How you can Make Money
with Facebook Graph Search
( Infographic Included)
Graph Search uses the one trillion or so social connections on Facebook to provide relevant and professionalized search results.
The name itself is derived from a sociogram which Facebook uses to depict the personal relations of its users. It currently supports searches for the following types of objects – public posts, people, pages,events,applications, groups, places, check-ins and objects with locations info attached.
Because Facebook Graph Search uses connections on the social network to provide relevant and personalized search results, there’s a huge opportunity for small businesses to grow naturally, via digitized word-of-mouth (which is trusted by 92 percent of consumers).
“Graph search could help over 13 million small businesses get discovered,” said Facebook’s Dan Levy.
Graph Search - One of the Three Pillars of Facebook
Zuckerberg calls Graph Search one of the “three pillars” of Facebook (the other two being Timeline and Newsfeed). Zuckerberg also has said that Graph Search is different from Web search because it fulfills a different need for Internet users. In a news release, two Facebook executives who introduced Graph Search on the site wrote: “Graph Search and Web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: 'hip hop') and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: 'my friends in New York who like Jay-Z') to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses."
The new search employs Facebook’s vast scale of user data and further illustrates how varied and specific the social network’s information database is. Here’s the question, though: Is Graph Search actually useful? To be more specific, will it enrich user experience? Will it help advertisers gain more exposure for their products? Will it help Facebook continue its quest to fully capitalize on its wealth of data? The responses to these questions are wide and varied, but essentially all draw attention to the fact that Facebook is still growing into its role as a relationship network, and many of those relationships have the potential to become more and more lucrative for the company and the advertisers who use its social matrix.
Janel Bailey, CEO of Xenos Hospitality in Georgia, thinks the social network’s new search feature is less about sales than about building relationships, which can, in turn, influence sales. Xenos has been developing a statewide portal for Georgia to promote small business through local search, and as part of its research, its looked into how consumers use Facebook.
Facebook NOT a Search Engine - It's a Relationship Network
“Facebook was not born to be a search engine. It is a relationship network. Facebook values its company based on the hypothetical value of its users and uses this ‘value’ to hook advertisers in an attempt to monetize its business model," Bailey told Minyanville via email. "However, our research proves that consumers who are ready to buy do not use Facebook (or any social network for that matter) to search for products.”
So, how does all this help small business? One way is that Graph Search places an emphasis on local search rather than brand pages.
This means that small businesses with local pages are given the same voice as everyone else. Graph Search is simply the newest tool that's both enhancing and harnessing the millions upon millions of relationships that make up Facebook. It's social impact is not yet clear, but as far as making money goes, Graph Search appears to be worth it
Check out the infographic below, developed by: Advantage Capital Funds, to learn more about Graph Search as well as some tips on how to optimize your pages to take advantage.
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