As Facebook unveiled its latest offering, Graph Search, earlier this week, there’s been much written about what the functionality would mean to the future of search engines, reviews, jobs and dating sites, user behavior and everything in between.
The search update, currently in limited beta, greatly amplifies the power of the network’s previously simple search functionality by diving deeper into the likes, interests, places and photos of your friends.
While we’ve had fun pontificating about the sweeping changes that may or may not come as a result, as a communications agency, we’re most interested in what these search changes mean to our communications and marketing clients.
After some discussion, we identified the following four categories as most immediately relevant for brands.
- Engagement Matters Even More: There’s even more of an incentive to encourage customers to check-in, like, review products and discuss you positively on Facebook to ensure these actions are showing up in searches. Pushing out engaging content (think compelling photos, humorous updates or useful information) is more likely to push your company up in the search results.
- Facebook Page Basics = Now Even More Essential: Establishing a Facebook page is more important than ever if only to ensure your official brand presence shows up in searches. When developing your page strategy, think about the key terms for your page – consider using those key terms in posts every now and then. Graph Search is a category-based search, so update your page information and make sure it’s categorized accurately so it shows up high on the list in relevant searches. It’s also important that “About,” “Basic info” and “contact info” be up-to-date.
- Comprehensive Search Strategy is Key: Now’s the time to start spending more time and resources ensuring your search strategy includes Bing. The typical Google only approach will no longer suffice. Since Bing has a longstanding partnership with Facebook, which has been significantly enhanced with these new changes, the new Graph Search means there will be many more instances of people searching, so Bing results will be served up much more often.
- More Effective Ad Avenues = Coming Soon: There will be more opportunities to reach customers through search ads (once rolled out on Graph Search) as even more people begin using what was once largely an unusable search function. This is potentially a huge moneymaker for Facebook and a compelling additional ad channel for companies.
As these search changes are slowly rolling out, we’ll keep our eyes on how these theoretical effects play out in reality.
Had any experience with Graph Search yourself or have any thoughts on what these means to brands? Sound off in the comments.
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