appearing prominently on page one (around position 3) for the query “what is SEO.”

We recently saw some rankings system updates (May 2024 core update and spam update) that could change the equation (with more or less social content), as well.

I’ll also revisit this article periodically to improve the writing and add images or details based on new updates or user feedback.

Until then, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂

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