Sandeep Amar, writes about Facebook’s newly launched Graph Search. He had previously written about Facebook’s open graph, meta tags and the potential for search. He was previously with One97 Communications and Times Internet, where he was looking after the marketing function, and is now in the process of launching his own start-up. He blogs at sandeepamar.in.
Facebook Graph search is one of the best product launches by FB in a long time. Graph search will truly lend meaning to a lot of data which Facebook has collected over time. It is like when we were learning market research in our MBA, the first thing we learnt was cross tabulation. Suppose you have filled out questionnaires across gender, age group and reading habits. Now you want to find out women under 25 reading Harry Potter! You use cross tabulation.
With all the data Facebook has, Graph search will put it to good use. It like the example given by Tom Stocky, “TV shows that are liked by software engineers”. The other simple examples could be “Restaurants liked by my friends from my company” or “Restaurants visited by my friends in Mumbai”. It is really powerful since it gives a quick snapshot of the piece of your social graph in as per your requirement. It has got launched for People, Places, Photos and Interests on Facebook as of now. But it can work for TV shows, apps, music and so on.
Facebook has already hinted that it will help discovery of businesses. This will alsoinclude “sponsored results” in these searches
There are following takeaways for businesses and marketers out here:
- All brands and especially hyper-local businesses (like restaurants) should push for “likes” on their Facebook fan page and “open graph” on their websites.
So with the searches above, we can deduce that establishments should push likes from local people. As friends are going to trust opinions of locals, so these are some important nuances to use while doing campaigns.
- Hyper local businesses / Brand stores should also encourage users to tag places on maps on mobile, once they are visiting. This can be done through contests at the establishments.
- Run photo contests as FB profile images, since research results are going to show profile image.
- Movies, TV shows, Books and Music marketing will get the edge in terms of social marketing. Therefore if you are promoting any of these, putting up a FB page and marketing it makes great sense.
- There is not much clarity on the sponsored results programme, but stay tuned since this will work with search targeting soon.
- It is great market research tool for marketers. As Tom Stocky compared “TV shows liked by software engineers” and “TV shows liked by Doctors”:
It can also help in profiling people with certain attributes for example: a comparison between “music liked by people who like Mitt Romney” and “music liked by people who like Barack Obama”:
This is solid research data for marketers, which they otherwise cannot find.
Finally I will leave you with a “joke” image from Mark Zuckerberg about how Graph search will look like:
*
(c) 2013 Sandeep Amar. Disclaimer: The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of MediaNama.com.
If you have an opinion or details to share with our readers, please do send across your contribution to nikhil AT medianama DOT com. Do take a look at our guidelines for guest columns
