If there are still companies out there who have yet to jump on the “Social Media Bandwagon,” I suggest you hop aboard and quickly!Social Media has transformed the way people interact with each other, it has revolutionized the way companies connect with their customers, and now it only makes sense that the next logical step is for Social Media to have a say in the search engine results.

SEOs have suspected the Social Media influence on the SERPs (search engine results page) for quite some time now and it has finally been confirmed that they do, if fact, affect the algorithm used to determine rankings on the SERP’s.Who would have thought a few years ago that all that tweeting and re-tweeting was actually benefiting a website and positively influencing their organic rankings?But the big question remains, how big of an influence does social media have? And how is it determined which tweets and Posts actually count towards something beneficial?While the size of Social Media’s influence has yet to be specifically determined, one thing is clear: relevance is key.Google and Bing have confirmed that they are taking notice as to “how important is this person,” “how many fans/followers”, “how relevant are these fans/followers,” and “are these postings relevant, insightful and useful?”

From my understanding, both Google and Bing have a sort of “Social Rank” tool they are using that acts much like a “Page Rank” that will rank the relevance of a Page, Post, or Fan page.So it is crucial that companies make sure that their Social Media pages are as relevant, up to date, exciting, and useful as possible.There will be heavy weight on how many “likes”/Followers you have but also how significant these people are and why they are following you.It has become more vital than ever to develop your social media pages and hold the attention of you Fans/Followers.

Every day we see new applications and tools on Facebook, and Twitter is constantly changing the way one “tweets.”Recently I noticed that there is a way to merge your Facebook business listing with your Facebook Places account.This allows users to interact as usual with your Business listing, but now your map is also available right there on your business page. This is something that we will be putting into play for all our local clients. There is also speculation that, this too, will begin to make headway in the “Maps” sections of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

So while we may not be able to measure the full affect of social media on organic search engine rankings yet, it’s safe to say that it’s a rapidly growing piece of the rankings puzzle.As a business, if you haven’t begun to develop your social media presence as part of your online strategy, ask yourself –what are you waiting for?”