Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s Graph Search So Far

Published on Wednesday, 16 January 2013 00:33

Matt Holandez

0 Comments

You’ve heard marketers and your SEO team speculate for a whole week about what they believed would be the big announcement from Facebook. For the record, I was wrong. I thought for sure the year and a half long rumor about the Facebook phone would mean that the phone would finally be unveiled, but I can’t be right all the time. (I guess with just about every phone having a Facebook app, a Facebook phone wouldn’t be too necessary anyhow.) So the moment has arrived and Mark Zuckerberg has unleashed his newest plans to the world. It’s called “Graph Search”, and it’s Facebook’s attempt to pull information based solely on the people that you care about. Allow me to draw out a scenario for you in order to explain just what this new search is and how it will affect your next search.

Let’s say you’re on Facebook and you want to search for someone you haven’t spoken to in a while. Let’s call him, “Matthew” (just because it’s my name). I’m actually doing this on my desktop at the office and my results show Matt (who I work with), Matthew Mcconaughey and Matthew Perry. The last two results were popular searches across the web and I do not know them personally. If you are an active Facebook user, you probably know what I mean.

Real Social Search Results

Graph Search is going to give us authentic social search results. So our results are going to be based on who we are connected to. I know what you’re thinking: “I’ve heard this before. This sounds like Google’s idea when they began to use Google+ connections for search.” You’re right, the idea DOES sound just like Google’s idea, except Google’s idea didn’t really work. The issue with Google social search is that there aren’t enough people using Google+. In fact, as marketers, we knew it would be a challenge for Google+ to gain adoption when so many people were already big on Facebook, and the next big thing at the time was learning how to tweet and maybe dabbling into an app called Instagram.

According to Facebook, the focal point of Graph Search will be in four areas:

1. People
2. Places
3. Photos
4. Interest

So for us marketers, will this kind of search mean anything to us, or is this more mumbo jumbo that we can ignore? Although Facebook’s Graph Search is still in beta, I’d say we definitely should not and cannot ignore Graph Search and here’s why:
We already know how much social media helps business to be seen. Social Media Managers have been trying to stress this point for a few years now. We also know that the social media has played a big role in your SEO and web development team. After all, the old rule still remains golden: content is king. With Facebook being as big as it is, this new search tool is going to make it easier to find our business’s content and hopefully continue to allow our business to gain exposure to a wider audience.

We will be sure to keep you posted on any new developments, but in the meantime let us know your thoughts and what your reaction is to the announcement of Graph Search.

Matt Holandez

More Posts

Follow Me: