| SEARCH MARKETING NEWS & TIPS BY SEM EXPERTS

There is a new player in town when it comes to local search- and really, no one should have been surprised that Facebook announced on November 3rd that they’d be rolling out Facebook Deals. Facebook has already been doing quite a bit to pull together two very powerful players in search marketing: social search and local search. The pairing seems very obvious, but still yet, many businesses drag their feet on taking advantage.

Facebook recently rolled out the new profiles over the weekend, and thus far, the reception hasn’t had status messages complaining. Generally, whenever Facebook makes a change there will be a multitude of ironically, Facebook statuses to complain. Not this time.

Facebook has seen a massive leap in users- from six months ago at just 250 million users to a staggering 350 million active users. That’s a 40 percent jump in six months. Not only that, those users are very active. 175 million users are active on the site every day. Over 35 million of those users are updating their statuses each and every day- sharing their thoughts and experiences on the products and services they utilize.

So we don’t appear impartial. In terms of how this impacts the way that we do things- it doesn’t, very much. Anyone staying on top of search trends, as well as social media trends and adapting accordingly should be fine. This coverage is more of a “We’re munching popcorn and watching the sides bicker and flail in anticipation.”

The F8 conference held earlier this year in April, at San Francisco, didn’t quite end up the way Facebook executives expected it to. Apparently, they bit off too much when trying to appoint themselves as the latest Sheriff on the Internet, by building social Web systems.