Fedor Romanenko, Yandex Search Quality Manager

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The intensity of information exchange continues to grow in social networks: a significant part of everything fresh, viral, interesting and important passes through them. Therefore, the reaction of search engines was inevitable: it is necessary to take this information into account when forming answers to user questions. Measuring the surge of interest in the topic of the request, the speed of information dissemination and the context of its mention allow the search to rank documents in the search results and determine the presence of a specific need of our user.
In 2012, search engines began to try different ways of integrating data from social networks. Yandex launched a program for searching the social Internet - PSI. One of the first launches was searching for people. In addition, Yandex launched a separate vertical twitter.yandex.ru, where you can search all of Russian-language Twitter. And the occupant resident database search results on yandex.ru include documents that are actively discussed on Twitter. Bing experimented with recommendations from friends and experts on offline issues, and Google responded to user queries using results from its Google+ social network.
At the same time, the industry has come to understand that using social media results in search is not universal. Active use and promotion of social networks in search does not necessarily help solve user problems. Thus, recommendations on offline aspects of life are still better searched for on specialized resources, for example, Yandex. Market for goods or on thematic forums. According to our observations, people do not share all aspects of their lives on social networks; they only provide limited coverage of certain segments of real life - cinema, show business , travel, technical innovations.
But social networks are indispensable in identifying current news, topics of concern to users, everything important and interesting. In Russia, we are witnessing a period of rapid growth of social networks, and their role in search will increase. In my opinion, in the near future, social search products will serve as information support for this virtual life and will improve its quality.

Social Commerce
What did we expect?

"The explosive growth of social commerce that some
experts predicted back in 2011 has not yet happened. Most likely, 2012
will see a significant step forward in this area. Many large brands have already
made their first attempts in this direction and will
act more boldly next year, based on their experience.

Social commerce will be taken seriously by brands:
not as an addition to existing sales channels, but as a separate, promising
channel. It is likely that by the end of 2012, sales through Facebook and other
social networks will reach a significant share in the sales structure of large
brands."

What really happened

In 2012, we saw successful examples of companies that
receive a significant share of traffic from social networks. At the same time,
there have been no fundamental changes in the sphere of social commerce. Most
retailers still perceive social networks as a communication channel, but not as a
sales channel. And the management of social networks is in no hurry to turn their sites into
trading platforms.

There seems to be no breakthrough in the minds of Internet users
yet : most of them come to social networks to communicate, and to online store
websites to make purchases. We are already ready to receive information about products and discounts on
Facebook or “like” things we like in online stores , but
do we want to buy on social networks? This question remains open.

At the same time, in 2012, a noticeable step forward in the sphere of
social commerce did occur. What is Pinterest alone worth? Perhaps
the driver of social commerce development will not be Facebook at all, which would be quite expected, but
a new social network with an initially more suitable format for this. By
dataRichRelevance, Pinterest is
increasingly driving traffic to US retail sites, with average
order values ​​significantly higher than Facebook ($169 vs. $95).

Bulat Lambaev, author of the blog social-commerce .ru

A significant step forward has been made, although sales through social media have not yet reached a significant share in the sales structure of large brands. In 2012, successful companies (fab.com, shoedazzle.com, airbnb.com and others) emerged that integrated with Facebook open graph and receive a significant share of traffic and sales (more than 25%) from the social network.
Social SaaS platforms (Graphite, Gigya) for large online stores also emerged , helping them quickly integrate social functions (authorization through social networks, reviews/ratings, posting products to social networks, data management, etc. ). In addition, solutions for evaluating the effectiveness of large vendors appeared (Adobe social and Google analytics social).
Other interesting events of 2012 include the final death of f-commerce (almost everyone was disappointed in the fashionable theme of showcases on Facebook) and Twitter (the share of referral traffic dropped to 0), as well as new Facebook experiments (Facebook gifts and retargeting). It is worth noting the growth of Pinterest (Pinterest traffic for online stores in the US has doubled in a year) and the integration of Google+ with Google's core products (social extensions in Adwords and the launch of Search Plus Your World).
There have been no major changes in the Russian market. There are companies that receive a lot of traffic and sales from social media (eviterra.com, aviasales.ru, trendsbrands.ru, cheaptrip.ru), but these are rather exceptions. It is also worth noting the boom of social referral programs (Flocktory, Sarafan Pro, Kupiqla, Admify). I hope that next year we will see successful examples of implementation.
The main problems are still the same. Russian social networks are still trying to create a showcase, paying little attention to the platform and API for e-commerce. Little attention is paid to the specifics of evaluating the effectiveness, so the result is not visible. In addition, the shortage of specialists in the field of social commerce has an impact.