Battle Between Facebook & Google for Likes

For anyone who is anyone, you may have jumped on to Facebook and gathered a community of friends. When you post something, your friends may press the like button on Facebook. Sometimes it's good to see how many of your friends support your cause or simply that your friends are paying attention to your life and they do care. Now what has this got to do with Hotels in Kuala Lumpur you ask ?

Well, Google just introduced the +1 function on the web. (this is currently only available in the US) The function is similar to the like button and lets you add the +1 to a website you like. Great, you think? Well there is more. Through this you will be able to see how many other uses have added the +1 and it will give you a tally of your community and other people as well thou you won't know who they are.

We as Hotel Marketers are already fighting for the Social Media space knowing full well the signals provided by Facebook do provide a boasting hand to your SERPS. Now, we all expected the Panda changes or farmer update but this, I have to admit, I was not ready for. Now I am at the drawing board already getting ready to fire up plans on how this will effect Search Engine Traffic.

Clearly moving forward this +1 function will have an effect on our Search Results. The fact that users are now directly influencing our results may not be a bad thing. Our daily battles with content optimization, searching for Back Links like the Holy Grail has now given us something else to mull over. The mix of internet Marketing into the Social space has been the trend for a while however with Google jumping in as it has tried a few times already will make this a lot more interesting. I for one will be following this one as I also feel they will be a lot of abuse of this product.,

I ask Google to prove me wrong here =)