Better Reach for Digital Marketing Professionals after Facebook-Bing Deal

In October 2010, Facebook announced that it had chosen Microsoft's Bing to be its fifth Instant Personalization partner. This resulted in better value for 'Likes' and check-ins coming from the social media platform. The expanded search partnership entered into by Facebook and Bing, gave digital marketing firms another reason to continue spending cash on building a presence on Facebook.

This Instant Personalization feature of Bing allows it to display names and photos of a user's Facebook friends, if they have signed-in to Facebook. These profiles appear if a particular Facebook friend of a user has either "liked" a business, or has checked in at one, through Facebook Places. This digital marketing feature has brought the familiar Facebook stamp to Bing, which was previously seen only on other Instant Personalization partner websites, such as Yelp, Docs.com, Pandora, and Rotten Tomatoes.

This feature will show companies that have been 'Liked' on Facebook by a searcher's friend, in Facebook's 'Web Results' segment, under links for People, Pages and Groups. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, explained that people reacted in the same way to digital marketing messages, whether online or offline. He said that people are hard-wired to be influenced by their friends. If a friend has 'Liked' a certain brand or company, users would be more likely to purchase from that company.

Through this feature, Facebook is rewarding digital marketing advertisers who have spent funds with the main objective of increasing the number of people who 'Like' their Facebook business page. To elucidate, brands that have been 'Liked' by more Facebook users, will display Facebook driven social content more often, when someone runs a search for them.

Furthermore, if a user on Bing.com ran a search for a particular hair salon, they would be served a link showing them how many of their friends who have 'Liked' that hair salon, are currently online on Facebook. Without switching to Facebook, the Bing user would be able to ping their Facebook friends to find out about the quality of service in that particular hair salon. Depending on the type of customer feedback received, this feature will affect the campaigns of digital marketing advertisers in either a positive or negative manner.

According to statistics by comScore, a leading digital marketing research agency, Bing currently accounts for 11.2 percent of the marketplace. This is much smaller than Yahoo's 16.7 percent and Google's whopping 66.1 percent.

Facebook and Microsoft had first worked together on search technologies in March 2010, when Facebook had launched its 'Web Results' feature. According to digital marketing experts, the expansion of the search relationship of Facebook with Microsoft's Bing, brings hope of the social networking company's foray into other lucrative digital marketing avenues like Internet search and paid advertising.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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