I have never really been too concerned with MSN - either from an SEO or a PPC point of view. We get really cheap PPC traffic through MSN but such small volumes that it does not warrent too much consideration. As such our SEO efforts and also our PPC efforts have been focused mainly on Google (and to a lesser extent Yahoo).
My initial thoughts are that it won't make much of an impact really, but I'd like to hear if people have different thoughts on this. I am not too hot on social media as a marketing tool and as such don't really know much about how the average user behaves. I know that Facebook has a large base of users that spend a lot of time on the site, but how much do/will they use the search feature rather than clicking away to Google to find stuff?
One thing I do find quite interesting, which is mentioned in the article linked above, is the idea that Facebook has access to a lot more personal info about its users than any of the other search engines (Again - correct me if I'm wrong). And I'm in interested by the possible implications of this - I would love the opportunity to really target people based on their interests, behaviour etc, and cut down on some of the wastage that we currently cause ourselves from lazy clicks and impulsive brochure requests from our site, thanks to search engine (particularly Google) traffic.
It just seems like one way to really start to serve the most relevent content to specific individuals, and also seems much more protected from advertiser manipulation than Googles efforts to keep their SERP's relevent. I know Google tries to do this already through personalised search etc but I don't hold out too much hope for this really taking off.
Personally, I can not see enough of a reason for Goolge users to stay logged in the whole time as I am not convinced that the supplemental Google products (that require logging in) such as Google Mail, are used widely enough (no facts or figures on that, just a hunch based on the small % of emails I see from Google Mail accounts).
What I'm getting at is that if a user is not logged onto Google, Google is not able to collect data about them to determine what results to display to the user. Facebook users however seem to log on every time they use the web, so if the user also searches from Facebook, Facebook has the opportunity to use the personal info along with the Live search algo to produce results relevent to an individual.
Anyway, just my initial thoughts - would love to hear what anyopne else thinks? Or am I just giving it too much thought??
