If you have been paying attention to the updates that Facebook has been rolling out, the latest update is definitely a very powerful one especially for small business owners. Their recent update includes the introduction of the Graph Search.
In many ways, having a social media outlet for your business especially Facebook is definitely a big boost to the visibility of your brand. Facebook has billions of members and there are over a million of new members daily. With this number, business owners can definitely get a huge number of connections whether it is on a local community basis, or on the national basis.
What exactly is a Graph Search and how can this change impact a small business?
- A Graph Search is the new social media search database introduced by Facebook which allows users and business pages to look for different types of content across the social media database. The categories that can be searched in the Graph Search are people or users, photos, their interests, and places too. With the introduction of the Graph Search, businesses can now search relevant data related to the 4 search categories which will be useful in their operations. And because Graph Searching is considered a new pillar in Facebook’s connection ecosystem together with the newsfeed and the timeline, it is expected to make searching and connecting with people of the same interests easier.
- If you compare the Graph Search of Facebook with a traditional search engine, the results of the graph search inquiry is more personalized and it is also more localized depending on your location. For business owners, this means a lot because people will be able to find their businesses as long as their locations especially their cities are on the ‘public’ setting. Localized searches contribute greatly to social media marketing strategies by small enterprises by increasing the visibility of their businesses to people who are actually interested in them and who are near the area as well. Big search engines can give information about a certain search with results from all over the world. Graph searches can give results that are accessible, local, and relevant to you.
Although Facebook has such a wide database with billions of users with different photos and tagged locations of businesses and places, there will be instances where the results could show less or no searches yet. This should not be an area of concern since the social media giant has made connections with Microsoft’s Bing to help locate small businesses that haven’t been indexed by Facebook yet.
