Facebook Graph Search is rolling out slowly and surely and it’s going to make an impact on your search engine marketing, social media marketing, whether you’re a Charlotte business or across the country. Here’s why.
Marc Pitre here… I suppose I’m lucky that I was selected from Facebook’s “lottery” of registered users who signed up to use Graph Search in the first few days. I logged in last Thursday and voila… there it is in all it’s glory.
If you are an interactive marketer in Charlotte or anywhere for that matter, you probably have been wondering about how Facebook Graph Search is going to affect your future social media marketing and even search marketing strategies. After reviewing (albeit briefly), I formulated a few first impressions about Facebook Graph Search. Some are from my perspective as a user and others are from my inbound marketing brain. Those thoughts include.
THE BAD
- It’s VERY limited in it’s scope. The best results seem to come from a drill down method where you click on it, start with a topic, then choose some of it’s sub-topics. It actually kind of reminds me of Yahoo search circa 1996 when it was easier just to drill down from category to sub category.
- I hit a lot of brick walls where I received “No Results.”
- The flip side to No Results was when it searched the web using Bing. Unfortunately, the promise of Facebook is that it would be contextually relevant based on my location and connections with my friends. Bing just slapped me with regular old results. You’ll see what I mean in the video.
THE GOOD
- If I want to find pictures of myself or friends, that works quite well. In fact, I saw several pictures that I must have missed or forgotten over the years.
- It has pretty decent filtering once you click to something you want. You’ll see that in the video. I actually think sales people might be able to use this for their own prospecting in the future, but for now, those kind of searches are better off on sites like LinkedIn.
- There is clearly a road-map that Facebook appears to be following. Lock down the personal type searches and user experience, watch the interactions, then work on how companies can explore.
As marketers, we should get really focused on key words within Facebook. For example, I searched on “Social Media Marketing Experts in Charlotte” and nothing came back. Well, I hope that doesn’t discourage you from wanting to work with Right Here Interactive, because we too need to figure these things out. But it sure did make me think and call a meeting on how we are going to target our key words against those terms from here forward. Because when Facebook does get around to tweaking this for more commercial use, I want to be sure that lots of legacy data is in there for Right Here Interactive to be positioned as social media marketing experts, search engine marketing experts and video marketing experts both in Charlotte and across multiple industries (see how I used the key word strategy, sorry about that).
photo credit: Facebook- Helping Your Online Advertising Campaign copy via photopin (license)