Hardly a week goes by without Facebook tossing some more digital spaghetti against the wall to see what will stick with consumers.
The latest effort started in earnest on Monday when the social networking giant rolled out an upgrade of Graph Search, which enables to users to find people, photos, places and other interests on Facebook. (The tool launched earlier this year in beta.)
According to Facebook, Graph Search is now much faster, both at suggesting potential searches and displaying results. The upgrade also features a sophisticated query function, which understands more ways of asking questions, and results that do a better job at showing the most relevant items first. The Interface for the search box is also easier to use.
“Everyone using U.S. English should start seeing their search box automatically updated,” Facebook stated in a blog post, adding that a mobile version of the Social ‘Graph’ is now in the pipeline.
With all that in mind, we thought it would be useful to provide a few tips on how brands can maximize their messaging using the social graph search, compliments of Jennifer Sadler, manager of social media marketing and strategy for Navy Federal Credit Union.
> Update your page information: Brands need to make sure they are constantly updating their page information with new and fresh content in order to give consumers a wide berth in their search queries.
> Create local pages: In order to be more relevant for search, brands may need to create local pages for each branch/chain store/office locale; that way, when fans do a search in a certain area, all of the various locations can get pulled in the search query.
> Run more photos: The visual is not yet subordinate to the word, but there’s little doubt that people respond with more alacrity to a picture (that really grabs them) rather than words. You can never have enough photos and images on your Facebook page.
To learn more about how to tap into Facebook’s audience engagement, check out PR News’ Next Practices PR Conference, which takes place August 6 at the Westin San Francisco.
Follow Matthew Schwartz: @mpsjourno1
Thanks for the post! Just had a few questions that I wanted your take on.
– How will photos on the brand pages affect graph search when it is text based?
– I’m not seeing how local pages will be easily surfaced in graph search. I’ve attached an example of how I think most will go about it and it’s returning no usable searches.