PN Connect Rapid Briefing - Facebook Graph Search

January 16, 2013

December 2012

PN CONNECT RAPID BRIEFING

Observations, analysis, and insights on Facebook’s new beta internal search engine

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WHAT IS IT? Graph Search is the new interface for Search within Facebook. It allows you to use a series of filters to find photos, places, or things based on what Facebook knows about the likes and activity of others. Instead of a Google or Bing search, which is ultimately trying to connect you with Web pages most relevant to your query, Graph Search connects you with a list of Facebook objects - profiles, restaurants, TV show pages, etc. – that match what you’re looking for. It’s almost as if they took the ad targeting suite and flipped it around to be used by consumers. It also connects up with Bing search, so any query that doesn’t return strong enough results from within Facebook will bring back Bing listings that are more like traditional search engine results.

A SEARCH FOR THINGS, NOT LINKS

PN Connect Rapid Briefing: Facebook Graph Search

THE BASICS •  Graph Search is a beta product not yet released to the public, and will roll out to a small subset of users first.

Join the waiting list here: https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch

•  At the present time, it does not have a publicly available API.

•  At launch, Graph Search is only in English; Facebook plans to expand it to more languages quickly.

•  It does not search posts or status updates yet but will in the future.

•  All results are ranked primarily to surface those connected to people you care most about first; then, other signals within Facebook’s data stores are taken into account.

•  At launch there are no unique paid placement opportunities, but it is believed that Facebook’s current paid placement opportunities will soon be in play in these results.

FACTS AT A GLANCE

PN Connect Rapid Briefing: Facebook Graph Search 3

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PAID VS. ORGANIC At launch, Facebook has indicated that there are no unique sponsored placement opportunities in Graph Search, but you can expect them to layer those opportunities in over time, as this will create a market similar to Google’s sponsored results.

THE ALGORITHM In a similar fashion to how Google+ works, Facebook “likes” and check-ins form the primary signals used to determine relevance. There are numerous secondary factors as well, including the data from when Facebook has asked users to rank and recommend restaurants they have checked into. Facebook has not yet shared any further detail on the algorithm, so it is expected that attributes will be valued in some way similar to Edgerank’s. There is a separate team working iteratively on Search, so it’s also possible they will derive their own scoring system.

As in Google’s “Search Plus Your World,” your search results will be ranked around your relationships. The more you interact with someone, the more likely the algorithm will privilege their recommendations and data over those of strangers.

HOW DOES IT WORK? RECOMMENDATIONS In terms of recommendations, it’s easy to imagine users turning to Graph Search in much the same way they use Yelp, Foursquare, etc. today. It could quickly supplant sites such as Angie’s List and become a go-to way to source restaurant recommendations, professional services, new movies and TV shows, products, etc.


INITIAL USE CASES FINDING PEOPLE This includes Facebook’s original purpose – dating, and professional recruitment. Some observers see the potential for Graph Search to become the preferred method to find vetted candidates since it allows recruiters to explore the friend and colleague networks of other businesses so easily.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE When you begin to type a search parameter into the search bar, you’ll see:

In this example, the user began to type “my friends who”

The bolded auto-completed words form possible search queries that the user may be looking for, in this case friends who live in San Francisco, friends who work at Facebook, etc.


WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE Example of a Graph Search results page

In this example, “Movies liked by my friends” was entered into the search bar

Search results can be “liked” immediately. The magnifying glass leads off into a further branching search that encourages discovery.

This section allows you to refine your search using several different category types. Refining filters are contextual and Graph Search presents filters based on the type of search you are performing.


“With Facebook Graph Search, the objects we search for aren’t web pages but instead virtual representations of real world objects: people, places and things. The connections are primarily Facebook Likes. Did such-and-such a person like a particular photo? A particular doctor? A particular restaurant? Those likes are the ties that bind the information in Facebook together.” - Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

WHAT OTHERS SAY

“It’s easy to see the potential. Facebook is generally appealing to advertisers because it knows users’ interests and interactions. Now, on top of that, it could be likely to know what those same users are about to do.” - Sarah Kessler, Fast Company

“Most strikingly, it expands Facebook’s core mission – not just obsessively connecting users with people they already know, but becoming a vehicle of discovery.” - Steven Levy, Wired

“If Graph Search is successful, it will be much more important that your page is liked by the friends of a person searching for your product or service. Engagement will continue to be important for a number of reasons, but the page like will be back in play as a primary Facebook marketing metric.” - Craig Smith, Social Media Today


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STRATEGIC IMPACT FOCUS ON FUNDAMENTALS Brands that approach SEO on Google by aligning with Google’s core mission and aiming to do everything they can to match searchers up with the best and most relevant information have enjoyed sustained success, and ultimately haven’t taken any actions that would compromise their business goals in other ways. In Facebook’s ecosystem, the approach should be no different. In some form or another, Facebook’s algorithm will seek to make recommendations based on total activity and sentiment around each page, person, or object and against the filter of one’s peers – in this way, brand strategy on Facebook remains unchanged. Although tactics may fall in or out of fashion, aligning around business goals and an audience’s needs and interests will not.

CONTENT VISIBILITY In the short term, Graph Search only works at the Page or Brand level, not at the post level. Until it expands its feature set, this will mean most content a brand produces on Facebook will be virtually invisible to a searcher – they will be searching for and land on a brand’s timeline, not a specific post. In the short term, this will also likely mean that a page’s aggregate activity level will matter more than the activity around its most massively popular posts. As brands experiment with optimizing around the limited beta of Graph Search, initial findings will emerge and we will evaluate their worth in the broader context. We expect post-level search to be highly prioritized in the product roadmap, however, so expect this to change in a matter of months.

