The power of social media cannot be underestimated because in today’s online world, it seems to be the most effective and fastest way to get a crowd excited about something. So, if your company is planning an important event that will need the engagement of your customers, the best way is to engage them is through social media sites. This is probably the reason why several applications have found a way to somehow link or connect their sites or applications to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Bing, for one, has continuously been releasing pockets of innovations on its home page. Since May 2012, Bing has been regularly adding features to its applications, to wit:-
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May 2012 – Bing introduced the Social Sidebar. It was a product of a big search results redesign. A 3-column design with organic search as the main pane, “entities” in the middle, and social on the right.
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August 2012 – Bing added Facebook Friend Tagging to search, Quora, and Facebook photo search. Bing introduced the ability to tag Facebook friends while doing a search. This aims to help users share easily search results with friends to ask for suggestions on the best items or location returned in a Bing search result. This feature allows a user to tap into the collective intelligence of his/her social network.
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September 2012 – Bing added Klout and Klout added Bing as an Influence metric. This time, collaboration between Bing and Klout resulted in including Klout Scores into the Social Sidebar. When a search query is made on Bing, the Social Sidebar’s “People Who Know” section will include people Klout believes to be influential about the searched topic.
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December 2012 – Bing changed the Social Sidebar from gray to white. Bing cleaned up their social sidebar where the background has been changed from dark grey to white. The “hover cards” have been removed which makes the entire page look more consistent and less segmented. There were two new section headers display that distinguished content from friends or experts and general content found within the social media sites. Images appear directly in the sidebar feed to make the section more attention grabbing.
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January 2013 – Bing allowed tagging to become public and 5x more than Facebook results. Previous to this change, tagged search results pages were only visible to your friends. Bing now allows that tags are made for everyone to see.
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April 2013 – Bing added Pin it button to image search. You can now Pin images directly from Bing to your Pinterest boards.
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May 2013: Bing moved “Klout Experts” answers to the top of search results. This is a Q&A feature of Klout which is now part of the Bing search results.
With all these segmented modifications and adding of new features geared towards maximizing the strength and power of social media, Bing doesn’t seem to have completed its task yet. Now, Bing is adding a feature that has the ability to comment on Facebook directly from the Bing Social Sidebar. This feature also allows users to ask questions or make comments or answers on posts which are relevant to the search.
This new feature according to Bing, allows for direct interaction by commenting on Facebook. For example, if you are searching for an event in your area and you have friends from Facebook who are talking about attending that event, you will find them easily using the Social Sidebar and at the same time join in the conversation without the need to leave the page.
