Facebook Graph Search will be arriving in the UK very soon

It’s almost ten months since Facebook introduced us to its Graph Search. In the next few weeks, Facebook will be arriving in the UK, and for users who have set their accounts for UK English. We thought this was a good time to remind ourselves about what Facebook Graph Search is.

Graph Search is a search engine which allows users to search the public content on Facebook, using natural language in their searches. The results will be delivered via a new search results bar at the top of the page. For a look at Facebook Graph, you can find information and visuals for it on Facebook. Just log in to your account and search for it by name.

The variety and language you can use to perform searches will apparently allow anyone to look for content easily and quickly. Your search does not need to include the specific name of an account holder or page any more. So, for example, Facebook tell us that we could search for, “Cars my friends like.” or “Hotels by friends like.” You can understand then, why businesses are looking forward to the marketing and promotional potential of Search Graph, and why there was full scale panic from the users worried about their privacy!

One of the most obvious benefits of Search Graph to business is that it should make it much easier for a business page to be discovered by the right audience. This could be particularly useful for businesses that are looking for and actively seeking local customers, rather than a global customer base. If you have a business that sells services or products locally, then Graph Search will help your customers find you.

Graph Search will also help you to target your customers much more accurately. It’s called micro-targeting, and is a method of being able to finely tune your content to suit a very specific target audience.  However, there are sceptics who say getting this close and personal to an unqualified lead will backfire, and the increase in highly invasive targeted adverts will discourage FB users. Time will tell.

There’s no way of knowing how it will work, or benefit businesses, not until we’ve been using it and monitored it for a while, but the mood is positive, especially amongst internet marketers and small businesses.

If you have an FB account and business page, and you have Graph Search, let us know what you think.