Data, data, and more data. Facebook’s newest feature could mean great news for advertisers-if users are willing to play along.
In a much-anticipated product announcement Tuesday, Facebook unveiled a new feature that will let users-and presumably marketers-dig even deeper into the company’s massive database of personal information. It’s called Graph Search, and the idea is to enable users to search for people, places, photos, and interests within their Facebook network.
Potential queries could range from the benign (“Mexican food restaurants in San Francisco that my friends like”) to the creepy (“single women in Boston who are friends with my friends and like Justin Bieber”), but all had at least two things in common: They do what several other notable Web services already do (watch out, Google, Yelp, and LinkedIn), and they offer some potentially important advertising opportunities for businesses. Although CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company isn’t yet focused on monetizing the search feature-“right now, we’re focused on user feedback,” he told the audience of reporters at the Menlo Park, California, event–he hinted that it wouldn’t be long before marketers would be let in. In the meantime, here are three aspects of Graph Search you should know about:
1. Word-of-mouth recommendations are going to be even more powerful.
This is where Graph Search acts a lot like Yelp, only more personalised. You can search for restaurants, music, activities-pretty much anything-based on things like location and number of friends’ likes. In other words, users are not just browsing random reviews; they have the ability to gather word-of-mouth recommendations from friends without actually having a word-of-mouth conversation. Plus, they can prioritize the results on the basis of how close they are to the friends. If Facebook can’t return the results you’re looking for, it will direct users to a Bing search.
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