ALWAYS BET ON URLS With the emphasis on social graph objects as their atomic unit, Facebook, unlike Google, is downplaying the importance of the URL, link, or Web page as a unit of search and interest. Programs that operate from a central owned media hub and anchor their activities in the canonical structure of the Web will play comfortably in both ecosystems, while those that place strong bets on Facebook alone will find themselves completely beholden to the economics of its emerging advertising platform. Our recommendation is to watch the beta rollout of Graph Search as its details emerge, but resist the urge to anchor all social content on Facebook’s shifting foundation.

PN Connect Rapid Briefing: Facebook Graph Search

A BRIDGE TO A MORE OBJECT-ORIENTED PLATFORM As a feature enhancement, Graph Search should provide a new reason for Facebook’s billion-plus users to remain engaged with the platform and spend more time within its walls. By Facebook’s own acknowledgement its search interface has for years been sorely lacking as a way to find information quickly, and Graph Search does more than just shore that up – it exposes a new, more powerful way to take advantage of all of that rich metadata. As it rolls out initially, we expect already popular individuals, businesses, and brands to see an infusion of new referral traffic from Graph Search, but in the short term that will be limited to page-level and not post-level activity until Facebook further evolves Graph Search. In the short term, it will not expose the depth and breadth of an active brand’s content; brand pages will be viewed and presented more as landing pages than as repositories.

OUR PERSPECTIVE


A SCREWDRIVER, NOT A MULTI-TOOL As a standalone search engine, Facebook Graph Search has the potential to erode market share over time particularly for vertical recommendation engines and tools like Yelp, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc. As it gains traction, it will likely deflect some percentage of searches that would otherwise take place on those external sites, including Google. However, since in its current incarnation it is limited to some very particular use cases for search confined to helping users find objects (people, places, businesses, etc.) it’s not a “Google killer” today. It would take many iteration cycles before Facebook could offer the wide range of use cases Google supports today and pass the “sniff test” of a user looking for a particular restaurant, event, or movie and for whatever reason can’t get the results they expect to display.

OUR PERSPECTIVE


A NEW AND LUCRATIVE AD INVENTORY – PRICING MODEL UNKNOWN As an advertising platform, the new Search tool will soon offer new opportunities to reach highly qualified and motivated users with demonstrated purchase intent. It will likely be as lucrative and as competitive a marketplace as Google’s SEM platform as it reaches full volume. In fact, it increases the pressure on Google to more fully integrate Search Plus Your World and create unique opportunities for advertisers to deliver smarter, more customized content that takes advantage of its store of social data. On both platforms, advertisers will only be limited by their ability to create customized content that takes advantage of the data. That said, it is not yet clear how Facebook will price those opportunities. Google has always generally tied the costs of its advertising products to the market rate as established through an arbitrage model, while Facebook has often used a more abstract model.

OUR PERSPECTIVE

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THE WEB VS. THE SOCIAL GRAPH GARDEN Facebook continues to give short shrift to the URL, link, or Web page as a unit of content and Search interest, while Google continues to make the URL the atomic unit of its world. Programs that operate from a central owned media hub and anchor activities in the canonical structure of the Web will be able to play comfortably in both ecosystems, while those that place strong bets on Facebook alone will likely find themselves completely beholden to the economics of its emerging advertising platform. Whether it’s viewed as a positive or a negative, it’s clearly a two-horse race moving forward. To maximize impact for the near future, brands will need to straddle both ecosystems – Facebook’s and Google’s – and carefully plan both paid and organic programs in both that follow the swim lanes each provide.

OUR PERSPECTIVE


WHAT TO WATCH Broadcasting the future of print from the Olympics of printing

•  The purpose of Graph Search is to keep users within Facebook’s walls. That can run counter to a brand's objective to get them out of Facebook for a conversion of one form or another, which places more emphasis on brand posts to make a compelling case for a user to click to leave Facebook. Will Facebook’s algorithm and feature set penalize brands that successfully drive users off of the platform?

•  We've consistently heard from Facebook and other studies that visual content such as photos drives more engagement. How will photos be properly indexed and displayed by Graph Search?

•  Given Facebook's track record of changing their products how stable can we expect this product to be over the next twelve months? How different will the experience and results be in a few months from launch?

•  Google has built an entire secondary industry around SEO/SEM and that community is very passionate. Until now, Facebook has purely been SEM-focused. How will it develop/cultivate an SEO community built around Graph Search?

KEY QUESTIONS WE’LL BE EVALUATING MOVING FORWARD


TO PREPARE FOR GRAPH SEARCH… 1.  The feature is rolling out slowly to a small beta list, so it may not make sense yet to make changes to

your publishing program, given the feature’s initial limited volume and what little is known yet.

2.  Sign up for the waiting list and enlist others to do so as well so that you have a large body of testers available when the time comes: https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch

3.  Monitor the tech press and sources like Inside Facebook for emerging case studies and experiments that delve in to the ranking algorithm.

4.  Watch your inbox for additional insights from PN Connect as more details become clear. PN CONNECT IS HERE TO HELP If you have any questions about Graph Search or would to talk more broadly about related social media strategies, please contact the PN Connect digital marketing team.

NEXT STEPS


PN Connect is the global digital services offering from Porter Novelli. PN Connect represents our social media marketing, web development and digital analytics services and incorporates the combined talent, resources, experience, and leadership of both Voce and Porter Novelli’s digital teams. Currently the team includes 60+ digital consultants across our network of offices working with some of our largest clients. For more information about PN Connect or to learn how we can help your organization with digital strategy, development and measurement e-mail: [email protected]

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PN Connect Rapid Briefing - Facebook Graph Search

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