Will Facebook’s new Graph Search provide a boost to advertisers looking to increase their organic reach on the social network? Laurent Boninfante, EMEA MD of Acquisio takes a closer look at Zuckerberg’s latest gamble…
Facebook’s launch of the Graph Search is an interesting, yet long overdue move from Facebook which will finally enable some semblance of competition with Google. While it was clearly stated that this not a traditional search engine and therefore not a play for Google’s traffic and marketing budgets, as the service evolves we could well see some migration occurring if consumers feel the value of searching inside their networks rather than across the open web.
From the marketers’ perspective, it is a clever move by the company that will lock in advertisers investing money in building likes as these will apparently be a core metric by which results are ranked.
In addition, Graph Search will help to justify a brand’s long term investment in the more organic side of Facebook marketing activity too. This is also a welcome boost for Bing of course. By undertaking the search queries that Graph Search is not in a position to answer, Bing will benefit from the additional search volume as well as provide companies that already have a good ranking some extra attention.
Ultimately, it is still early days for Facebook search and this is only the start of the journey to fully integrate social with search. I cannot imagine that this approach could ever eliminate the need for the broad matches delivered by the likes of Google, but a platform of this size and stature offering an interesting alternative and new way of sourcing information and answers can only be a good thing for the market.
By Laurent Boninfante
EMEA Managing Director
Acquisio
http://www.acquisio.com