Facebook’s new search feature is about to become more robust than any other search engine out there. Okay, I might be exaggerating a bit, but it’s about to get a lot better and a lot more in-depth. In the past, Facebook’s Graph Search gave users the ability to search on a personal level. This meant you could find people who both like pizza and went to Indiana University. Or maybe you were interested in finding people who like Convert With Content and are also fans of Mashable. But the buck stopped there.
That’s all about to change. According to Facebook’s newest announcement, Graph Search is being expanded so that it includes posts, status updates, photo captions, check-ins and even comments. As with any new Facebook update, there’s a whole slew of people fighting the change, siting infringement of privacy rights, so on and so forth. However, with this update, there are a lot of benefits for your business. Let me explain.
Why Facebook’s New Graph Search Features Are Good For Your Business
1. Deeper Insight
As more information opens up, you’re given the ability to learn more about your customers. You can really dive in and see what makes them tick, what types of people they associate with, what they have in common, and where they hang out. You can really get a lot of information out of the search function.
2. More Targeting
With this insight, your advertising efforts will be highly targeted. In essence, you’ll be able to advertise to someone who once mentioned your brand in a comment on someone else’s post. Now that? That’s pretty powerful.
3. Social Listening
One of Facebook’s past major downfalls was that you couldn’t really search for what people were talking about due to privacy settings on personal accounts. While there are still privacy issues within Facebook, this new feature could allow you to monitor keywords more effectively, and on a deeper level. Right now, Twitter has been the social listening leader.
4. Lead Generation
Due to enhanced listening abilities, you can actually deliver on what you see and hear. This can open up lead generation to a whole new audience that you didn’t know existed.
5. Referral Traffic
This move could also increase referral traffic to your site. Because other people can search for topics they’re interested in, they just might come across an article someone shared once, or a comment posted with a link to an article, that refers them back to you.
The Future Of Social Search
It’s clear that social media is becoming more like a search engine every day. Billions of searches are performed on Twitter daily. Pinterest has a robust search feature where you can search sources and keywords, G+ hashtags come up in search queries, and now Facebook is making their bold move.
It’s also clear that social media has to be a major part of your overall content and response strategy starting now (if it isn’t already). Score 1 for social media!
How do you see this feature benefitting your business?
