Many companies have decided that social networking is not for them. However new developments online mean that companies who don’t opt in could be missing out.

Google search now includes a live search section which updates by the minute with information from all over the web including up to date blog posts, Tweets and feeds from FriendFeed. To a certain extent when Google moves in a direction it is unwise to ignore it. It is the search engine which generates the most traffic.

Choosing not to include a social networking element to your online marketing campaign means that you might be missing out on extra traffic. If your competitors are involved they could have the advantage.

There is also a possibility that you could be misrepresented online too. UK political parties, for example are leaving themselves exposed in the social networking arena. Tamar, a search agency, undertook research which looked at the reputation management of Gordon Brown and David Cameron to see how well they had positioned themselves online. They found that neither leaders had protected their position in Twitter.

The Twitter accounts with the names of the leaders were not official accounts. @davidcameron was featuring unofficial party news but currently has the message:

‘This unofficial Twitter is now shutting down, at the reasonable & very polite request of Tory HQ. Please follow @conservatives for updates.’

The Tamar report said:

‘With the explosion of real-time search recently, it’s even more important for the political parties to take both factual and ’social’ search seriously. Simple actions such as registering the names of key figures, opening Facebook accounts and engaging on Twitter.’

This is good advice for all businesses.

When the vast majority of people search for something online they use 3 – 4 words. However with more and more business and information sites joining the internet it can be harder to find exactly what you want with only a few words.

Most people start their search with one or two words but if they don’t find what they are looking for they increase the number of words that they use until they find more suitable information.

Earlier on in the year Propero reported that online search queries were getting longer and a new survey from Experian Hitwise shows that this trend continues.

Search queries with an average of eight words or more increased by 6% and those that were five to eight words rose by 2%. Despite the fact that 68% of searches contained between one to four words there were 3% less of this length of search.

For online marketing companies longer search strings mean a more complicated and sophisticated approach to search engine optimisation and potentially more initial expense as more keywords are needed to attract more focused consumers. In the longer term the more targeted a keyword campaign is the better the results. The aim is not to get as much traffic as possible but to generate traffic that converts to sales. Ultimately longer searches help search engines to marry up searchers with the sort of information that they are looking for.

It would be interesting to see word length statistics in a breakdown for the main search engines,  Which search engine’s users use the most words for their searches? for example, would be a good question to have answered.  It would tell us a lot about the search engines.  However currently this sort of information is not available.