Facebook Graph Search has been recently rolled out to everyone using Facebook in US English.
The tool lets users find specific information including their friends’ favourite hotels, restaurants, films and more, using filters such as location, gender, specific personal interests etc...
In some ways, Graph Search is a natural extension to the News Feed. However, rather than reviewing friend’s news feeds, now you can ask questions to Facebook about your friends and quickly find out the results. For example; searching 'Friends that have gone to Barcelona on holiday' would bring up a list of all the friends in your network who have either listed Barcelona as somewhere they have visited on their timeline or have checked in to a location in that city. You can then message your friend to learn more about it.
With its features, Facebook Graph Search is believed to be really big for marketing from creating awareness to purchase decision making process, as most of the people searching for pubs or restaurants etc... that their friends ‘Like’ when they’re figuring out where to go and in general friends’ recommendations are important decision making triggers.
Via this tool, people will be exposed to a huge range of new results.
Let’s try a research for hotels:
You can narrow it down by making it more descriptive:
What does Facebook Graph Search mean for brands and businesses?
From a business perspective, whether you’re a small or a large business, you would really want to get your data into Facebook so that you’re showing up on the results pages.
Not all the businesses probably have physical locations on Facebook, so that they will need to think of clever ways to get themselves found in Facebook.
In terms of marketing, this change also support the need for an Integrated Social Search approach as this development is additional proof that the search and the social teams can’t be separated anymore. Brands and companies would want the SEO efforts to be taking into account what is happening in the search as well as in social media and in this case Facebook.
Below we have listed a couple of points about how your Facebook pages can best take advantage of the opportunities presented by Facebook Graph Search.
1) Make sure your Facebook listings include the right information and are optimised.
This can be ensured by checking if the right category has been chosen and the added business address is correct. To fully optimise your page, suggest completing your profile including important keywords, posting and correctly tagging photos and videos, and encouraging your fans to add recommendations to your profile as the reviews will show up in Graph Search results.
2) Encourage Check-ins
For local optimisation, encourage your fans to check in to your business page whenever they visit. It is one of the most important features as people mainly tend to search by location.
3) Learn more about your fans to provide more value
This tool lets you learn about your fans’ interests and likes by sorting them into behavioural (hobbies, recent activities) and demographic segments (age, gender, location).
Fans interests can be used for Custom targeted campaigns, contests; and by identifying the other pages your fans like you can learn what content to share will be liked by your fans.
This may help you to provide more value to your fans and to increase brand loyalty.
For more tips and the possible search combinations you could use to help you conduct your research, suggest viewing the article 17 Ways Marketers Can Leverage Facebook Graph Search from Social Media Examiner.
If you have any queries on how social media can benefit your business, please do get in touch with our Sales team.
Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi
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