Currently, the biggest problem with using Bing for SEM and Business SEO is the lack of search volume. Sure, they came in with roughly 20 percent of the total U.S. searches by the end of last year, but Google is still dominating them, essentially getting the rest of the market share (ignoring the pittance of Yahoo, AOL, and ASK.com). Optimizing for Bing hasn't been on the top of many to do lists, it has simply made more sense to optimize for Google and then (maybe) perform a few small tweaks to appease Bing. That could all be changing though.

We wrote about how the Graph Search partnership of Facebook and Bing would be a boon to the search engine, but now there is speculation that it could be more important than previously thought. Here is a quote from Derrick Connell, Corporate Vice President of Search for Bing.

"Now when you do a web search on Facebook, the new search results page features a two-column layout with Bing-powered web results appearing on the left-hand side overlaid with social information from Facebook including how many people like a given result. On the right hand side, you will see content from Facebook Pages and apps that are related to your search."

Mr. Connell also included a picture of what he's talking about. Notice anything interesting?

What should leap out is the presence of the sponsored ad. If that part of the page is dedicated to Bing results as Connell says, that means that the ads you pay to sponsor on Bing may also be available on Facebook. The combination of the information from both Bing and Facebook would essentially be the best of both worlds, traditional search and social cues. This is something Google has been trying to do in-house with Google+, but so far they've been failing.

It's all still speculative at this point, but it looks very promising for Bing moving forward. If Facebook's Graph Search catches on, it could mean a major market share swing away from Google dominance.

Original post about Facebook and Bing can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Bing Ads on Facebook?"