Facebook has added a smart search engine it has called Graph Search to its social network capabilities.
The feature allows users to make "natural" searches of content shared by their friends.
Search terms could include phrases such as "friends who like Pulp Fiction and lord of the Rings" or, "friends of friends who are single and live in Birmingham".
Founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg insisted it was not a web search, and therefore not a direct challenge to Google.
However, Microsoft's Bing search engine kicks in automatically when Graph Search cannot answer your query so it may not be prudent to ignore the importance of Facebook's latest addition.
Do you have a business Facebook Profile? The need for having a presence on Facebook is growing in importance. Social Media is not the answer to all of your problems and is certainly not the only marketing activity you should be doing but, if you don't have a presence then you aren't competing in that arena.
As Facebook's Graph Search grows in popularity and rest assured, it will. (Facebook says it now has 1.01 billion people using the site each month, this is a figure too large to dismiss) The number of Likes and Facebook users interacting with your page will become increasingly important. The search function will look for these and the most popular pages will rank in their search results.
Do you have a Facebook profile for your business? What does it look like? If you were one of your prospects or clients, what would you think of your page? Could it be improved?
There are four golden rules to managing a good Facebook page.
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Exclusivity -Give your loyal social media followers exclusive first looks and information to give them a reason and reward for staying connected.
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Interactivity - Offer social media followers interactive content and get them involved. Links, images, videos, competitions and engaging information can encourage people to get involved and draw attention to your posts.
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Minimal Narcissism - Very few of your posts should be about your services. Links and content shared should be valuable and useful rather than about you
- Fun - Social Media is a light hearted forum. Posts can stand to be a little bit more fun and quirky to stand out from others and stand more of a chance of going viral or at least being shared with others.
The use of Microsoft's Bing search engine to answer queries that Facebook can't is interesting. So what does that mean for your business?
It's at best, naive and at worst incredibly foolish to believe that this won't have an impact on search engine optimisation (SEO) as a whole.
Bing requires the same methods of best practice for SEO as Google so if you're already writing good quality content of a reasonable length (500 words +) optimising on page, generating high-quality backlinks and adding meta tags. Then the chances are that you are already ranking highly on Bing. If you aren't doing all of this then, you can probably bet that your competitors are so either develop a core competence in-house or, call in the experts.
Search for your optimised key word phrases on Google and then again on Bing. Are you in the same position on both search engines?
I've just reached the magic 500 word length in this post so ensure your web content is of similar length and relevant to your keywords.
