Legal Internet Marketing Blog
People with an insider’s knowledge of Microsoft say that the company will make an announcement soon that Facebook posts will appear in Bing’s search results in the near future. Microsoft has said that posts from Twitter users have already been integrated into its new search engine’s search results. It’s also possible that posts from other social media sites will also be included in the future.
The president of Microsoft’s online services division, Qi Lu, was expected to make the announcement about the integrated search results at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The senior vice president for Microsoft’s online audience business group, Yusuf Mehdi, is expected to conduct a demonstration of the new capabilities of the Bing search engine.
Microsoft’s deal with Twitter, which is expected to be nonexclusive, has reportedly been included in the company plans for many weeks. Microsoft engineers had already included Twitter posts into Bing in anticipation of the announcement. The terms of Microsoft’s deal are not expected to be disclosed, but a person inside the deal who wished to remain anonymous said that negotiations included a payment from Microsoft to Twitter.
Analysts have said that it is not yet clear how much progress Bing has made in integrating Facebook updates into its search results. However, Facebook has been an ally of Microsoft since the software giant paid $240 million for a stake in the popular social media site in October 2007.
The new deal with Twitter is regarded as something of a coup for Microsoft in that both Microsoft and Google have been in negotiations with Twitter about gaining access to the company’s real-time stream of updates, posts, conversations and other communications. Bing’s initial foray into offering real-time search results from Twitter occurred in June 2009, when it integrated “tweets” from some select twitter users into its new search services. Internet marketing professionals and many others have been watching Bing very closely since Microsoft officially launched the search engine in May 2009. For more information and more detailed explanations about how social marketing strategies can be effective, contact a legal Internet marketing specialist at SLS Consulting.