Bing has added a Public updates feature to Bing News that promotes shared content related to timely search queries. For content marketers, this means shared content is more likely to reach a highly relevant group of Bing News users.
With the update, News searchers can click a link on the left of News results pages to see “Public updates.” Tweets related to queries appear in a scrolling fashion, with Bing seemingly giving more attention to top-shared, highly relevant Tweets than the most recent Tweets. Clicking “More updates” brings searchers to Bing's Social Search results page.
For instance, a Bing News search for “SES NY” offers highly relevant public Twitter updates from within the hour – not minute-to-minute updates in the style of Google Realtime results or Bing Social Search. (Notably, Brafton's article from this morning on SES NY insight on the future of search is one of the leading updates.)
Content marketers might consider how this development will help them expose their timely content with a relevant Bing audience. In fact, Bing News searchers may be more inclined to click the fresh Public updates than the traditional News results. At press time, most of the News results for “SES NY” are from last week, even though the conference commenced on Monday.
This development adds to benefits of producing industry-specific, fresh content and distributing it across social channels. In addition to boosting brand exposure amongst Bing users – reported by Brafton as representing a growing demographic – this practice will likely help content marketers reach Google audiences. As Brafton recently reported, Google's Matt Cutts has openly advocated using social media marketing to enhance SEO.
