As search engines begin to publicly announce how they’re incorporating social media into their organic search engine rankings, let’s take a look at what Bing has said and how it should affect you.
While Bing has been very public about their Facebook integration, and perhaps showy about their close ties with the social juggernaut, contrary to Google’s “on-the-outs” relationship, Bing also measures the social authority of Twitter users. In fact, they’ve gone specific and stated that they look at how many people the user follows and how many follow them. Now, in order to factor in spam accounts, you would think that followers would increase your Twitter reputation score and that the number of people you follow would hurt it, but Bing doesn’t come out that far and say such a thing.
Bing does have privileged access to Facebook personal walls, unlike Google, and does incorporate personal wall links to value organic content, unlike Google. And the incorporation of Facebook and Twitter links by both major search engines is a good incentive for companies looking to expand their search engine presence to expand their social media one as well.