What is Facebook Graph Search?
So much has been written about the impact of Facebook ‘like’ and ‘share’ on SEO. We have seen the growth of business pages on Facebook to increase visibility, connect with a wider audience of people and refer traffic. Now there is a new product – “graph search”, being launched by Facebook which may have caused some initial panic due to the fact it contained the word ‘search’. Having read up on it now and watched the video from Mark Zuckerberg I will attempt to try and dispel some of the myths and assumption by “sharing” what I know.
The simple summary of what has been said about is product is that it
will be far more personalised than web search. In web search, results are usually very similar for the same search query. In graph search, they will be very different due to the amount of personalisation and the way in which it is intended to be used.
-“Where do my friends like to eat?”
-“What photos have I liked?”
These examples will provide completely unique results for each individual.
To summarise the product, Zuckerberg said it was intended to become the ‘Third Pillar’ alongside ‘news feed’ and ‘timeline’. It will allow us to discover things by casting a much wider net. Starting with people, photos, businesses and places, graph search will be developed and refined to become a worldwide resource. That said, it is not predicted to cause any significant effect on traffic or rankings but it will serve to encourage people to manage their social media well, keep their page updated and expand their networking. We look forward to it making it’s way to the UK.
Watch the video or ‘try graph search’ here.
January 18th, 2013
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an extremely long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyways, just wanted to say excellent blog!|