Searching deeper within Facebook

By Mark Frary

A new Facebook feature was released this week that will likely be of interest to travel brands.

Graph Search is far more interesting than it sounds and refers to the social graph, a term coined by Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. The social graph, if you don’t know, is the network of relationships that links people together. Imagine you have just ten Facebook friends. The social graph is what encompasses all of the potential relationships in that group of ten people.

The new Graph Search, currently in beta for uses of US English on the social network, taps into that network of connections and allows you to search within that graph.

Graph Search appears as a new search bar at the top of your Facebook page and uses natural language. You can type things into it such as “friends who live in my city”, “photos of cats”, “music my friends like” or, perhaps more interestingly for those working in travel, “people who like skiing”, “friends who like beach holidays” or “photos of Paris”.

This search will return a list of friends as well as anything shared with you relating to that search and currently finds, in the words of Zuckerberg himself in the video announcing the launch of Graph Search, “people, photos, places, pages for businesses”.

It is this latter point that will make lightbulbs go off in the heads of many reading this post. If you search for something, your brand page will be displayed in the search results if a person has liked your page or a friend of yours has liked the page. Indeed, the search will return any content whose which is Public for the purposes of Facebook’s privacy settings.

This is Facebook’s amplification effect coupled with search. Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is going to be one of the “pillars” of Facebook henceforward, alongside things such as News Feed and Timeline.

He says in the video, “Most people today don’t think about Facebook as a place to discover places where they could go eat or things that they could go do…With this product, it’s so natural just to do that.”

Facebook already contains a vast amount of material that never makes its way onto search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! and it was only a matter of time before a more powerful search feature was added.

While the launch of Graph Search appears exciting it might add yet another thing onto the list for travel companies to remain on top of. Graph Search Engine Optimisation (GSEO) anyone?