Back in January, Google rolled out Social Search, a service that pulls search results from content written by those in your social circle. Members of your social circle include friends you communicate with on Google Chat, people you follow on Twitter and blogs you’re subscribed to on Google Reader. Google pulls this information from links on your Google Profile, which is voluntarily filled out.

If you’ve used the service, you’ll notice two results from your circle at the bottom of the SERP after the top 10 organic listings. As an example, I searched for “full service marketing agency” and came up with the following:

Similar to other non-traditional results Google serves up like local, images, and OneBox, social circle results can and should be optimized to receive the maximum amount of exposure. While the positioning of social results are not as prominent as the others, they are still on page one and have prominence when clicking on to the next page. Remember, we live in a culture that reads left to right, so our first reaction will always be to look left before clicking “next”.

Google Social Search was in labs for a few months before it went into public beta, so I was fortunate enough to have time to test out some theories and develop off-page social strategies for a couple clients of mine before the service launched. What I found was the following:

• Companies that have a strong presence on social networks received a greater boost in traffic compared to those with a weak to moderate presence
• Companies that were more active on Twitter (i.e. > 2 tweets per day) were more likely to appear on social search results for a given query than a company that used Twitter less actively
• Average page views and time on site increased during tests for social search

The above results lead me to believe that:

1. Google is using more than its standard ranking algorithms and may be testing different ways to add greater rank to tweets tied to accounts with more influence
2. People are more likely to spend time reading / digesting content published by companies or individuals that they are somehow connected to.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Before we all jump right in and become social media queens, we need to think about our target audience and consider who is actually searching for us. When I tested the effectiveness of social search it was for professional service providers. The technically savvy, social network-friendly people that search for service providers are a lot different than people that search for local Italian restaurants, golf clubs or where they can find the latest Twilight novel. Who knows, the majority of your audience might not even know what Twitter is!

In its present voluntary, opt-in form, Google Profiles has a relatively low audience and thereby reduces the significance of social search. Sure, the launch of Google Buzz brought more awareness and a “suggestion” to fill it out, but the mere invasiveness and lack of privacy in Buzz may have turned people off. With all things considered, I’m sure we’ll see a bigger push to make social search more relevant, especially after the big payout to Twitter for the inclusion of tweets in search results at the end of 2009. My advice? Start getting social with search!