Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s much-awaited new tool yesterday: Graph Search. Graph Search allows you to search your social life. Want to find which friends listen to a certain band in New York? Great. Want to know what music your London friends are listening to? You can. For end-users and consumers, it should be able to help join the dots between social circles and interests. It’s social searching that plays with Facebook’s interest graph. In terms of reception, many online have already taken to either slating it as pointless or holding it up as Facebook’s greatest innovation so far.
So what does it mean for online marketing?
If I was going on holiday to a city I’d never been to before, one of the first things I’d be interested in finding out was where I could eat some decent local food. Guide websites and books over-saturate the market and are just as frequently way-off mark as they are accurate and truthful. Collective responses automatically give me faith in a subject. So with Graph Search I could enter a search for ‘restaurants my friends eat in Paris’ and suddenly have a list of restaurants that have been ‘Liked’ and checked in at.
The next step relies on the presence of that restaurant on Facebook. I see a restaurant I like; I click the link and am taken to their page. If I like the look of their page, that’s it – I’ll head there. But if it isn’t maintained, outdated or non-existent, I’ll hit Backspace and choose another.
For any customer-facing business, it is now necessary to be on Facebook with a well-maintained community page, and online marketers will be able to take advantage of this with their existing experience. Many did not see the value of being on Facebook before, but as Graph Search becomes standard across the world, businesses that are on the social network will benefit immensely.
Fully integrated solutions
Various communications practices such as marketing, PR, SEO and social media have been coming together for a while, but now more than ever it is those that provide integrated PR solutions, which will benefit the most. Maintaining a single message and voice throughout your online communications platforms is essential – otherwise you might be tweeting one thing, emailing another with your website saying something different entirely. These platforms are finally coming together.
Mark Zuckerberg wants to make the world more open and connected, and if you think about the way different strategies are going to have to come together, in one respect, he’s going to get it.