The Social Media paradox is worthy of a Zen koan. Companies who engage in social media frequently fail (Blackberry, NetFlix  and Unilever’s Ragu immediately spring to mind) and companies which don’t also achieve social media fails (PayPal, Virgin America and GoDaddy to mention but three).

If that weren’t enough there is another paradox to contend with. Social Media interest in terms of reporting, news coverage, speculation and marketing accounts for – at a guess – 80% of the noise about 21st century marketing yet according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project report search and email trump it by over a 30%.

There is now a third paradox I will throw in the mix and this has to do with the lifespan of a social media post. A well-received Facebook post which gets reshared and gets a few score ‘Likes’ has an average lifespan of three hours before it gets so buried in the stream that it’s lost forever. A popular Tweet has about two hours before it too gets crashed by the sheer volume of Tweets going through the micro-blogging site. This locks social media marketers in an endless campaign of promotion and re-sharing in order to maintain their social media status.

When you compare this to search where each article written and every piece of information placed on a website counts on a cumulative basis, you have to ask, why bother?

Well, here’s the thing. Search, increasingly, is nuanced by social media. The socialisation of content (which is the bulk of what social media marketers post) contributes, significantly to website ranking which then leads to higher volumes of traffic and better search results. Social media then, albeit at a stretch, is search engine optimization (SEO) which, by its very nature is more accessible and thereby more popular than SEOs more arcane and decidedly unsexy practices.

Here’s where Google Plus steps in
Until recently when it came to socialising your website and its content you were bound up in a constant cycle of Tweets and Facebook postings. These pushed your content to the attention of Google and made your online presence look bright and shiny. Google Plus offered a slightly better deal in that, being a Google property, it was totally transparent to Google search. Posts there got indexed quickly offering a real shortcut to search indexing but that was it.

Google’s announcement, however, of full integration of Google Plus in search is a real game changer. Here’s how:

1. Personalisation – This is a big imperative in search and it has been on the cards for some time. It will take social sharing out of the social network content (where it is ephemeral) and give it lasting impact right on the Google search page.

2. Socialisation – Now your social media marketing efforts are never lost. While they may not be instantly visible on Google Plus they exist in the Google Search Index and they are poised to bear fruit for the right search query.

3. Localisation – This is the third of the Google SEO initiatives the search engine has been working on for some time. Now with long-lasting social media sharing in the index, social media marketers will get the chance to work in locale with their clients which will start to bear fruit in Google local search results.

When it comes to social media it has always been about search. The integration of Google Plus in the search results simply makes it official.